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AMD Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile

AMD Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile: A Professional Tool in a Mobile Format

April 2025

Introduction

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile is a mobile graphics card designed for professionals who require a balance between performance and mobility. Released in 2025, it remains relevant thanks to its optimization for workloads, although it does not aim to be a gaming champion. Let's explore who this model is suited for and what tasks it excels at.

1. Architecture and Key Features

Polaris Architecture: Reliability and Proven Foundation

The card is built on the Polaris architecture (4th generation GCN), manufactured using a 14nm process. Despite its age, Polaris remains popular due to its stability and low power consumption.

Professional Features Over Gaming "Gimmicks"

The WX 4170 Mobile focuses on supporting professional technologies:

- AMD FidelityFX: A toolkit for enhancing graphics (contrast adaptive sharpening, shaders).

- OpenCL 2.2 and Vulkan API: Optimization for rendering and computations.

- Error Correction Code (ECC): Memory error correction for accurate calculations.

It's noteworthy that hardware ray tracing (RTX) or similar DLSS options are absent—this remains the specialty of competitors.

2. Memory: Modest but Effective

GDDR5 and 4 GB: The Minimum for Professionals

The card utilizes 4 GB of GDDR5 with a 128-bit interface. The bandwidth is 96 GB/s. This is sufficient for working in CAD applications (AutoCAD, SolidWorks) or video editing at resolutions up to 4K, but for complex 3D scenes or neural network tasks, this amount could become a bottleneck.

Why Not GDDR6?

The choice of GDDR5 reduces cost and power consumption, which is critical for mobile workstations.

3. Gaming Performance: Not the Main Focus

Average Performance at Full HD

In gaming, the WX 4170 Mobile shows modest results (tested on laptops with Intel Core i7-12700H processors):

- CS:GO (high settings, 1080p): ~110–130 FPS.

- Cyberpunk 2077 (low settings, 1080p): 28–35 FPS.

- Red Dead Redemption 2 (medium settings, 1080p): 40–45 FPS.

1440p and 4K: Not Recommended

At QHD resolution, the frame rate drops to 20–25 FPS in demanding titles. Ray tracing is unavailable due to the lack of hardware support.

4. Professional Tasks: Strength in Optimization

Video Editing and Rendering

In DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro, the card handles 4K 30fps editing (H.264), but for 8K or RAW formats, a more powerful GPU is needed.

3D Modeling

In Blender and Maya, performance depends on optimization for OpenCL. Rendering a scene of medium complexity takes 20–30% longer than with the NVIDIA Quadro T1000.

Scientific Calculations

Support for OpenCL allows using the GPU in MATLAB or ANSYS, but for ML tasks, it's better to choose cards with larger memory (e.g., Radeon Pro WX 6400).

5. Power Consumption and Thermal Output

TDP 65W: Easy Integration into Thin Notebooks

Low thermal output allows the WX 4170 Mobile to be installed in ultrabooks and compact workstations. Recommended cooling systems are hybrid (heat pipes + fans), such as those in Dell Precision 5570 or HP ZBook 15 G8.

Tip: Avoid extended loads in poorly ventilated cases to prevent throttling.

6. Comparison with Competitors

NVIDIA Quadro T1000 Mobile

- Pros of NVIDIA: Better CUDA support, higher FPS in games (~15–20% more).

- Cons: Price is 10–15% higher (WX 4170 costs around $450 compared to $500–550 for T1000).

AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200

- A newer RDNA architecture, but twice the price ($700). Suitable for those needing an upgrade.

Conclusion: The WX 4170 is a choice for budget professional notebooks.

7. Practical Tips

Power Supply: Standard Adapter

A standard 90–120W power adapter is sufficient for a laptop with this card.

Platform Compatibility

The card works only in specialized mobile workstations (e.g., Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 3). Check for support on the manufacturer's website.

Drivers: Pro Edition

Use only certified AMD Pro drivers—they ensure stability in professional applications.

8. Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Optimization for work tasks.

- Low power consumption.

- Affordable price ($450–500).

Cons:

- Weak gaming performance.

- Only 4 GB of memory.

- No ray tracing support.

9. Final Conclusion: Who Is This Card For?

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile is an ideal choice for:

- Designers and Engineers who need mobility and stability in CAD applications.

- Video Editors working on projects up to 4K.

- Students studying 3D modeling on a budget.

Gamers and machine learning specialists should consider other options. The WX 4170 is a reliable "workhorse," not a universal champion.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Mobile

Launch Date

March 2017

Model Name

Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile

Generation

Radeon Pro Mobile

Base Clock

1002MHz

Boost Clock

1201MHz

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x8

Transistors

3,000 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

Foundry

GlobalFoundries

Process Size

14 nm

Architecture

GCN 4.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

128bit

Memory Clock

1500MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

96.00 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

19.22 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

76.86 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

2.460 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

153.7 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

2.411 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1024

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

1024KB

TDP

50W

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.2

OpenCL Version

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (12_0)

Power Connectors

None

Shader Model

6.4

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

2.411 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 760 X2

2.519 +4.5%

FirePro W7000

2.481 +2.9%

Radeon Pro WX 4170 Mobile

2.411

Xe DG1 SDV

2.35 -2.5%

GeForce GTX 760

2.33 -3.4%