Home / AMD / AMD FirePro W8000: Performance and Specs

AMD FirePro W8000

AMD FirePro W8000 in 2025: A Professional Tool or a Relic of the Past?

Introduction

The AMD FirePro W8000 is a professional graphics card released in 2013. Despite its age, it still draws interest from enthusiasts and professionals alike. In this article, we'll examine how relevant this model is in 2025 and who might still find it useful.

Architecture and Key Features

Architecture: The FirePro W8000 is built on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) 1.0 microarchitecture, which has served as the foundation for many AMD GPUs. The manufacturing process is 28 nm, which is considered outdated by modern standards (current cards use 5–7 nm).

Unique Features:

- Support for OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX 11.2, but lacks modern technologies such as RTX, DLSS, or FidelityFX.

- Hardware optimization for professional tasks: rendering in CAD applications, double-precision calculations (FP64).

- PowerTune technology for dynamic power management.

Memory: Speed and Efficiency

Type and Volume: The card is equipped with 4 GB GDDR5 and a 256-bit bus. In comparison, modern professional GPUs (like the Radeon Pro W6800) utilize 32 GB GDDR6 or HBM2e.

Bandwidth: At 176 GB/s, this is a modest figure even for 2025 (competitors range from 500–1000 GB/s). In tasks involving large textures or complex scenes, this could become a bottleneck.

Impact on Performance: The limited memory makes the FirePro W8000 unsuitable for 8K rendering or working with neural network models. However, it should suffice for basic 3D modeling or editing at resolutions up to 4K.

Gaming Performance: Nostalgia for the Past

The FirePro W8000 was not designed for gaming, but in 2025, its capabilities seem particularly modest:

- Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p, low settings): 15–20 FPS.

- Fortnite (1440p, medium settings): 25–30 FPS.

- Valorant (1080p, high settings): 60–70 FPS.

Ray Tracing: Not supported hardware-wise. Software emulation through DirectX 12 reduces FPS to unplayable levels (5–10 frames).

Summary: The card is unsuitable for modern gaming. Its purpose lies in projects from the 2010s, such as Skyrim or GTA V at medium settings.

Professional Tasks: Strengths

3D Modeling: In Autodesk Maya or Blender (with OpenCL optimization), the W8000 demonstrates stability, but its rendering speed is 2–3 times slower than that of the Radeon Pro W6800.

Video Editing: In Adobe Premiere Pro (CUDA acceleration not available), the card handles 4K editing using proxy files. To work with RAW materials, a minimum of 16 GB of memory is required—where the W8000 falls short.

Scientific Calculations: Support for FP64 (1/4 the speed of FP32) allows it to be used in MATLAB or ANSYS for small simulations. However, for complex tasks (such as climate forecasting), choosing modern GPUs with tensor cores is advisable.

CUDA vs. OpenCL: The focus on OpenCL limits compatibility with NVIDIA CUDA software (for instance, certain plugins for After Effects).

Power Consumption and Heat Output

TDP: 225 W is still high even for 2025. For comparison, the NVIDIA RTX A4000 (2023) has a TDP of 140 W while delivering twice the performance.

Cooling Recommendations:

- A case with good ventilation (minimum of 3 fans).

- Ideally, use a liquid cooling system (especially in workstations with multiple GPUs).

- Regular replacement of thermal paste due to the card's age.

Comparison with Competitors

- AMD Radeon Pro W6800 (2021): 32 GB GDDR6, RDNA 2 architecture, ray tracing support. Performance is 4–5 times better. Price: $2249 (new models).

- NVIDIA RTX A4000 (2021): 16 GB GDDR6, CUDA cores, DLSS. Better suited for machine learning. Price: $1260.

- AMD FirePro W8000: Lags behind in every parameter except price (if you find a new one, around $500). However, its purchase is justified only for specific tasks involving old software.

Practical Advice

Power Supply: Minimum 500 W (recommended 600 W with 80+ Bronze certification).

Compatibility:

- Motherboards with PCIe 3.0 x16.

- Drivers available only for Windows 10 and Linux (no official support for Windows 11).

Drivers: Use the professional "Enterprise Edition" driver packages for stability in work applications.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

- Reliability and durability (quality components).

- ECC memory support for error correction.

- Optimization for professional software from the 2010s.

Cons:

- Outdated architecture.

- High power consumption.

- Lack of support for modern APIs (DirectX 12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.3).

Final Conclusion: Who is the FirePro W8000 Suitable For?

This graphics card is a choice for:

1. Professionals working with outdated software that requires precise compatibility with OpenCL 1.2.

2. Budget workstations where reliability is more important than speed.

3. Enthusiasts building retro computers for running old projects.

In 2025, the FirePro W8000 is a niche product. For most tasks, modern alternatives are preferable, but if you encounter a unique scenario from the past decade, this card may still serve you well.

If you find a new FirePro W8000 for $500, think it over carefully. For the same price, you could buy a used Radeon RX 6700 XT, which would offer better performance both in gaming and creative tasks. But nostalgia, as they say, is priceless.

Basic

Label Name

AMD

Platform

Desktop

Launch Date

June 2012

Model Name

FirePro W8000

Generation

FirePro

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Transistors

4,313 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.

112

Foundry

TSMC

Process Size

28 nm

Architecture

GCN 1.0

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.

256bit

Memory Clock

1375MHz

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.

176.0 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.

28.80 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.

100.8 GTexel/s

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.

806.4 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.

3.291 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.

1792

L1 Cache

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

512KB

TDP

225W

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

1.2

OpenGL

4.6

DirectX

12 (11_1)

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Shader Model

5.1

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.

Suggested PSU

550W

Benchmarks

FP32 (float)

Score

3.291 TFLOPS

Compared to Other GPU

FP32 (float) / TFLOPS

FirePro S10000

3.473 +5.5%

Radeon R9 285

3.356 +2%

FirePro W8000

3.291

GeForce GTX 690

3.193 -3%

GeForce GTX 1650

3.044 -7.5%