AMD launches budget tier Radeon Pro W5500 workstation graphics cards for professionals

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AMD has announced the launch of a pair of new workstation graphics cards – the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 and, for those who want to work on the go, the laptop AMD Radeon Pro W5500M GPU.

Created with design and engineering workloads in mind, the AMD Radeon Pro W5500 series promises to offer decent workstation performance for the budget-conscious professional.

The Radeon Pro W5500 and Radeon Pro W5500M are manufactured using the 7nm process, rocking the RDNA GPU architecture. AMD’s desktop version features 22 Compute Units (CUs), 5.35 TFLOPS FP32 performance, 8GB GDDR6 memory and peak memory bandwidth of 224GB/s. It’s fairly resource-light as well, chugging on a max TDP of 125W.

AMD’s laptop-focused Radeon Pro W5500M trims it down to 4GB GDDR6, along with 4.79 TFLOPS FP32 compute performance.

Both the Radeon Pro W5500 and the Radeon Pro W5500M have four DisplayPort 1.4 outputs capable of driving four 4K displays or a single 8K display at 60Hz. This gives it an advantage of Nvidia’s similarly priced Quadro P2200, which doesn’t have support for 8K resolution.

Usually, these workstation graphics cards can stretch up into the thousands of dollars, typically paying well above the odds compared to traditional consumer-focused gaming GPUs. The Radeon Pro W5500 comes in at just $399. That’s some way below AMD’s own higher end Radeon Pro W5700 at $799, or Nvidia’s slightly budget-conscious Quadro RTX 4000 at $900.

“Designers and engineers require a professional graphics solution that delivers the performance and efficiency to meet today’s unique challenges. Nothing is more stressful than a deadline, and AMD professional graphics keep performing when you need them most,” said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. 

“The AMD Radeon Pro W5500 graphics card delivers exceptional power efficiency and leadership performance for 2D and 3D design applications, enabling them to better visualize and interact with their designs in real time, explore new immersive workflows like virtual reality and maximize productivity.”

For gamers, needless to say, stay well away. For the same price point you could be picking up a Radeon RX 5700 XT, a graphics card explicitly designed for gaming purposes. So what’s the benefits of the Radeon Pro then? Well, it’s strong multitasking performance, packs significantly improved power efficiency, utilises AMD’s Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise specifically designed for 24/7 computing, and AMD Remote Workstation which allows professional users to access their physics workstation from just about anywhere.