- Radeon Pro GPUs outperform the best Nvidia cards in critical SOLIDWORKS workloads
- Mid-range Radeon Pro GPUs match high-end Nvidia Blackwell performance in Inventor
- AMD’s AI Pro R9700 leads Nvidia in drawing and hidden line tests
Professional benchmarking of GPUs for engineering workloads continues to expose a gap between hardware marketing claims and measurable software behavior.
Recent testing by PugetSystems on common CAD, modeling, and photogrammetry applications shows that performance results are often limited by application design, driver behavior, and limited scaling rather than raw graphics capability.
In several cases, lower-cost professional GPUs matched or surpassed the results of much more expensive models.
Cheapest Radeon Pro GPUs outperform Blackwell and Ada chips
The tests compared AMD Radeon Pro workstation GPUs directly to Nvidia’s top-tier RTX Pro Blackwell and Ada Generation cards in multiple engineering applications.
Testing focused on Autodesk Inventor, SOLIDWORKS, Revit, and PIX4Dmatic, using consistent 4K display configurations and a high-end Ryzen CPU to minimize processor bottlenecks.
In Autodesk Inventor graphics tests, Radeon Pro models like the W7900, W7800, and AI Pro R9700 performed on par with the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and RTX 6000 Ada cards once the workload exceeded a base performance threshold.
Above the Radeon Pro W7500 level, performance differences between GPUs clustered closely together, indicating minimal scaling regardless of price tier.
This behavior suggests that Inventor graphics workloads do not gain significant benefits from Nvidia’s more expensive workstation GPU designs.
SOLIDWORKS tests showed greater variation between Radeon Pro and Nvidia RTX Pro GPUs, depending on workload.
Composite GPU scores put the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon AI Pro R9700 ahead of the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and RTX Pro 5000 models, despite much lower launch prices.
Radeon Pro GPUs also led hidden line and drawing workloads, where every AMD card tested outperformed Nvidia’s fastest result by a wide margin.
However, Nvidia maintained advantages in some shaded modes and RealView, particularly with higher-tier Blackwell cards.
The PIX4Dmatic benchmarks only supported Nvidia GPUs, completely excluding Radeon Pro cards.
Still, the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and RTX Pro 5000 only made modest gains over previous Ada cards in calibration and point cloud generation.
Processing time was often determined by stages that were not related to the GPU, which limited the impact of Nvidia’s newer workstation hardware despite dedicated software support.
In all engineering applications tested, Radeon Pro workstation GPUs repeatedly matched or outperformed Nvidia’s flagship RTX Pro Blackwell cards in GPU-bound workloads and cost significantly less.
Nvidia’s best models showed great consistency and software compatibility, but rarely achieved performance improvements that aligned with their higher prices.
These results suggest that for many engineering workflows, especially CAD modeling and drafting tasks, Radeon Pro hardware currently delivers comparable results without the additional cost of high-end workstation GPUs.
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