How The Radeon Professional Graphics Performance Changed Over 13 Years

The old FirePro graphics cards did manage to run Unigine Superposition with the modern RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, albeit rather slowly...

So for those curious about the performance evolution for Radeon professional graphics since 2010, hopefully these weekend-benchmarking numbers were of some help for quantifying the gains made during this time period.

The Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 cards did run warmer than the older FirePro cards but these new RDNA3 products are single-slot designs.

And a look at the overall AC system power consumption during these OpenGL benchmarks.

Lastly is the geometric mean for all of the raw benchmark results carried out. Besides the significant performance improvements over this course of time, it was equally fascinating to see these 2010 graphics cards still running on a modern Linux kernel with mainline Mesa compared to the FirePro Windows driver support having stopped in 2017 and not even supporting Windows 11. NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards on Windows and Linux are in a similar boat due to their proprietary driver stack. Again, there isn't much feature work done to open-source driver stack for graphics cards of this vintage but there is some and at least the open-source driver stack allows users to continue keeping up with the latest versions of the Linux kernel for other features / support / security fixes.