Last week the AMD Radeon PRO R9700 officially began shipping for that new AI-minded workstation/professional graphics card built on RDNA4 and packing 32GB of RAM to accommodate large language models (LLMs) especially with multi-GPU configurations. While the focus of the product has been all about AI workloads, you may be wondering about the graphics capabilities of the Radeon AI PRO R9700 given the lack of any other “Radeon PRO 9000” series product at this point. In today’s testing is a look at the workstation graphics capabilities for the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700.
Similar to the follow-up tests that looked at OpenCL performance on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, OpenGL and Vulkan are both working well on the Radeon AI PRO R9700 for graphics workloads. With leveraging an RDNA4 GPU, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 can enjoy the mature RDNA4 support with the AMDGPU kernel driver paired with Mesa’s RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers for those considering this 32GB graphics card for professional/workstation graphics type workloads — either complementary or in place of AI tasks.
Compared to the prior generation Radeon PRO W7900, as a reminder the Radeon AI PRO R9700 is cut-down with just 32GB of 256-bit GDDR6 compared to 48GB of 384-bit GDDR6 leading to lower vRAM bandwidth as well. The Radeon PRO W7900 also features 192 AI accelerators compared to 128 with the Radeon AI PRO R9700 as well as 4096 stream processors compared to 6144 on the W7900 and then 96 vs. 64 compute units, but this new product has the advantage of being based on RDNA 4 and PCI Express 5.0. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 is also priced lower at $1299 USD compared to the Radeon PRO W7900 commanding a $3699 price tag.
As with the prior articles, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 and Radeon PRO W7900 were compared to the NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation and RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics cards. As mentioned, I unfortunately have no RTX PRO Blackwell review samples yet for comparison there. The RTX 4000 Ada though continues retailing for around $1449 USD while the RTX 6000 Ada is up around $5300 USD.
The Radeon graphics cards were tested with the Linux 6.18 kernel and Mesa 26.0-devel for the very latest open-source upstream driver experience. Though even using the stock Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS install or Ubuntu 25.04/25.10 does provide a nice working out-of-the-box experience too for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan on the Radeon AI PRO R9700. On the NVIDIA side was their latest public NVIDIA 580.95.05 Linux driver build.
