AMD put SSDs on its latest Radeon Pro Duo SSG

AMD put SSDs on its latest Radeon Pro Duo SSG

AMD might often fall behind Nvidia in terms of raw performance, but its Radeon Pro Duo is still a monster of a card. Indeed the 290 X2 which preceded it as the dual-core GPU of its day, remained more powerful than just about everything until very recently.

Although aimed more at enterprise users and developers, the Radeon Pro Duo has huge performance with monstrous raw power thanks to its dual Fiji cores, but its 8GB of memory (even HBM) can let it down a little. That's not the case with the Radeon Pro Duo SSG though.

The card AMD is touting as a $10,000 monster with developers, renderers and photo-editors in mind, comes equipped with its traditional dual cores and 8GB of memory, but also two SSDs as well. The M.2 Samsung 950 Pros offer up to a terabyte of additional local storage space, which though much slower than on on board graphics memory, should be quicker than sending requests to the system memory for additional space.

The reason for this is that some professional applications require a huge amount of video memory. While AMD does offer some cards which have as much as 32GB, that isn't always enough. With a terabyte of local, reasonably high-speed storage, that problem is likely to have been solved.

One example AMD used to show off the power of the SSG, is in playing 8k video. Standard graphics card stuttered along at 17 frames per second, while the SSG could output it no problem at 90FPS, as well as skipping back and forth in the video without lag.

But that's an awful lot of money to expect anyone to pay - especially since the card is technically still in beta.