Engineers, AMD has a Christmas gift for you: Extensive benchmarking puts much cheaper Radeon Pro ahead of Nvidia's finest in key engineering software packages
PugetSystems testing shows Radeon Pro GPUs frequently matching or exceeding Nvidia RTX Pro cards in engineering software despite significantly lower pricing.
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- Radeon Pro GPUs outperform Nvidia’s top cards in critical SOLIDWORKS workloads
- Midrange Radeon Pro GPUs match high-end Nvidia Blackwell performance in Inventor
- AMD’s AI Pro R9700 leads Nvidia in drawing and hidden line benchmarks
Professional GPU benchmarking for engineering workloads continues to expose a gap between hardware marketing claims and measurable software behavior.
Recent tests by PugetSystems across common CAD, modeling, and photogrammetry applications show that performance outcomes are often constrained by application design, driver behavior, and limited scaling rather than raw graphics capability.
In several cases, lower-cost professional GPUs matched or exceeded the results of far more expensive models.
Cheaper Radeon Pro GPUs edge past Blackwell and Ada chips
The tests compared AMD Radeon Pro workstation GPUs directly against Nvidia’s top-tier RTX Pro Blackwell and Ada Generation cards across multiple engineering applications.
Testing focused on Autodesk Inventor, SOLIDWORKS, Revit, and PIX4Dmatic, using consistent 4K display settings and a high-end Ryzen CPU to minimize processor bottlenecks.
In Autodesk Inventor graphics testing, Radeon Pro models such as the W7900, W7800, and AI Pro R9700 performed on par with Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and RTX 6000 Ada cards once the workload passed a basic performance threshold.
Above the Radeon Pro W7500 level, performance differences between GPUs clustered tightly, indicating minimal scaling regardless of price tier.
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This behavior suggests that Inventor graphics workloads do not gain meaningful benefits from Nvidia’s most expensive workstation GPU designs.
SOLIDWORKS testing showed greater variation between Radeon Pro and Nvidia RTX Pro GPUs, depending on the workload.
Composite GPU scores placed the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon AI Pro R9700 ahead of Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and RTX Pro 5000 models, despite much lower launch prices.