On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have sine sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial [1]benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

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At $1299 USD the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 with its 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and RDNA4 GPU with official ROCm support make for a competitive offering. The pricing is much more aggressive than what's currently found from the NVIDIA RTX (Pro) Ada and Blackwell graphics cards.

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In today's article is a look at the OpenCL GPU compute performance for the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 compared to the prior generation Radeon PRO W7900. Plus on the NVIDIA side are the RTX 4000 Ada Generation and RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics cards. As noted, I unfortunately don't have any review samples of the NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics cards at the moment which is why the testing was done with the Ada Generation hardware. Compared to the $1299 USD Radeon AI PRO R9700, the RTX 4000 Ada Generation currently retails for $1449 USD while the RTX 6000 Ada Generation goes for $5300 USD.

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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.

This AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 OpenCL testing was done with the ROCm 7.0.2 OpenCL driver stack on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. On the NVIDIA side was CUDA 13 with the NVIDIA 580 driver stack. In addition to looking at the raw OpenCL performance, the GPU power consumption and performance-per-dollar was also analyzed. For the OpenCL benchmarks able to scale-out to multiple GPUs, there are also the results for dual AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-radeon-ai-pro-r9700

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=radeon-ai-pro-r9700-opencl&image=radeon_ai_pro_r9700_1_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=radeon-ai-pro-r9700-opencl&image=radeon_ai_pro_r9700_2_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=radeon-ai-pro-r9700-opencl&image=radeon_ai_pro_r9700_3_lrg