AMD FirePro S10000 vs NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell Comparison

The AMD FirePro S10000 and the NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell sit at opposite ends of the workstation GPU timeline, and the recorded data reflects that gap in nearly every dimension. Both are professional cards built for compute and visualization rather than gaming, both carry a FirePro or RTX PRO badge aimed at workstations, and both land in the same general neighborhood of the database's overall percentile rankings: the FirePro S10000 at the 77th percentile versus all GPUs, and the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at the 72nd. Yet the single head-to-head benchmark the two share tells a lopsided story, with the Blackwell card winning it by a decisive margin. The interesting question the data raises is how two cards with comparable aggregate percentile placement can be so far apart where it counts.

Where Each One Wins

The honest answer, based strictly on the recorded results, is that the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell wins everything the two cards have in common. The only overlapping benchmark in the database is Geekbench Vulkan, where the Blackwell card scored 194168 against the FirePro S10000's 34145, a delta of 82.4 percent in NVIDIA's favor. That is not a close result; it is a generational rout, which is what you would expect when comparing a 5 nm Blackwell 2.0 part against a 28 nm GCN 1.0 part. The FirePro S10000's Geekbench OpenCL score of 30631 and its average benchmark score of 32388 place it in a cluster of rivals including the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (32456 average), the FirePro S9300 X2 (32540), the Radeon Pro 570X (32176), and the RX 590 GME (32601), all within a fraction of a percent. So the FirePro remains competitive within its own scoring cohort, but head-to-head against modern silicon, the data shows no category where it comes out ahead.

Where the FirePro S10000 can still claim an advantage is in raw specification width rather than measured performance. Its 384 bit memory bus is twice the Blackwell card's 192 bit interface, a legacy of an era when bandwidth was bought with bus width rather than with signaling speed. That advantage is entirely negated by memory technology: the GDDR7 on the RTX PRO 4000 running at 28 Gbps effective delivers 672.0 GB/s of bandwidth, well beyond the FirePro's 240.0 GB/s. The FirePro also carries dual 8-pin power connectors and a 375 W TDP, an indicator of how inefficiently that older architecture converted power into work compared with the Blackwell card's 140 W TDP fed by a single 16-pin connector.

The Verdict

For anyone choosing between these two based on the database, the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell is the only rational pick for current work. It wins the sole head-to-head benchmark by 82.4 percent, it is an active production product while the FirePro S10000 is end-of-life, and it supports the modern API stack: DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) and Vulkan 1.4, against the FirePro's DirectX 12 (11_1) and Vulkan 1.2.170. Its feature set includes 70 RT cores and 280 tensor cores, hardware the FirePro simply does not have, which matters for ray tracing and AI workloads. It is also dramatically more practical to house: single-slot, 20 mm wide, 241 mm long, and drawing a fraction of the power.

The FirePro S10000 makes sense only in narrow historical or legacy contexts: a system that must interface with its 1x DVI and 4x mini-DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, or a software stack pinned to older API levels. Its 3 GB of GDDR5 is the hardest constraint in the data for modern work, while the Blackwell card's 24 GB of GDDR7 accommodates far larger datasets and models. Nothing in the recorded results suggests a workload where the older card would be preferable on merit.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

The direct comparison list contains exactly one entry, Geekbench Vulkan:

• Geekbench Vulkan: NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell 194168, AMD FirePro S10000 34145, an 82.4 percent margin for NVIDIA. This is the headline number of the comparison. A gap of that size means the Blackwell card delivers roughly several multiples of the FirePro's compute throughput in a modern API path.

Context sharpens the picture. The FirePro's 34145 Vulkan result is consistent with its overall average score of 32388, which lands it within one percent of the RX 7900 GRE, FirePro S9300 X2, and RX 590 GME in the database's rival clustering. The Blackwell card's average score of 27135 puts it near the RTX 4070 Mobile (27435, 1.1 percent ahead), the RX 6700 XT (27425, 1.1 percent ahead), the RTX 3090 (27565, 1.6 percent ahead), and 1.7 percent ahead of the RTX A4000. Note the inversion: the FirePro has the higher percentile against all GPUs (77 versus 72) and the higher average score, yet loses the shared benchmark catastrophically. That divergence is worth questioning. The averages are computed over different test suites, and the Blackwell card's suite includes several Passmark DirectX results with small absolute values, such as 97 in DirectX 12, 173 in DirectX 10, 276 in DirectX 11, and 354 in DirectX 9, plus 1265 in G2D. Those low-scoring entries pull its average down without saying anything about its capability in the tests that matter to a modern workstation. The FirePro's average rests on only two Geekbench results, 30631 OpenCL and 34145 Vulkan, so its percentile is derived from a much thinner sample. When the two cards meet on the same test, the modern architecture dominates.

The Blackwell card's other recorded results fill out the profile: 4648 in 3DMark Steel Nomad DX12, 28427 in Passmark G3D, and 14805 in Passmark GPU Compute. There is no FirePro equivalent recorded for any of these, so no comparison can be drawn, but the GPU Compute figure in particular indicates substantial general-purpose throughput.

FAQ

Q: Which card is faster in the benchmarks they both ran?

A: The RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell. In Geekbench Vulkan, the only shared test, it scored 194168 versus 34145 for the FirePro S10000, an 82.4 percent advantage.

Q: How do the two compare in overall database standing?

A: The FirePro S10000 sits at the 77th percentile versus all GPUs with an average score of 32388, while the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell sits at the 72nd percentile with an average score of 27135. The higher percentile does not translate into head-to-head wins, since the averages come from different test suites.

Q: Are both cards still in production?

A: No. The FirePro S10000 is listed as end-of-life, having been released in 2012. The RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, released in 2025, is an active product.

Q: Which card has more memory?

A: The RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, with 24 GB of GDDR7 and 672.0 GB/s of bandwidth. The FirePro S10000 has 3 GB of GDDR5 and 240.0 GB/s of bandwidth.

Q: What power supply does each card require?

A: The database lists a 750 W suggested PSU for the FirePro S10000, which has a 375 W TDP and two 8-pin connectors. The RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell lists a 300 W suggested PSU, with a 140 W TDP and one 16-pin connector.

Q: Do both cards support hardware ray tracing?

A: Only the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, which has 70 RT cores and 280 tensor cores. The FirePro S10000 predates both and has neither.

Architecture Differences

The architectural distance between these cards is the whole story. The FirePro S10000 is built on the Tahiti chip, GCN 1.0 architecture, on TSMC's 28 nm process, with 4,313 million transistors on a 352 mm² die at a density of 12.3M per mm². The RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell uses the GB203 chip, Blackwell 2.0 architecture, on TSMC's 5 nm process, packing 45,600 million transistors into a 378 mm² die at 120.6M per mm². The dies are similar in area, but the Blackwell die holds well over ten times the transistors, and that density is what funds its 8960 shading units, 280 TMUs, and 96 ROPs against the FirePro's 1792 shading units, 112 TMUs, and 32 ROPs.

The throughput consequences are stark. The Blackwell card delivers 36.83 TFLOPS of FP32, plus 36.83 TFLOPS of FP16 at 1:1, versus 3.405 TFLOPS FP32 on the FirePro, with no FP16 figure recorded. Pixel rate is 197.3 GPixel/s versus 30.40 GPixel/s, and texture rate is 575.4 GTexel/s versus 106.4 GTexel/s. Clocks tell the same tale: 1230 MHz base and 2055 MHz boost on the Blackwell card against 825 MHz base and 950 MHz boost on the FirePro, with memory at 28 Gbps effective versus 5 Gbps effective.

Platform support diverges just as sharply. The Blackwell card uses PCIe 5.0 x16 and offers 4x DisplayPort 2.1b; the FirePro uses PCIe 3.0 x16 with 1x DVI and 4x mini-DisplayPort 1.2. Both support OpenGL 4.6, the one point of API parity. Lineage also differs: the FirePro S10000 succeeded the FirePro Terascale line and was itself succeeded by the Radeon Pro GCN generation, while the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell follows the Workstation Ada generation and has no listed successor.

Specification Differences

• Process node: 28 nm (FirePro) versus 5 nm (Blackwell), both on TSMC.
• Transistors and density: 4,313 million at 12.3M/mm² versus 45,600 million at 120.6M/mm², on near-identical die areas of 352 mm² and 378 mm².
• Clocks: 825/950 MHz base/boost versus 1230/2055 MHz; memory at 5 Gbps effective versus 28 Gbps effective.
• Memory: 3 GB GDDR5 on a 384 bit bus at 240.0 GB/s versus 24 GB GDDR7 on a 192 bit bus at 672.0 GB/s.
• Compute resources: 1792 shading units, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, no RT or tensor cores versus 8960 shading units, 280 TMUs, 96 ROPs, 70 RT cores, 280 tensor cores.
• FP32 throughput: 3.405 TFLOPS versus 36.83 TFLOPS; FP16 recorded only on the Blackwell card.
• Power and cooling: 375 W TDP, dual-slot, 2x 8-pin, 750 W suggested PSU versus 140 W TDP, single-slot, 1x 16-pin, 300 W suggested PSU.
• Bus and outputs: PCIe 3.0 x16 with DVI and mini-DisplayPort 1.2 versus PCIe 5.0 x16 with DisplayPort 2.1b.
• API support: DirectX 12 (11_1) and Vulkan 1.2.170 versus DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) and Vulkan 1.4; OpenGL 4.6 on both.
• Physical size: 305 mm long, dual-slot, height 111 mm on both versus 241 mm long, 20 mm wide, single-slot.
• Status and dates: end-of-life, released in 2012, versus active, released in 2025.
• Launch MSRP: the FirePro S10000 launched at 3,599 USD; no launch MSRP is recorded for the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell.