AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo

The AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo is a dual-GPU professional graphics card built on TSMC’s 7 nm process, packing 13,230 million transistors into a 331 mm² die per GPU. With 32 GB of HBM2 memory and a 4096-bit bus, this card targets the highest end of Apple Mac Pro configurations. Its average benchmark score of 114,878 places it in the 96th percentile of all GPUs, meaning it outperforms roughly 96% of the hardware in the database. The card is now end-of-life, launched in June 2019 with a launch MSRP of 4,399 USD.

Benchmark Performance

The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo delivers an average benchmark score of 114,878 across all recorded tests. In Geekbench Metal, it scores 131,414, while in Geekbench OpenCL it reaches 98,341. The Metal result is notably stronger, indicating that the card’s compute architecture is well-optimized for Apple’s graphics API, which is expected given its Apple MPX bus interface. The OpenCL score, while lower, still represents a substantial compute capability for professional workloads.

Relative to its nearest rivals, the Duo sits in a tight competitive band. The NVIDIA RTX A5500 Mobile scores 113,944, which is 0.8% lower than the Duo’s average — a negligible difference that puts the two cards statistically at parity. The NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation posts 117,088, beating the Duo by 1.9%. This is a slim margin, but it does indicate that NVIDIA’s newer Ada architecture achieves higher efficiency in a smaller form factor. Against AMD’s own single-GPU Radeon Pro Vega II, the Duo is 4.5% faster, with that card scoring 109,967. The improvement over the Radeon Pro W6600X is more pronounced: the Duo leads by 7%, as the W6600X manages only 107,342.

The data shows a card that is competitive but not dominant at its performance tier. The 1.9% deficit to the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation is small enough that real-world application differences could flip the ranking. The 0.8% edge over the RTX A5500 Mobile is similarly within noise. However, the Duo’s dual-GPU design delivers a clear advantage over its single-GPU AMD siblings — 4.5% over the Pro Vega II and 7% over the W6600X — which justifies its position as the top AMD offering in this segment. The pixel rate of 110.1 GPixel/s and texture rate of 440.3 GTexel/s are consistent with a card designed for high-resolution rendering and heavy texture work.

Who Should Consider It

Benchmark results indicate this card is best suited for professionals working at high resolutions with demanding compute loads. The 32 GB HBM2 memory and 1.02 TB/s bandwidth provide ample headroom for 4K and 8K video editing, large 3D scenes, and GPU-accelerated machine learning inference. The 14.09 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and 28.18 TFLOPS of FP16 (2:1 ratio) make it a capable workhorse for single-precision compute tasks, while the half-precision throughput is useful for AI workloads that tolerate reduced precision.

For gaming, the card’s 96th percentile standing means it can handle most titles at high settings in 1440p, and many at 4K with adjustments. However, its Quad-slot form factor and 475 W TDP make it unsuitable for typical gaming rigs — this is a workstation card designed for Apple Mac Pro enclosures. Users with that specific platform who need maximum compute density should consider it. The 4096 shading units and 256 TMUs provide strong fill-rate performance, but the 64 ROPs may limit pure rasterization throughput at very high resolutions compared to newer architectures.

The suggested PSU of 850 W is a practical requirement for any system housing this card. Given its end-of-life status, buyers should weigh whether the performance advantage over the 7%-slower W6600X justifies the complexity of a dual-GPU card. For tasks that scale well across two GPUs — rendering, simulation, certain compute kernels — the Duo delivers. For workloads that are single-GPU bound, the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation’s 1.9% lead makes it a simpler alternative.

How It Compares

NVIDIA RTX A5500 Mobile: The Duo is 0.8% faster than this mobile workstation GPU, with scores of 114,878 versus 113,944. This near-tie means the Duo offers no meaningful advantage in raw compute, but the A5500 Mobile consumes far less power and fits in laptops. The Duo’s 32 GB memory dwarfs typical mobile offerings, giving it an edge in memory-bound tasks despite the negligible score difference.

NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation: The RTX 4000 SFF leads by 1.9%, scoring 117,088. This is the Duo’s closest competitor and the only one in the list that definitively beats it. The Ada card achieves this in a small form factor, suggesting better architectural efficiency. The Duo counters with 32 GB VRAM versus the Ada card’s likely smaller pool, which matters for datasets that exceed the latter’s capacity.

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II: The Duo is 4.5% faster than its single-GPU sibling, which scores 109,967. This is the most direct comparison since both share the Vega 20 architecture. The performance gap reflects the dual-GPU configuration’s ability to pool compute resources, though the 475 W TDP is the price paid for that 4.5% gain.

AMD Radeon Pro W6600X: The Duo leads by 7%, with the W6600X scoring 107,342. This is the largest margin among the listed rivals. The W6600X is a lower-tier professional card, so the gap is expected, but it also shows that the Duo’s dual-GPU design delivers tangible benefits over AMD’s mid-range workstation offerings.

FAQ

Q: What is the average benchmark score of the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo?

A: The average benchmark score is 114,878, which places it in the 96th percentile of all GPUs in the database.

Q: How does it perform in Geekbench Metal versus OpenCL?

A: It scores 131,414 in Geekbench Metal and 98,341 in Geekbench OpenCL, showing a significant advantage under Apple’s Metal API.

Q: Is it faster than the NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation?

A: No, the RTX 4000 SFF is 1.9% faster, scoring 117,088 compared to the Duo’s 114,878.

Q: What memory configuration does it use?

A: It has 32 GB of HBM2 memory on a 4096-bit bus, providing 1.02 TB/s of bandwidth.

Q: What is the power requirement for this card?

A: The card has a 475 W TDP and requires a suggested PSU of 850 W.

Q: What APIs are supported?

A: It supports DirectX 12 (12_1), OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.3.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo has no dedicated ray tracing cores and no tensor cores, as these fields are null in the specifications. Instead, it relies on GCN 5.1 architecture with 4096 shading units for all rendering tasks. This means ray tracing workloads are handled in software or through compute shaders, which is significantly slower than hardware-accelerated implementations found in newer NVIDIA cards. The card’s API support includes DirectX 12 (12_1), which is the baseline for DXR ray tracing, but without dedicated hardware, performance in ray-traced titles will be poor.

The feature set is oriented toward traditional rasterization and compute, not real-time ray tracing. The 110.1 GPixel/s pixel rate and 440.3 GTexel/s texture rate provide solid conventional rendering throughput. For professional applications that use ray tracing for final-frame rendering — such as architectural visualization or cinematic effects — the card can compute these workloads, but users should expect long render times. The lack of tensor cores also means no dedicated AI acceleration for features like DLSS; any machine learning tasks must run on the general-purpose shading units, which deliver 14.09 TFLOPS of FP32 and 28.18 TFLOPS of FP16.

Display outputs are limited to 1x HDMI 2.0b and 4x Thunderbolt, which is tailored to Apple’s ecosystem. The Thunderbolt ports can drive multiple displays and support high-bandwidth peripherals, but the HDMI 2.0b standard caps 4K output at 60 Hz. For users needing higher refresh rates or newer display technologies, this could be a limitation. The card supports Vulkan 1.3, ensuring compatibility with modern cross-platform graphics applications.

Memory Subsystem

The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo features 32 GB of HBM2 memory on a 4096-bit bus, yielding a bandwidth of 1.02 TB/s. This is an exceptionally wide memory interface, designed to feed the dual GPU configuration with massive amounts of data simultaneously. The 1.02 TB/s bandwidth is among the highest recorded in the database, allowing the card to handle large textures, high-resolution framebuffers, and compute datasets without memory bottlenecks.

For high-resolution workloads, this memory subsystem is a decisive advantage. At 4K or 8K, texture data and geometry can easily exceed 16 GB, and the 32 GB capacity ensures that most professional scenes fit entirely in VRAM. The 4096-bit bus width also means that even when memory is heavily accessed, the effective throughput remains high. The memory runs at 1000 MHz with 2 Gbps effective speed, which is conservative for HBM2 but sufficient given the extreme bus width.

The practical implication is that users working with multi-GPU rendering or large simulation datasets will rarely hit memory limits. The 7% performance lead over the W6600X is partly attributable to this memory advantage, as the latter’s smaller bus and capacity would throttle data-intensive tasks. However, the 475 W TDP and Quad-slot design are direct consequences of this memory configuration — HBM2 stacks and the accompanying logic require substantial cooling and power. For Mac Pro owners, this trade-off is acceptable; for others, the RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation’s 1.9% score advantage with less power draw might be more appealing.