The AMD FirePro W9000 & W8000 Review: Part 1

Despite the wide range of the GPU coverage we do here at AnandTech, from reading our articles you would be hard pressed to notice that AMD and NVIDIA have product lines beyond their consumer Radeon and GeForce brands. Consumer video cards compose the bulk of all video cards shipped, the bulk of revenue booked, and since they’re targeted at a very wide audience, the bulk of all marketing attention. Consequently consumer cards also take up the bulk of the press’s attention, especially since new GPUs are almost always launched in a consumer video card first.

The truth of course is that there’s a great deal more to the GPU marketplace than consumer video cards; abutting the consumer market is the smaller, specialized, but equally important professional market that makes up the rest of the desktop GPU marketplace. Where consumers need gaming performance and video playback, professionals need compute performance, specialized rendering performance, and above all a level of product reliability and support beyond what consumers need. They need the same basic product as consumers – a high performance, feature-packed GPU – but they need to use it in entirely different ways.