AMD competes with Nvidia with its new workstation Pro WX graphics chip dedicated to professional designers, announced at the Siggraph graphics technology conference in Anaheim, California.

According to Venture Beat, just hours after rival Nvidia graphics chip maker revealed its "world's fastest GPU" for workstations, AMD unveiled its new Radeon Pro WX GPU for professional workstation users. AMD's new chips target a market composed of around 10 million artists, designers, and engineers and they are based on its newly launched Polaris graphics chip architecture.

The senior vice president and chief architect of AMD Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, said that the company has evaluated its strategy for the workstation market and concluded that, when it comes to rendering images, the game engines have become real-time as they are being created. Since virtual reality is increasingly growing in popularity, it takes more horsepower to render the images. New applications programming interfaces (APIs) such as Vulkan and DirectX 12 also require special attention. More apps and tools are open source software.

In this context, Koduri said that AMD is preparing some exciting hardware and software products to be used to create content for VR and AR. AMD's new GPU Radeon Pro WX is a professional graphics card series targeted at each one of these points.

With the new AMD GPU series, professionals will be able to create their art in an open and non-proprietary environment. The new GPU series include the Radeon Pro WX 4100, the 5100 and the 7100. All three professional graphics chips will be available in the fourth quarter of 2016.

PCWorld reports that AMD's new move tries to catch up with Nvidia in the professional graphics market and for this reason, the company has scrapped the FirePro brand for its workstation GPUs. The Radeon Pro WX GPU series from AMD are able to create VR content for under $1,000.

The new AMD GPUs are based on Polaris architecture on 14-nanometer FinFET manufacturing. AMD has also packed more memory into GPUs and it introduced the experimental Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics processor with an integrated 1TB SSD. AMD has also launched its ProRender rendering technology that can use the computer power of multiple graphics chips at the same time.