Friday, June 30th 2017
New Performance Benchmarks of AMD's Vega Frontier Edition Surface
You probably took a long, hard read at our article covering a single-minded user's experience of his new Vega Frontier Edition. Now, courtesy of PCPer, and charitable soul Ekin at Linus Tech Tips, we have some more performance benchmarks of AMD's latest (non gaming specific) graphics card.
Starting with 2560x1440, let's begin with the good news: in what seems to be the best performance scenario we've seen until now, the Vega Frontier Edition stands extremely close to NVIDIA's GTX 1080 Ti video card in Fallout 4. It trails it for about 10 FPS most of the test, and even surpasses it at some points. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt regarding the RX Vega consumer cards: performance on those models will probably be higher than the Frontier Edition's results. And for the sake of AMD, they better be, because in all other tests, the Frontier Edition somewhat disappoints. It's beaten by NVIDIA's GTX 1070 in Grand Theft Auto V, mirrors its performance in The Witcher 3, and delivers slightly higher performance than the GTX 1070 on Hitman and Dirt Rally (albeit lower than the GTX 1080.)
At 4K (3840x2160), the Vega FE trails the GTX 1080 by about 3 FPS (at 57 FPS, just shy of 60 FPS) on Dirt Rally; trails it again (this time with a 7 FPS difference) in Fallout 4, at around 42 FPS; delivers around 66% of the GTX 1080's performance on Grand Theft Auto V, and less than 50% of the GTX 1080 Ti's performance on the same game. In Hitman, the Vega FE delivers around 83% of the GTX 1080's performance (around 50 FPS versus the 1080's 60), and delivers almost the same result on The Witcher 3, barely maintaining a 30 FPS performance towards the end of the run.
Do note that all of these tests will apparently be re-run by PCPer, and the publication is looking to publish their results later today. Also keep in mind the Vega Frontier Edition isn't a consumer graphics card, and isn't officially meant for gaming. Instead, it's meant for professionals or prosumers who do some professional workloads as well as some gaming, and want to have the ability to test their development fruits with the same graphics card they developed with. Power draw was rated at around 280 W while gaming, with only 25 of those being taken from the PCIe slot, which seems somewhat disproportionate.
Apparently, there was some testing done on mining software as well, and performance is reported as disappointing (as in, "very low".) This probably speaks to the HBC (High Bandwidth Cache) and HBCC (high Bandwidth Cache Controller), which probably will require a lot of fine tuning from mining software (remember the GTX 1080 is generally poor in mining workloads compared to the GTX 1070 because of the higher latency of its GDDR5X memory implementation.) Perhaps these news come as a relief, however, since availability of RX Vega cards will likely be limited without miners taking up the whole supply.
Sources:
Ekin @ Linus Tech Tips, PC Perspective, PC Perspective YouTube Channel
Starting with 2560x1440, let's begin with the good news: in what seems to be the best performance scenario we've seen until now, the Vega Frontier Edition stands extremely close to NVIDIA's GTX 1080 Ti video card in Fallout 4. It trails it for about 10 FPS most of the test, and even surpasses it at some points. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt regarding the RX Vega consumer cards: performance on those models will probably be higher than the Frontier Edition's results. And for the sake of AMD, they better be, because in all other tests, the Frontier Edition somewhat disappoints. It's beaten by NVIDIA's GTX 1070 in Grand Theft Auto V, mirrors its performance in The Witcher 3, and delivers slightly higher performance than the GTX 1070 on Hitman and Dirt Rally (albeit lower than the GTX 1080.)
Apparently, there was some testing done on mining software as well, and performance is reported as disappointing (as in, "very low".) This probably speaks to the HBC (High Bandwidth Cache) and HBCC (high Bandwidth Cache Controller), which probably will require a lot of fine tuning from mining software (remember the GTX 1080 is generally poor in mining workloads compared to the GTX 1070 because of the higher latency of its GDDR5X memory implementation.) Perhaps these news come as a relief, however, since availability of RX Vega cards will likely be limited without miners taking up the whole supply.
166 Comments on New Performance Benchmarks of AMD's Vega Frontier Edition Surface
Who knows, unfortunately we really are not getting much of a taste of this card and that to me worries on so many levels.
I expect the same from the accelerated Pascal Refresh. :-)
So there may be no GCN5 specific new Features enabled because the Driver lacks support.
Also there could be ECC used slowing Games down by upto 20% alone, in some cases.
With the first real GCN5 Driver the clould be a 20% uplift easy.
What makes Vega almost twice as fast as Fury, but only in Fallout 4?
So, people, don't be stupid. With all this excitement of finally having a first actual Vega core, people forgot they just threw all the logic out the window by testing it as a gamer card. If gaming RX Vega will be rubbish, piss on it by all means, but doing that now just makes everyone look like absolute cretins. Yes, I watched PCPer's live stream, but I still believe the same to be true.
I'm on mobile so posting links is too difficult for my 'on holiday's brain. But a quick Google search shows the P6000 Quadro (hothardware I think) beat the Titan X (original Pascal model) in gaming, convincingly.
Yes, far more expensive than Vega FE but the point is, it's a Quadro that games better than a Titan X.
Vega FE doesn't have an excuse unless we beat that worn track, AMD still can't write proficient drivers. And before I'm lambasted for criticising AMD, explain the Quadro gaming performance in the context of Vega FE gaming performance.
Waiting to see the actual gaming card, with its drivers for gaming.
As much as i would like to bash stuff for horrible performance, Gaming VEGA deserve a fair chance just like any other cards.
For now Vega looks like the GPU big companies where expecting, not like the GPU gamers where expecting.