Monday, October 2nd 2017
AMD Radeon Vega 64 Outperforms NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti in Forza Motorsport 7, DX 12
In an interesting turn of events, AMD's latest flagship videocard, RX Vega 64, has seen a gaming performance analysis from fellow publication computerbase.de, which brought about some interesting - and somewhat inspiring findings. In their test system, which was comprised of a 4.3 GHz Intel Core i7-6850K (6 cores), paired with 16 GB of DDR4-3000 memory in quad-channel mode, and Crimson Relive 17.9.3 / GeForce 385.69 drivers, the publication found that the Vega 64 was outperforming the GTX 1080 Ti by upwards of 23%, and that percentage increases to 32% when compared to NVIDIA's GTX 1080. The test wasn't based on the in-game benchmark, so as to avoid specifically-optimized scenarios.
8x MSAA was used in all configurations, since "the game isn't all that demanding". Being it demanding or not, the fact is that AMD's solutions are one-upping their NVIDIA counterparts in almost every price-bracket in the 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 resultions, and not only by average framerates, but by minimum framerates as well. This really does seem to be a scenario where AMD's DX 12 dominance over NVIDIA comes to play - where in CPU-limited scenarios, AMD's implementation of DX 12 allows their graphics cards to improve substantially. So much so, in fact, that even AMD's RX 580 graphics card delivers higher minimum frame-rates than NVIDIA's almighty GTX 1080 Ti. AMD's lead over NVIDIA declines somewhat on 2560 x 1440, and even further at 4K (3840 x 2160). In 4K, however, we still see AMD's RX Vega 56 equaling NVIDIA's GTX 1080. Computerbase.de contacted NVIDIA, who told them they were seeing correct performance for the green team's graphics cards, so this doesn't seem to be just an unoptimized fluke. However, these results are tremendously different from typical gaming workloads on these graphics cards, as you can see from the below TPU graph, taken from our Vega 64 review.
Source:
Computerbase.de
56 Comments on AMD Radeon Vega 64 Outperforms NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti in Forza Motorsport 7, DX 12
Is the engine just anti-nvidia ?
Will other Games follow where Polaris and Vega can shine?
Let's have it for at least 50 games and then draw a median line with the performance.
Edit:
Looking at the scaling from 1080p to 1440p and from 1440p to 2160p, I would say 1080Ti (and to a lesser degree, rest of the nVidia lineup up to 2160p) is somehow CPU-limited. nVidia drivers having larger overhead, async scheduling in drivers or something?
In GPU limited circumstances, I would expect the performance difference from going to larger resolution to be 20+% (maybe 15-20% for 1080p>1440p primarily because this usually tends to be CPU-limited anyway). Here is what the 1080p>1440p and 1440p>2160p performance hit looks like based on these graphs:
1080ti - 7.6% and 11.7%
vega64 - 16.0% and 27.2%
gtx1080 - 8.6% and 20.5%
vega56 - 12.0% and 24.1%
gtx1070 - 6.4% and 22.0%
When I mean shine here, shine more than usual in DX12\Vulkan.
Thus Vega is in a right place I guess.
DX12\vulkan is still a bit of a wildcard though
As I see some 1080 owners just popped up and started crying.
In anything not exclusively DX12, nVidia users are practically always better off relying on DX11 path.
I think what's happening is that AMD's memory subsystem rears its head again. When bandwidth isn't a problem, GCN does fantastic. As bandwidth demands increase, GCN takes a bigger blow than Pascal does. Vega manages to stay on top only because of HBM2. In games that are more demanding, HBM2 is not enough to satisfy Vega either.
This is actually quite easily explained by using 8xAA. That's something that's not going to result in a lot of cache misses, hiding AMD's problem and giving a misleading good impression.
IMO pascal is under performing here. It could be a driver issue, or game's optimization, or both. It might also be possible that the FPS meter software they're using is causing a drop. It's not unheard of.
It's also not a DX12 thing, because 1080 Ti is faster than vega in other DX12 games and usually by quite a margin.