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
Guess i should have expected a cat/flying car when they told me in videos and in interviews leading up to the release its wasn't a cat/flying car.
I should have just kept them up to my expectations of what they should have come out with. Guess i'm off to the forums to rant about it.
FWIW, I completely understand your POV. But you utterly ignore the futility of a Gaming Mode on a non-gaming card. I know it's aimed at 'prosumers'. I know RX Vega is the gaming version. I know the FE is hampered. I know these things. That's why, as a logical thinking person, it beggars belief they put a Gaming Mode on it...that does nothing for gaming performance. Why bother?
It certainly looks and feels like one with all the brushed aluminum and glowing logo. Look at Quadro, that is how a pro card looks, dull plastic shroud. What the pro user cares is the triangle throughput, pro certifications, dedicated customer support. Not looks. All the above are the opposite with this product.
And even if it is not, so what? Quadro's can game too, they just have a bit slower clock, ~5-10% resulting in that much smaller performance. It is non-sense to say that the pro driver lacks gaming features. It is true the other way around.
And stop comparing the price of Vega FE to a Quadro. With Quadro most of what you are paying is the ability to call NVIDIA and get them to help you personally.
And saying Quadro P6000 isn't stylishly designed... Either you're blind or at lest color blind. Why else would NVIDIA bother placing chrome and green details on it? It could simply have a black or gray shroud. AMD simply opted for all metallic blue shroud and that yellow "R" cube in the corner.
I personally don't expect RX Vega to be much faster, 8%-15%. Maybe just in sustained clock rates.
I'm not buying one but if you buy me that cat/flying car I will use Fly Mode and click that button as much as I want.
Thus, this discussion is just a waste of everyones time until the RX Vega comes out.
Moar cores pls :)
But nevermind. I see how others are blind and have invalid logic, so I guess it wasn't the first one(knowing everything).
On other news
AMD announces Capsaicin Siggraph with no word about RX Vega | VideoCardz.com
There was no reason for AMD to keep RX Vega for Siggraph, other than delay it. Siggraph is not for gaming cards. It seems that they are delaying this card because of reasons we don't know. Being the cost of HBM2, availability of HBM2, disagreements about if they should sell this card to the gaming market, drivers, problems with card's design, I don't know. But indications right now show that this card is only a big step forward for professionals and big corporations needing high performance in compute tasks, not a good enough product for gamers. And because of HBM2, AMD probably can't sell it at 1080 price levels without saying goodbye to reasonable profit margins, or without even losing money.
Not so sure about that, it's more of a hope, for AMD fans, sprinkled with (some) unrealistic expectations. Can't say this on behalf of everyone, but most us want RTG to be just as competitive as the CPU division as can be seen with Ryzen, if Vega falls way short of 1080Ti then it'd be a major disappointment, that's all there's to it.
That's only bad in gamer's eyes. For AMD Ryzen is a success, Threadripper cough Intel off guard, and Epyc probably would signal an epyc return to servers. Vega will also make many pros and corporations happy. But gamers will probably have to wait longer, because AMD's financial limitations can't offer two miracles in just a few months period. Hopefully consumers will buy AMD processors so that the company have enough cash for better R&D in future products, gaming GPUs included.
Patience.
I'm far from expert in processor architectures, but I know the basics.
Yeah it does make sense if you understand it. It shows how Vega handles Fallout on 2k. Isn't that an indication of performance? AMD sucks with driver deliveries would that be the case it's not as good across the games that it was tested on? Are you an enthusiast, fan, expert or a NV fanboy? Well you are not an expert that's for sure since you miss so much info, even though you try to convince people you are. enthusiast maybe and a fan. But for sure fanboy. How about you go to NV threads and say how great it is and how happy you are to have one instead?(if you have one or you would really like to have one maybe) Cause your arguments are just lame and honestly i'm tired of this. Not sure about other people. Just go on NV posts and write there how great it is and how fast. Not here telling Vega is bad and sucks which is not even out since this is professional. Professional cards sucks for games and for you it's a myth. That's your opinion. They are not for games and that's my opinion but you can use them for games.
Maybe it is better that we end here indeed, because you're clearly not interested in learning anything new...
You see? It's just a button to enable more game specific options in the driver while deactivating the production specific options, so that a developer can develop a game and then see if it actually runs without the special options he set in his driver for developing said game.
And this Vega Frontier Edition is a card that sits in a bracket between current Titan and Quadro cards from Nvidia. It has no hampered DP and similar output as the current Titan (which is by Nvidia specifically called a GAMING card, not a prosumer card anymore) but it has a bit more consumer oriented driver features the Quadros lack. THIS is a prosumer card, the Titan actually isn't (anymore).
Vega FE does not have full fp64, 819 Gflop/s fp64. AMD is planning a Vega20 to arrive next year with higher fp64 performance to compete with Quadro.
Titans are prosumer cards. They does work well in gaming, but so does Quadros too. The purpose of Titan is to provide the ultimate performance for demanding power-users/developers which are willing to pay a little extra to get the maximum available. They are made out of cherry-pick top binned chips. Nvidia could have priced them a little lower, but they can't provide them in large quantities, as evident by them often being out of stock and Nvidia having to limit the cards per customer. As a developer, I'm super happy these exist, and I know these are used extensively in development, research/academics, etc. As for all the people complaining about their pricing and their lack of "value" once the GeForce versions come along; These cards are not meant for you! All the adolescents doing gaming in their mother's basement have a problem grasping that there is a professional/prosumer market out there, where getting access to better performance is easily worth it in terms of increased revenue. This is not Nvidia screwing their customers, actually the prosumers demand this!
I learned one thing from this. How to add someone in the ignore list. ;)
Tbh, my last Geforce that actually ran (awesomely) was a 7900GS (@ GTX+ clocks and shaders). After that I once did a swap with someone, my HD4850 vs his 9800GTX. We swapped back because our cards did play up and throw errors in each others PCs. Swapping back and no signs of errors anymore.
Also at the time of the Geforce 7000, Nvidia did some shady stuff with displays, since that times my faithful old display, which does have a DVI port, would only run via DVI if connected to a Nvidia card, neither AMD nor Intel will work with DVI with that display. But the first test of the Display was via DVI on a integrated Intel Chip (on which it also doesn't work anymore).
So, just for me it's: Nvidia screwed me over by crippling my display, I'll not buy anything from them if possible.
Still they make awesome cards, just not with the right features for me (Freesync e.g.)Okay, I didn't do my homework there, I'm sorry.