GTX 1080 or Vega?
1080, 1070 or wait for Vega?
1080 Ti...
Wait for RX Vega?
Wait for Navi?
So GTC last year... We expected to get AMD Vega in early 2017.
But as the slide helpfully points out the time line was subject to change
And change it did.
It is now August. (cough)
But today, we finally find out
Was Vega worth the wait?
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Meet Vega or more accurately RX Vega 56 and 64.
The consumer versions of the Vega Founders Edi...[cough] Excuse me...
Frontier Edition cards that launched back in June of this year.
It's named for the number of Next-gen compute units on board, if we compare it against the Frontier Edition,
we can see that we're on par for compute units on Vega 64
But we've got about half the video memory at 8 gigs and our clocks are a little lower.
Much lower in Vega 56's case
but like that card and one of the likely reasons behind the delays
they both have HBM2 memory. The newest revision of the blazing fast memory
that first debuted on amd's own Fury cards back in 2015.
Which both does and doesn't feel like a long time ago depending on how you look at it.
Anyway, aside from actually basically
everything new to Vega is a tile based rendering mode that AMD calls the draw Stream Binning Rasterizer.
A feature similar to what nVidia implemented on Maxwell that AMD tells us will improve
performance without any extra work from game developers.
Let's meet our line up for today!
We've got Vega 56 both air and liquid cooled flavors of RX Vega 64 and
the GTX 1070 and 1080 that their pricing puts them up against.
And we'll be treating all three cards to our mainstream gaming platforms from both the Red Team
And the blue team.
At the top-end, we immediately see the vega 64 Liquid Cooled card
pull out into a comfortable lead. Though this quickly changes in Rise of the Tomb Raider
where the GTX 1080 over runs it.
Moving a teardown...
While the Vega 56 significantly widens and closes these gaps on the 1070 at times appearing like a kind of 1070 Ti.
This theme of trading blows
seems to take place across all of our gaming benchmarks
and our synthetics tell a similar tale. So if you're an AMD fan who wanted to see competition...
You're going to be happy. But if you wanted AMD to blow the doors off nVidia...
Well, you might be a little disappointed.
You'll be more excited about the productivity applications
in Cinebench R15,
Blender and Adobe Media Encoder, we see a clear trend favoring even the air-cooled RX Vega 64
over the GTX 1080. Something that we're not entirely surprised by but we're happy to see.
Considering AMD's traditional strengths in general purpose GPU tasks.
Unfortunately, another point of divergence is power consumption.
The RX Vega 64 is an
absolute hog when it comes to power to say nothing at the liquid cooled version
and thermal performance isn't much better for the air-cooled Vega 64 either with the heaviest throttle out of any of the cards we tested.
You actually need both 8 pin power connectors for these cards.
Ouch...
With that said, the value proposition here is still pretty compelling.
Our air-Cooled RX Vega 64 is quite close to the
GTX 1080 Founders Edition in gaming, while the liquid cooled variant is a better performer
but one that's ultimately held back a little by its higher price tag.
For productivity and GPGPU though, RX Vega really shines. Of course the same is true of the excellent productivity performance of RX Vega 56.
But the real story is gaming.
Holy balls!
We're actually doing pretty great at this price.
Especially since we couldn't even find a GTX 1070 for less than about four hundred and Thirty dollars. Though with that said,
the value argument of the entire Vega lineup is
pretty complicated. Because the higher end cards may not be purchasable without AMD's
value added bundles, so we're talking a discount on a Ryzen 7, a FreeSync monitor and some free games...
That seems to add about a hundred dollars to the price. Though, AMD says it's worth $420.
So the question really becomes
Vega 56 looks pretty good with or without the bundle. Depending on whether you want that stuff
that's part of amd strategy to deter coin miners from buying these cards
but at the very high end the Vegas 64 liquid cooled
at $699 with rebates and games...
That one becomes a tougher sell
But feel free to tell us if we're wrong in the comments below.
So conclusion then. The wait is finally over
Vega might bear more similarity to the performance and power consumption profile of nVidia's last generation
Maxwell architecture when it comes to gaming tasks
but the good news is that it's enough to be in the conversation for
high end GPU Buyers and
those poor folks with high resolution freesync monitors that now
finally have a real option for a graphics card to drive them. The only thing remaining
then is to see what nVIdia has up their sleeves with Volta
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