AMD Vega (FE and RX) Benchmarks [Updated Aug 10 - RX Vega 64 Unboxing]

[William Gaatjes]

AMD has already told us that there will be more information and release of RX Vega at SIGGRAPH, which is at the end of July. I assume that reviewers will be getting RX Vega samples shortly before or at SIGGRAPH.

We will just have to wait and see.
I am going to continue playing wolfenstein old blood.
Game looks fantastic.

 

[Phynaz]

Actually almost nobody will ever be aware of some random nobody posting numbers. Those who are, if they are people who this card is designed for, won't pay it too much credence and will wait for pro results.

You are highly underestimating brand value. The Vega brand is getting tarnished.

 

[tamz_msc]

It seems that every step forward that AMD takes with their CPUs is negated by the steps taken backward by their GPUs. As a result, no net improvement in brand value, as of now.

 

[Bacon1]

Did you buy your Fury's at launch? How much did let's say month or two newer drivers impact Fury performance?

No I bought it on sale about a year ago now. Yes drivers can make a huge difference even on Nvidia.

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/02/08/nvidia_video_card_driver_performance_review/1

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/30/amd_video_card_driver_performance_review_fine_wine/1

Often you need game updates as well to take advantage of the new features / beefier hardware. I mean we've seen huge updates to game performance from Ryzen game updates which many people think would be impossible.

I mean just look at "game ready drivers", they often boast >10% performance increases.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

You can't catch the moving goal post for how long you're supposed to wait for amds product to be ready. You're always supposed to wait for xyz.

As far as I'm concerned, you've got until the first one gets in the hands of a civilian that didn't steal it off the production line. Once it's in a box and someone can plug in a power connector, it better be wired up tight, or you're going to get roasted by the first guy to do a live tech demo of your product.

 

[Bacon1]

Source, from a month ago

Hmm...

Response from a month ago

Hmmm.....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqnpo5/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqot92/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqnsgo/

 

[tential]

As far as I'm concerned, you've got until the first one gets in the hands of a civilian that didn't steal it off the production line. Once it's in a box and someone can plug in a power connector, it better be wired up tight, or you're going to get roasted by the first guy to do a live tech demo of your product.

I can't understand anyone defending AMD's release of this card with no benchmarks or reviews. AMD deserves whatever they got. If they wanted to control the narative of this release they could easily have given some cards out to reviewers. They could have cherry picked the most favorable AMD reviewers under the sun.

Anandtech's Ryan Smith said he didn't want to rush an article for fear that the news aggregator websites would run with it. Well, AMD now you are at the mercy of whoever gets the card first.

Now the next lines will be
"Wait for an unbiased website to get FE Vega."
And then if they do before RX is released
"Wait for RX Vega".

It's a never ending goalpost chase.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I can't understand anyone defending AMD's release of this card with no benchmarks or reviews. AMD deserves whatever they got. If they wanted to control the narative of this release they could easily have given some cards out to reviewers. They could have cherry picked the most favorable AMD reviewers under the sun.

Anandtech's Ryan Smith said he didn't want to rush an article for fear that the news aggregator websites would run with it. Well, AMD now you are at the mercy of whoever gets the card first.

Now the next lines will be
"Wait for an unbiased website to get FE Vega."
And then if they do before RX is released
"Wait for RX Vega".

It's a never ending goalpost chase.

Fact is, it should have never ended up in boxes until the drivers were ready. If they DID wait, then we're getting what AMD is providing. If they aren't ready, they took too long on one end of the production line (drivers) and they've got some premature fail going on right now. A random youtuber is controlling the narrative of the biggest release for AMD since the Fury line, and it's lookin pretty terrible.

 

[Rifter]

I Vote we rename this thread the jump to conclusions thread. 90% of posts are BS speculation based on nothing concrete. Is it so hard to wait for the damn RX cards to launch if you want to know RX performance????

 

[Veradun]

You are highly underestimating brand value. The Vega brand is getting tarnished.

Let's continue this fictional conversation: say RX Vega come to stores while reviews show 1080Ti average performance at 499$.

Tell me again about brand value :>

People have budgets.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Let's continue this fictional conversation: say RX Vega come to stores while reviews show 1080Ti average performance at 499$.

Tell me again about brand value :>

People have budgets.

I'd buy one, if for no other reason than being able to use a FreeSync monitor.

 

[Bacon1]

Anandtech's Ryan Smith said he didn't want to rush an article for fear that the news aggregator websites would run with it. Well, AMD now you are at the mercy of whoever gets the card first.

Funny if you are going to pretend to quote him, at least do so in context.

He said he wouldn't want to do a review now anyway, because performance is going to change a lot between now and RX. So he'd have to redo them anyway.

 

[tential]

I Vote we rename this thread the jump to conclusions thread. 90% of posts are BS speculation based on nothing concrete. Is it so hard to wait for the damn RX cards to launch if you want to know RX performance????

You're the same style of poster who is like "We have no clue how fast the 1080Ti is!!!!" After the Titan card releases.

Are we seriously just allowed to pretend like we don't understand what the underlying silicon is?
Come on man, lets have a serious discussion based on the facts we know now. It's not fun posting when we do this game. Please.

 

[Face2Face]

6/29 @ 2:30pm PT / 5:30pm ET
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Live Benchmarking

https://www.pcper.com/live/

 

[Bacon1]

The Vega brand is getting tarnished.

Yep the anti-AMD force is doing a pretty good job of trying to prove that there are no improvements in Vega and that the performance we see here is the best it will ever be.

Amazing how those who "wish it will do well" people manage to "like" every single negative post about it while talking up NV.

 

[Snarf Snarf]

I don't understand why anyone is even upset, none of us were the target market for this card. I highly doubt anyone here was actually going to buy an FE card. Our target market is gaming, the gaming card isn't out yet. If it reviews terribly don't buy one, if it reviews great then go nuts and buy one.

This whole thread is like a first world problem for techies. We wanted day 1 reviews from our favorite benchers to look at the performance of a card in games that wasn't primarily designed to play games with. Raja is on quote last page as saying RX Vega gaming will be optimized and "have a few extra goodies". I don't know what that means exactly but it's been 100% clear from the beginning this is not the card for gamers. Everyone breathe deep, take your fingers off the keyboards, go outside and enjoy the day. If the performance is this bad at the end of July feel free to bash Vega as the second coming of Bulldozer all you want.

 

[tential]

Funny if you are going to pretend to quote him, at least do so in context.

He said he wouldn't want to do a review now anyway, because performance is going to change a lot between now and RX. So he'd have to redo them anyway.

Where did he say it w ill change a LOT? He said it will change... not a lot.

Ryan Smith

To be fair, if I had one I probably wouldn't bother with gaming numbers either. Any performance data collected now will be invalid by the time Vega RX launches. Which would make the work going into producing that data more or less wasted.

Sure. But a lower bound is bound to disappoint.

I suppose it's an inevitable outcome, but I'm not sure it does anyone any good to publish numbers that will be below the consumer retail card. No matter what here, AMD is going to be dealing with some hysteria.

A) Obviously it's a lower bound, but you can only push perf so far when there are already gaming drivers out for this card.
B) He obviously again agrees with what I'm saying, that they brought this upon themselves.

Oh it's totally valid to benchmark it.

I just have to tread a little more carefully; as AnandTech people often take what we say as the final word, and while I'm proud of the trust readers have in us, it means I need to be careful not to write a preview article and have 10 news aggregators posting "AnandTech proves that Vega sucks!" in the morning. Most readers get that a preview is a preview, but not everyone does.

 

[Veradun]

He can preview with a short article like this:

"it's s blue."

j/k

 

[Malogeek]

I don't understand why anyone is even upset, none of us were the target market for this card. I highly doubt anyone here was actually going to buy an FE card. Our target market is gaming, the gaming card isn't out yet. If it reviews terribly don't buy one, if it reviews great then go nuts and buy one.

It's simple. Frontier Edition is basically the same card that RX Vega is going to be, therefore giving us a very close look as to what we are going to get a month from now. We know the consumer version is going to be a touch faster but we also understand from a technical perspective that there aren't really any hardware differences apart from the HBM2 stacks. So the internet runs rampant with benchmarks of the FE for a month with wild speculation as to what RX Vega can bring above FE, all without any controlled messaging or information from AMD or big review sites.

 

[Bacon1]

Where did he say it w ill change a LOT? He said it will change... not a lot.

Ryan Smith







A) Obviously it's a lower bound, but you can only push perf so far when there are already gaming drivers out for this card.
B) He obviously again agrees with what I'm saying, that they brought this upon themselves.

I think you skipped over a handful of great quotes that sum up a lot of your posts in this thread and others:

Most readers get that a preview is a preview, but not everyone does.

No matter what here, AMD is going to be dealing with some hysteria.

But yes this is the main one:

I probably wouldn't bother with gaming numbers either. Any performance data collected now will be invalid by the time Vega RX launches. Which would make the work going into producing that data more or less wasted.

Explain to me how a 1-5% change would be "wasted"? It wouldn't, it would still be close enough. That means he is expecting the performance to be significantly different than what we have now, not just a few % change.

 

[Snarf Snarf]

It's simple. Frontier Edition is basically the same card that RX Vega is going to be, therefore giving us a very close look as to what we are going to get a month from now. We know the consumer version is going to be a touch faster but we also understand from a technical perspective that there aren't really any hardware differences apart from the HBM2 stacks. So the internet runs rampant with benchmarks of the FE for a month with wild speculation as to what RX Vega can bring above FE, all without any controlled messaging or information from AMD or big review sites.

Again, we don't know anything. Because AMD has literally told us nothing. Under the hood yes, they are likely to be similar, there might be a difference though that wasn't made public because AMD is doing a deep dive of Vega at Siggraph in July. No one's family is getting hurt because of this, I just don't understand the level of outrage going on here. The performance just doesn't seem right, whether or not its because the card sucks or there's something else going on none of us know. Which is exactly my point, the world keeps spinning, we still don't have cards to play games with from AMD, nothing has changed since 3 days ago.

 

[Bacon1]

Again, we don't know anything. Because AMD has literally told us nothing. Under the hood yes, they are likely to be similar, there might be a difference though that wasn't made public because AMD is doing a deep dive of Vega at Siggraph in July. No one's family is getting hurt because of this, I just don't understand the level of outrage going on here. The performance just doesn't seem right, whether or not its because the card sucks or there's something else going on none of us know. Which is exactly my point, the world keeps spinning, we still don't have cards to play games with from AMD, nothing has changed since 3 days ago.

Exactly.

AMD told us a month ago, this is not a gamers card.

The Frontier Edition was designed for a variety of use-cases like Machine Learning, real-time visualization, and game design. Can you play games on Frontier Edition? Yes, absolutely. It supports the RX driver and will deliver smooth 4K gaming. But because it is optimized for professional use cases (and priced accordingly), if gaming is your primary reason for buying a GPU, I’d suggest waiting just a little while longer for the lower-priced, gaming-optimized Radeon RX Vega graphics card

That's a direct quote from Raja.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqnsgo/

And another:

Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqmwfj/

Its meant to go against a Titan type card, which is terrible value for gamers but aimed at more productivity related work with some gaming.

 

[Malogeek]

Which is exactly my point, the world keeps spinning, we still don't have cards to play games with from AMD, nothing has changed since 3 days ago.

I don't think you understand how the gaming enthusiast community works, or the internet in general. This is how people react to these situations. It's a fact of the hobby and has been this way since the dawn of GPUs. If you really thought the enthusiast community would sit idly by for a month with FE available....

It doesn't make it the logical thing to do, it's just a fact of the community. People get excited over this hardware, and with excitement comes other emotions.

 

[.vodka]

Siggraph will be fun. Look at the booths

Hope they don't start a war that close

 

[tviceman]

Exactly.

AMD told us a month ago, this is not a gamers card.



That's a direct quote from Raja.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqnsgo/

And another:



https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...n_technologies_group_at_amd_and_were/dhqmwfj/

Its meant to go against a Titan type card, which is terrible value for gamers but aimed at more productivity related work with some gaming.

You're right, the Titan line has always been a terrible value proposition. But it was always the undisputed best at something when it came out. ALWAYS. What is a Vega FE the best at? Nothing. Nothing at all. On top of that it's throttling with the stock cooler and consuming more (considerably more) power than any other card in production. And AMD wants someone to pay a premium price for something that isn't premium at anything. And you're defending this?!

It blows my mind more to watch AMD fans defend a dumpster fire than it is to see AMD stumble.

Infraction issued for inflammatory language.
-- stahlhart