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

[jpiniero]

I've never understood the point of the Titans since they are always awful price/perf but people seem to love them.

It's an e-penis thing. No I don't get it either.

Hah at this point they can launch at $600+ since mining is going nuts... I gave up hope for a well priced Vega weeks ago after the mining craze. Miners are even buying FE @ $1000 <.<

IIRC it's not very good at mining for the price, only 33 mhash/sec I think.

 

[jpiniero]

If the mediocre gaming performance holds the same for the RX Vega then what the hell are they doing with the extra 5B transistors?

The one thing that came to mind was half DP. But there's been no evidence it has that.

 

[JDG1980]

The one thing that came to mind was half DP. But there's been no evidence it has that.

But Hawaii can do FP64 at 1/2 the FP32 rate despite its relatively modest die size. Nvidia dedicates special cores to just FP64; AMD has traditionally supported this by creating multi-function units that can handle either workload.

 

[moonbogg]

So far Vega looks like a titanic letdown. It makes me wonder what the hell they were doing all these years developing Vega. In the end it barely beats last generations high end cards like 980ti OC. Seriously, this makes me really wonder what on earth is going on with AMD's GPU department. Did they just transfer all their resources over to work on Ryzen or something? How can they spend this much time on a GPU and have it suck this bad? Also, using HBM2 on such a low performing product is completely ridiculous. Regular DDR5 (non-x) would have been more than enough to feed that sluggish die. Geeze man, I feel a real sense of shock and frustration with this. What the heck just happened? What did they do!? This card SUCKS!

 

[Cloudfire777]

Further delays?
Just paper launch?
Sucky marketing team at it again?

https://videocardz.com/70655/amd-announces-capsaicin-siggraph-with-no-word-about-rx-vega

 

[JDG1980]

So it looks like Vega 10 is nearly as big as Fiji. 564mm^2 is over 94% of Fiji's die size. With the full node shrink, that means Vega 10 probably has at least 60% more transistors. Yet Vega 10 has the same 4096 shaders and 64 ROPs, and still retains the 4-shader-engine bottleneck.
Despite the node shrink, it uses MORE power than the similarly sized Fiji. Yet performance is only about 30% better than Fiji - inferior in many cases to GTX 1080, which is only 56% the size and uses about 60% as much power.

How in the world did this happen? How could they have screwed things up this badly? What are all these extra transistors doing?
Given its die size, Vega 10 should be outpacing GP102 (1080 Ti / Titan Xp) by a good 10%-20%, and leaving GP104 in the dust. But it's not doing that. It isn't even coming close.

GamersNexus tested Vega FE and got two crashes while running Blender. This proves that the current drivers are crap. But it doesn't indicate whether they are just unstable, or whether whole chunks of features are partially or completely missing as many have speculated. One thing is for sure - AMD should never have released FE. The only reason they did so is so they could technically qualify as meeting their H1 2017 release window.

 

[Bouowmx]

Wait™ for Volta

"Wasted" die area on high-bandwidth cache or other new architectural elements irrelevant for gaming.

Don't know if this has any relevance, to explain Vega's fatness: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6kcq4n/so_wtf_went_wrong_with_vega/djl98fh/

 

[JDG1980]

Further delays?
Just paper launch?
Sucky marketing team at it again?

https://videocardz.com/70655/amd-announces-capsaicin-siggraph-with-no-word-about-rx-vega

If what we're seeing on Vega FE is actually a fair representation of what the hardware can do, it wouldn't be surprising to see RX Vega "delayed" again... and again... and eventually cancelled when it becomes clear they can't make a profit selling this gigantic chip at the price they would have to meet to make it competitive.

Seriously, if they end up roughly on par with GTX 1080 performance at >1.6x the power draw, then $399 is about the best they can hope for. Better to devote the fab capacity to Zen products that are actually competitive and can sell at decent margins, and only produce as many Vega chips as they need to cover WX9100, Instinct MI25, and Apple's special orders (plus the handful of suckers buying FE).

 

[moonbogg]

This doesn't just hurt their GPU division, it also hurts their ecosystem in a huge way. How many people with Freesync monitors have been saying they want Vega so they can take advantage of their freesync monitor? Lots of people bought those monitors for the better price and they were waiting for Vega. Now they don't have crap to drive those screens and unless some massive driver magic happens, they will be stuck. This will hurt freesync monitor sales because no one wants to drive a badass 21:9 screen with a slow ass card. Nvidia is more expensive and there is a big Gsync markup, but you know what? Sometimes the price is justified, and this is one of those times.
They did great with Ryzen and Intel's higher prices are difficult to justify, but the GPU market just isn't the same. The good news is GPU's are throw away products and are ready for the trash bin almost as soon as they are released, so maybe they can do better next gen which is always just around the corner. Man I feel for those people with freesync screens who were holding out for Vega. With any luck, maybe there really is a big driver fix coming.

 

[Grubbernaught]

Ok so this rant is based on an assumption. The assumption that performance is impacted by features not enabled in the driver.

These features were advertised and never once mentioned that they are currently not functioning in the product being sold.

In what other industry is that ok?

It's like buying a car and driving it off the lot only to find out your radio, Windows and air con won't work for another month cos, u know, not ready.

Not to mention game mode to optimise while you develop. But you can't optimise for the new optimizations because not ready yet.

Or even worse....It's ok our new product underperforms because we disabled all the good bits.

End rant.

 

[Bouowmx]

Fruition of Gamers Nexus's effort today

Testing content tomorrow.

 

[Azix]

reasonable to expect 52% faster than fiji on rx vega with just clock speed and arch improvements minimizing non-linear clock scaling. beyond that, who knows. based on videocardz.com summary of pcper article, a lot of the time the 1080ti is within 30-40% of vega fe. and vega FE was definitely not 52% faster than fury x.

seems the power management is not exactly working right while gaming. and the clock speed was typically 1440Mhz for PCper. that's almost 11% left on the table. if they can get it consistently 40% faster than fury X and sustaining higher clocks, its in striking range of 1080ti

this is just to conservatively estimate where RX vega could end up.

personally, I think this card is just not ready for gaming, hence delaying rx vega. Sure as heck doesn't have the gaming drivers they are willing to launch with and i dont think they would delay for 5% gains in drivers. At least not unless that 5% was going to put them in a sweet spot.

there is also the question of why its so big. even if it were less dense than their norm it still seems too big. what extra did they put in there? if its in there for something other than gaming, can it be disabled in the gaming card to give better results on power and clocks? etc. The die size is very strange.

 

[Face2Face]

If RX Vega can manage 1080 OC performance and the price is right, then people with FreeSync monitors will still have a decent upgrade option to drive 1440p/4K. Not a fan of the high stock power consumption, but at least AMD guys have a high end option.

 

[Doom2pro]

I'm calling it... Considering RX Vega is delayed, the wacky performance relative to Fiji despite more transistors, higher clock and higher TDP, and the fact that AMD has decided to go Pro before Consumer (which is uncharacteristic) this could only mean one thing...

Sometime after production began on Vega at the foundry a significant hardware bug was discovered, and the only fix in a BIOS patch results in a significant performance penalty, so AMD immediately halted production and began work on a new stepping to correct the hardware flaw... however too many buggy dies had been manufactured at this point, so they salvaged them for an emergency "Frontier Edition" pro-sumer card that would still compete in the workstation market despite the reduced performance.

RX Vega would then have a different stepping and significantly higher performance. Lets hope.

 

[crisium]

That theory is a couple days old now. Time will tell.

 

[Elixer]

... and the price is right...

That is the main thing, if they can nail this down with a price below what the competition has, then it will sell.
If not, they will just keep getting dumped on.

Mind you, lots of this is brought on the way they are handling this, and more marketing BS about a "game mode" that should have never been introduced at this time.
They should have released solid drivers for whom this card was originally aimed at.

The whole reason for having 'professional' class drivers means, it is tested & tested, and tested yet again, until it is certified X program will *always* work.

Games come later.
But, the marketing clowns wanted to have a "game mode" since it makes people think it will go into overdrive or some drivel like that.
Things don't work that way. Yes, there are shortcuts they can do with some games, that don't require the extra checking that is done, but, that is a trivial amount of performance gain of maybe 5-8% if that.

 

[raghu78]

Raja is either sweating bullets right now, or he's laughing at all of us. Guess we'll find out in a month. Looks like AMD's direction with their CPU and GPUs is heading toward server and professional. Unfortunately for us gamers, AMD is chasing larger profits which is not unreasonable I suppose.

yeah thats probably true.

 

[Doom2pro]

That theory is a couple days old now. Time will tell.

And I have been saying it for days now on AMD's Reddit.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Nvidia is more expensive and there is a big Gsync markup, but you know what? Sometimes the price is justified, and this is one of those times.

This is where I'm at now. I've been on the NV bandwagon for a while and I'm glad. I knew when I got my gsync monitor that I'd be moving from NV to NV, and that my next card (1080) would handle 1440p @>90FPS fine, I knew that there'll be another gen in 15mo or so that'll be a flat % upgrade for the same price, +maybe $50. It's reliable, and I don't have to hope that maybe this time AMD will get a competitive product out the door in an appropriate timeframe. Yeah, $200 more for the monitor and $50-100 more for the GPU cost more money, but meanwhile I've been actually doing what I got this stuff for, playing games, not chasing AMD news on the Next Big Thing.

 

[.vodka]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6kjuqd/msi_marketing_director_dont_compare_vega_fe_too/

MSI Marketing director: "Don't compare Vega FE too much with RX Vega"

Vergelijk deze kaart aub niet teveel met RX Vega.

Translation:

"please dont compare this card too much with RX Vega"

He was right about the power draw before and now he seems to be hinting that RX Vega is different from Vega FE and can't be compared.

Hmm... Interesting. That can't be simple damage control.

 

[Elixer]

Hmm... Interesting. That can't be simple damage control.

Why not? They are part of the marketing team.

AMD really should have their PR unit out in front of this, this is basically one long holiday weekend for lots of people, and they are being fed a ton of negative info about what is going on. They caused this, they need to fix it.

I lost track of how many people that said, "We waited for nothing, I'm going out and getting a 1070/80", so, they have lost all faith in AMD being able to recover with the Vega RX cards.

 

[moonbogg]

If they can tweak it to match a 1080 and sell it for $400, they'd have themselves a card. Anything less and its going to be a pointless product. Actually, if performance figures are anywhere near accurate, then the card is already pointless. Similar performance has been available in that price bracket for a long time and with 1070's going for something like $350, this Vega card will be a tough sell and a very late one at that. I guess we'll know in a few months when RX Vega finally shows up. By that time I'd expect to start seeing some legit Volta leaks. I swear it seems like the entire GPU department was totally checked out and off doing something completely unrelated from Vega these past few years.

 

[JDG1980]

The FE launch has been a disaster. It will still be so, even if they manage to pull off a miracle with RX Vega. They've already lost a non-negligible number of sales. Regardless of the official disclaimers, most people will believe (and not unreasonably so) that Vega FE will be within ~10% of RX Vega. These people are giving up on AMD and buying 1080 Ti's. They won't go back and buy a RX Vega even if the release day drivers boost gaming performance by enough to beat GP102.

AMD wasn't quiet about Ryzen before its release, nor were they afraid to release real, reproducible benchmarks. But they've been very reluctant to say anything about Vega in the past couple of months, and when they do, it's all professional stuff with gaming basically shunted to the back. Lisa Su looked like she wanted to disappear when she was going through the Vega spiel at Computex. Everything they've done (and not done) just reinforces the impression that the company has no confidence in Vega.

 

[Azix]

Why not? They are part of the marketing team.

AMD really should have their PR unit out in front of this, this is basically one long holiday weekend for lots of people, and they are being fed a ton of negative info about what is going on. They caused this, they need to fix it.

I lost track of how many people that said, "We waited for nothing, I'm going out and getting a 1070/80", so, they have lost all faith in AMD being able to recover with the Vega RX cards.

if rx vega turns out to be much better, the whole thing turns around to become massively good press.

AMD has actually said a lot.

https://www.reddit.com/user/gfxchiptweeter

but people don't pay attention. the claims of new architecture and how hard drivers are to develop and that the team wishes it really was tuned polaris. etc. uses infinity fabric, its a soc

 

[JDG1980]

I wonder if maybe we owe Mockingbird an apology.