Not many people seem to care about the FE anymore, so I'm going to leave some words here for those that do, either in the forum or externally. I honestly don't care if this thread gets locked after this opinion expose'.
Also, before calling me an AMD fanboy or whatever you want, you should consider my daily driver is an EVGA 1080Ti FTW3, and Ryzen is the first AMD CPU I've had since the first Sempron series... This is just my summed up opinion on AMD, and specifically the Frontier Edition.
Right... so, for the irrationally ambitious of us who have purchased an FE without working in a sterile dungeon research facility: I was on the AMD community yesterday chatting with someone and we both realized that the changes coming in the new driver are not completely in line with what has been presented in the first driver.
There are only three Vega-based cards that will be supported by this new update: FE, SSG and WX9100. Now, with the exception of the FE, the other two are decisively NOT gaming cards (neither is the FE, yet it performs at least as good as 64 when drivers were equal and the PCBs are nearly identical), and therefore this update will not include the single most beneficial tool that can boost a card's efficiency: WattMan. Yep, that's right, everything else RX is there except no out-of-box OC solution for the FE which I guess it's because of the other two, who are meant to be 100% stable over everything else, as they are meant to be abused 24/7 in a pro environment. Maybe WattTool will still work on the FE, we'll wait and see.
Having said that: Gaming mode is now replaced by "Driver Options". So, instead of actually switching to a full-on RX driver, in reality you'd likely only load specific parts that make the FE compatible with games. I won't say Optimised for gaming since we know damn well it's at least as good as an RX64, yet we're being robbed of WattMan which would ultimately offer increased efficiency. AMD have decided to take away the possibility to turn the FE into a better card. Brilliant...
But there is a silver lining to this: since the FE is part of the Pro series of cards, it will benefit from increased support, for a longer period of time and theoretically with higher frequency and hopefully will be included in the quarterly enterprise drivers since it's in the same bag with WX9100 and SSG.
Getting a bit tired of this whole drivers crap, but I have to admit I won't return the FE despite the stupid price tag and here's why: First of all, and I want to get this out of the way, I just honestly love the design of it and love the pro/gaming bipolar attitute, even when considering the disappointing, sub-par initial performance due to using old (i assume Fiji) drivers on Vega. Despite the stupid amount of heat, AMD have actually pulled off something interesting this year: managed to have a good hard swing at nVidia and Intel, not enough to rob them of their crowns, by no means, but still, a punch from the depths and aiming very very high!
Look at the bigger picture, if AMD refine their production and driver support, nVidia will have a problem from the mid-range downwards and Intel already feels the burn due to the new Zen architecture, which offers by far and wide the best price/performance ratio out there and excellent support - same motherboard will last you at least a couple of generations of CPUs, and while Ryzen was a stuttering start, it is now a truly performant contender for content creators.
I'm not defending AMD, by all means Vega was a tragic launch to say the very least, and Volta will make it seem pathetic in terms of gaming performance, that's for sure, and to put the final nail in this coffin, it's not up to the expectations of Vega's core-audience, gamers. Actually, apart from brand loyalty, no reason at all to buy Vega if purely for gaming. None... not with the current price tag anyway!
But the FE itself does offer something no other company has done before: Gaming AND Pro benefits on the same card. Interesting concept that I really think will prove invaluable for creative professionals such as myself. For that alone I think it's worth keeping and before some of you get pissed off and invoke the "Placebo mode" as described by Gamers Nexus, the next iteration should be a different animal, we'll just have to wait and see. Even AMD sort of admit it was crap in their features chart on the
Crimson Pro main page. Not to mention it's got quite a few extremely important features disabled which should further boost performance - more info on that in the
Vega Whitepaper.
The part that most FE owners seem to miss is it's ultimate Pro aspect: it shares the same architecture and instruction features as the Instinct series, meaning you can program a prototype GPGPU or AI on it (playing fast and loose with the term AI here) and then mass-deploy on Instinct compute frameworks, which is invaluable for research scalability such as in medical and financial sectors. All the while having a decent gaming GPU.
If all you're looking for is GPU rendering, go for RX series... the 64, if your scene is correctly optimised, will top any other card in the same price with the same settings, guaranteed, even with inflated prices. Just as a reference, the Blender BMW27 scene was rendered in 1:10s by 4x GTX 1080 (since that's what it's being pitted against)... and 59s by only two RX64's (tested by members of the official AMD community forum)
All in all, for gamers specifically, Vega is somewhat of a failure at it's current price point, except maybe the 56, and honestly redundant when compared to upcoming Volta. For content creators and developers/researchers however it is actually extremely appealing. I'm happy there is finally competition and innovation in my sector, and it's why Vega is such an important landmark despite it's failed first steps. These are good times to build systems.
Again, I'm not trying to convince myself or anybody else of anything. Just laying down my thoughts in this forum, that's all.
Sorry for the long post, here's a few Potato FE