Vega FE benchmarked by random dude

[HKZeroFive]

7 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

drivers can make huge differences and their deadline for finishing those is in a month

Doubt it. The card itself is struggling against the GTX 1080 while consuming significantly more power. You would need a driver miracle if it is the "GTX 1080Ti competitor" everyone wants it to be.

[MageTank]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Let's not forget the Witcher 3 release where that "other company" got blamed for destroying "this company's" performance when a driver update two weeks later fixed the issue.

 

AMD needs to start releasing their "full" drivers with the card rather than waiting for the public to find issues. 

To be fair, that "other company" made the tessellation rate so obnoxious that it crippled their past generation cards that were technically superior than their lower-end new generation cards. When a newer card that is normally 30% slower, starts beating the older, faster card by a substantial amount, then it's safe to assume something is wrong.

 

Either way, it was fixable with a simple .ini edit, so that's neither here nor there. My point is, we can't use that title as an excuse to mock driver immaturity, when that title had software that was crippling both sides on purpose.

 

If you want an example of AMD's driver immaturity causing issues, the RX 480 was a great example of that. They needed both drivers and firmware updates to fix the obscene voltage and performance of the RX 480, and that scaled universally across all titles. Part of the reason why I had hoped reviewers would take a look at this Vega cards voltage, and tweak it themselves to see if it was another one of those situations. With that much raw horsepower and heat, voltage will most definitely cause some issues if you have too much of it. Given these cards boost behavior and safety features, it should be mandatory to factor that in nowadays. 

[ARikozuM]

Just now, MageTank said:

My point is, we can't use that title as an excuse to mock driver immaturity, when that title had software that was crippling both sides on purpose.

Agreed, my point was that we can't be "always waiting" for a driver improvement. Otherwise, we might as well buy Volta and Vega when the next line-up comes out full-force in 2019(?).

[leadeater]

20 minutes ago, MageTank said:

They are looking for a competitive alternative. Meaning, similar, or slightly less performance, for a much better price. Even knowing the potential performance ceiling, the fact that we do not know the pricing of the rest of the vega lineup, means it's impossible to judge whether or not it's a failure.

I find this whole notion that unless a new architecture release is in whole much faster than the performance of the last including all other competitors otherwise the whole thing is a failure rather disturbing. That's a losing game for everyone, GPU makers and consumers and leads to an unsustainable arms race.

 

Getting more performance is great, getting more for less is even better. Reducing heat and power is good too. Adding technology that allows for better ram utilization could be much better than we think or could understand at this point in time. Pinpointing one and only one metric to evaluate a product and in such a way to mean it must be the best above all else is not a good way to do it.

 

We do more sane judgments of other types of products, in a way to CPUs as well but when it comes to GPUs we throw all of that out and become blind to everything else.

[Taf the Ghost]

5 minutes ago, HKZeroFive said:

You would be suicidal to make two product stacks that have two fundamentally different architectures. They will either:

 

a) give the ability to laser off/disable certain parts to create a lower-end product in their product stack

 

or

 

b) make each setup modular

 

Especially with HBM2, cost efficiency would be disastrous if they ever did it. So it's more than safe to say that this Frontier Edition is indicative of what "consumer RX Vega" will bring... and unfortunately for gamers, it doesn't look like much.

Oh, I believe it's going to be in the same region, but everyone is assuming the 1080/TI vs Titan relationship.  Or the post-Maxwell Nvidia Quadro vs GTX comparison, where the GTX chips are simply cut down versions of the Professional card.  Even if the die is identical, given the way HBM is stacked on an interposer, there's already going to be actual construction differences between the FE and the RX versions. We also don't know if there's some new tech specifically for games that just isn't on the FE.

 

The saddest part of all of this is I'm normally an Nvidia buyer, but I want to see what the new tech actually does before everyone just calls it DOA.  Even if RX is identical to FE for performance, at say 399 USD, we're having a completely different discussion.  

[HKZeroFive]

4 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Oh, I believe it's going to be in the same region, but everyone is assuming the 1080/TI vs Titan relationship.  Or the post-Maxwell Nvidia Quadro vs GTX comparison, where the GTX chips are simply cut down versions of the Professional card.  Even if the die is identical, given the way HBM is stacked on an interposer, there's already going to be actual construction differences between the FE and the RX versions. We also don't know if there's some new tech specifically for games that just isn't on the FE.

 

The saddest part of all of this is I'm normally an Nvidia buyer, but I want to see what the new tech actually does before everyone just calls it DOA.  Even if RX is identical to FE for performance, at say 399 USD, we're having a completely different discussion.  

Price/performance will play a "yuge" factor, of course, but I suspect more people are hung upon the fact that RX Vega is likely to be providing roughly only GTX 1080 performance more than a year after the damn NVIDIA card was released.

 

Unfortunately, the actual silicon still plays a large part in determining performance. Even in the best case scenario, where the consumer card has things such as better power components so it can sustain higher clocks better and "gaming" drivers that boost performance by let's say a generous 10%, you are still going to fall way short to that fabled GTX 1080Ti performance bar.

[Taf the Ghost]

39 minutes ago, HKZeroFive said:

Price/performance will play a "yuge" factor, of course, but I suspect more people are hung upon the fact that RX Vega is likely to be providing roughly only GTX 1080 performance more than a year after the damn NVIDIA card was released.

 

Unfortunately, the actual silicon still plays a large part in determining performance. Even in the best case scenario, where the consumer card has things such as better power components so it can sustain higher clocks better and "gaming" drivers that boost performance by let's say a generous 10%, you are still going to fall way short to that fabled GTX 1080Ti performance bar.

I expect it to trade blows with the 1080 TI, depending a bit on the game, certain implementations and what API it is in. I also want to see it tested on Intel & AMD CPUs. Especially in DX12.

 

I also expect it'll use more power relative to the Nvidia offering (that's a given this "major" architecture generation) and probably come in at 599 for the top SKU.

[Drak3]

Buy the Frontier and paint it, or get an MSI RX when those come out. Decisions decisions.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Buy the Frontier and paint it, or get an MSI RX when those come out. Decisions decisions.

Why are you going to paint it? It's already blue!

Spoiler

Is @deXxterlab97 even here anymore?

 

[Guest]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Why are you going to paint it? It's already blue!

  Reveal hidden contents

Is @deXxterlab97 even here anymore?

 

no

[Drak3]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Why are you going to paint it? It's already blue!

A) My system is black and white, with red accents on my Gaming X 470.

B) I find the stock colors on the Frontier to be extremely ugly, namely the blue+gold. The specific shade of blue also isn't my cup of tea.

Just now, deXxterlab97 said:

no

Good. That guy was a fucking wierdo. He liked BLUE for crying out loud.

 

Kappa.

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Drak3 said:

A) My system is black and white, with red accents on my Gaming X 470.

You're one of THOSE gamers, huh? I f#cking knew it...

[Drak3]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

You're one of THOSE gamers, huh? I f#cking knew it...

It was cheap when I bought it, plus, the flash doesn't come at the cost of the dash.

also, can only see a little red, and since it's the AMD card with red, I'm fine with it. The RGB LEDs on my mainboard are set to blue due to the Intel CPU, and if the Armor OC 1080 had RGB, it'd be set to green. I had the G1 Gaming 1070 set to green when it was in Project Enza, but now it's in Kahza, which is a Node 202 build.

[HKZeroFive]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I expect it to trade blows with the 1080 TI, depending a bit on the game, certain implementations and what API it is in. I also want to see it tested on Intel & AMD CPUs. Especially in DX12.

 

I also expect it'll use more power relative to the Nvidia offering (that's a given this "major" architecture generation) and probably come in at 599 for the top SKU.

I still expect it to fall short. Even in Dirt Rally, which is a AMD-leaning game, the Vega FE card averaged at about 105FPS while the Titan Xp averaged at about 150FPS. That's a huge performance gap if I've ever seen one. Hitman also didn't look great.

 

At $599, it's not enticing at all TBH if this performance is indicative of the consumer card. It just seems to be exactly like Fiji 2.0 (except worse).

[Valentyn]

3 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Buy the Frontier and paint it, or get an MSI RX when those come out. Decisions decisions.

Yln Mn blue is an Oxide powder that's baked onto the metal shroud though. You can't paint it on.

[mr moose]

17 hours ago, Notional said:

Are you sure you can compare them though? The first Titan's might have had a point, in that they could do double precision fairly well. However, Maxwell and Pascal Titan's are only standard GTX cards with double amount of VRAM and uses GTX gaming drivers. By all definitions, Titan cards the last couple of generations have been gaming cards.

 

Vega on the other hand, might be a gaming GPU, but it comes with pro drivers. It can change to gaming drivers too, but those seems to be secondary, with low performance and doesn't seem to be optimized for anything. By all accounts, I would say this is a semi pro card, mostly for devs/content creators.

 

That being said, Vega could be bad at gaming, and simply be a better pro card than gaming. But it's way too early to say anything about that.

 

The problem for AMD atm, is the lack of R&D resources. AMD is forced to make 1 architecture to suit both pro and gaming markets. That is not very effective, and one of the reasons why GCN has always been such brutal compute cards. When AMD gets more money, I'm sure we will see a split in architectures for gaming and prop cards, just like Nvidia.

 

I was not comparing the cards, ultimately we know FA about the vega yet,  I was comparing the arguments people are using to defend/attack the vega with how closely they resemble the arguments people used to attack/defend the titan.  I.E it doesn't matter how much the titan costs becasue it's not a gaming card, while here people are saying it doesn't matter how poorly the vega performs because it's not a gaming card. And vice versa of course.   

 

I think it's simply prudent we wait until we have better information. 

[Drak3]

4 hours ago, Valentyn said:

Yln Mn blue is an Oxide powder that's baked onto the metal shroud though. You can't paint it on.

That's nice and fine, if I wanted to paint it the WRONG way, like Linus. But, doing it the correct way, sanding it down until the paint adheres, and I can make it any color(s) I want. I could also get it in Chrome if I so damn well pleased.

[Valentyn]

13 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

That's nice and fine, if I wanted to paint it the WRONG way, like Linus. But, doing it the correct way, sanding it down until the paint adheres, and I can make it any color(s) I want. I could also get it in Chrome if I so damn well pleased.

Good on ya. It's always funny when people just spray paint a chassis as well. no sanding, no primer nothing. Then it start peeling off