[Updated with final Review] Vega FE Benchmarking by PCPER

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, JuztBe said:

But would AMD release under performing graphics card then without any explanations? Reviewers who ask to comment on this situation are being met with silence. IF something went wrong in drivers department I would expect AMD to say so.

then shouting that this is not a gaming card doesn't count? 

[Valentyn]

12 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Except you have zero idea what workstation performance numbers were like under the Fiji drivers. It is entirely possible the new drivers significantly improved performance there and borked something heavily on the gaming side.

 

Exactly, that's entirely a possibility. That brings us to this question. Why state frontier edition can game, and has a gaming mode?

Why even bother to enable a gaming mode, when it has less performance in games than Pro mode? AMD knew it's performance. 
They could have simply launched it without Gaming mode, and only Pro; with a statement saying "Gaming mode, and drivers are not finalised; they will launch along with the Radeon RX"

Jobs done, confusion avoided, and gaming results taken with that in mind. Instead AMD has drawn your attention to gaming on the Pro.Radeon site for Frontier Edition.

 

It's a stupid blunder that has only negatively affected them; and damaged the public image in regards to Vega.

 

https://pro.radeon.com/en-us/product/radeon-vega-frontier-edition/
 

[JuztBe]

3 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

then shouting that this is not a gaming card doesn't count? 

But is it AMD who's shouting it? I've seen some random dude from AMD posting on twitter something along the lines of that.  I would expect anything more official after that kind of community outcry

[Valentyn]

12 minutes ago, JuztBe said:

But would AMD release under performing graphics card then without any explanations? Reviewers who ask to comment on this situation are being met with silence. IF something went wrong in drivers department I would expect AMD to say so.

 

One would hope, but their silence is certainly not helping. Even tests showing Tiled Based Rasterization isn't working are not being addressed by AMD.

It's a PR blunder essentially. One need only go through my posting history to know I like AMD a lot, and this has even jaded me a bit.

The entire Frontier Edition Launch is a mess; and honestly could have been avoided simply not including the "Gaming Mode", or even mentioning it on the Frontier Edition site or driver downloads.

Then people would have ignored gaming tests, knowing only Pro optimised drivers are out.

[Delicieuxz]

With each new thing they put out, AMD show that they have no marketing sense, and no social understanding for how people will react to the information, or lack of information that AMD presents them with. All this community cynicism would be pre-empted by AMD simply stating alongside the FE's release that the FE is one of the lower-tier Vega cards, and there are more powerful Vega cards being revealed at Siggraph. Instead, AMD is silent, and let's the public build up false conceptions of what Vega is.

 

Also, what @Valentyn mentioned two posts up about how to avoid confusion over the Gaming Mode performance and drivers is also true.

 

And none of these things require some amazing marketing science to figure out: They're basic communication skills that every functional adult, and also not-yet-adults should have. If a teacher in school asks students if they've done their homework and can hand it in, do the students freeze like deer in headlights, feeling like there's no way to explain that, either, 'no', they didn't, or, 'yes', they did - and so start silently doodling on their desks while the teacher is still waiting for an answer because they can't figure out how to navigate the situation? Well, what AMD has done in all of their recent-history product releases is similar to that sort of handling of very basic and what should be virtually effortless-to-manage situations.

 

"... and we'll also be talking about our more higher-end capabilities within the professional line with Vega for our professional Radeon Pro offerings, as well." - AMD dude, PCPer video, June 26th

 

A low-tier Vega GPU that's between the performance of a GTX 1070 and 1080 sounds pretty good, and promising for the rest of the lineup, IMO. There were even rumours / predictions since months ago that there would be a small Vega and a large Vega, with the small Vega speculated to be between the performance of a 1070 / 1080.

[othertomperson]

56 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

The only game in which AMD cards considerably outperform their Nvidia competitors is Doom with Vulkan

I'd love to see more Vulkan games done as well as Doom. So many people are lauding AMD's Vulkan performance on the back of a sample size of 1. If I were Nvidia, I know where I'd spend almost all of my optimisation budget right now.

[Humbug]

LOL, clearly AMD has botched the launch. Terrible communication etc...

 

But I don't believe for a second that this is the final gaming performance. Once the RX Vega launches expect to see the FE Vega get a magical big boost because the RX Vega gaming drivers will also be pushed onto FE Vega (gaming mode).

 

How can we be so sure that the gaming performance is going to be drastically better?

It's simple. Even a theoretical Fury X clocked at Vega FE clockspeeds will perform better than this. So clearly something isn't working properly yet as far as gaming goes.

 

It's no coincidence that AMD didn't launch RX Vega yet. I still expect the final product to be too underwhelming because it's too late, but I don't think this is the performance. Because it doesn't make sense mathematically.

[Agosto]

I hope the "extra goodies" Raja's been talking about are tile based rasterization and lower power consumption.

[cj09beira]

Just now, Agost said:

I hope the "extra goodies" Raja's been talking about are tile based rasterization and lower power consumption.

if i would guess, the extra goodies might be fp16, and if it is, vega will be supercharged 

[Agosto]

Just now, cj09beira said:

if i would guess, the extra goodies might be fp16, and if it is, vega will be supercharged 

Vega FE already has fp16, so that wouldn't be "extra"

[cj09beira]

Just now, Agost said:

Vega FE already has fp16, so that wouldn't be "extra"

but its not been used in the gaming pipeline, its  using fp32 now

[Agosto]

7 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

but its not been used in the gaming pipeline, its  using fp32 now

Are you sure games can take advantage of that? Except those on Vulkan, which are the only ones I know which possibly could

 

[cj09beira]

Just now, Agost said:

Are you sure games can take advantage of that? Except those on Vulkan, which are the only ones I know which possibly will

in dx11 because its the driver's job to do the leg work, you could do it, is it easy? probably not, can everything run under fp16? no,

its hard to say if they could pull it off, as even vulkan hasn't released a version that supports it

[ltguy]

How is Vega FE 20% slower than RX580 crossfire when it should be 6% faster even if they improved nothing since rx580?

[Agosto]

Just now, ltguy said:

How is Vega FE 20% slower than RX580 crossfire when it should be 6% faster even if they improved nothing since rx580?

We're all pretty sure it's because of drivers.

[cj09beira]

2 minutes ago, ltguy said:

How is Vega FE 20% slower than RX580 crossfire when it should be 6% faster even if they improved nothing since rx580?

vega FE in gaming right now isn't firing in all cylinders 

[ltguy]

2 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

vega FE in gaming right now isn't firing in all cylinders 

I guess its doesnt matter that much atm. Even if it were good at gaming, it would be unobtainium like all of the RX580's/570's because of crypto-mining.

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, ltguy said:

I guess its doesnt matter that much atm. Even if it were good at gaming, it would be unobtainium like all of the RX580's/570's because of crypto-mining.

that one cracked me up, good job

Ps: i am gonna steal that word and use it myself

[Agosto]

8 minutes ago, ltguy said:

I guess its doesnt matter that much atm. Even if it were good at gaming, it would be unobtainium like all of the RX580's/570's because of crypto-mining.

Vega FE only does 30-35 MH/s currently, so it's not appealing to miners

[cj09beira]

Just now, Agost said:

Vega FE only does 30-35 MH/s currently, so it's not appealing to miners

ethereum is not a worry, it never was as vega has less than 2 times the bandwidth of the rx 480/580 but other coins that use the compute portion might be another history, and if there is one that can run under fp16 vega will be crazy fast compared to anything else, the good part is that those other coins have a much smaller market right now 

[othertomperson]

3 hours ago, Drak3 said:

Nope. It's the same thing as the Titan, Titan Black, and Titan Z. Cards that were pretty damn good at workstation tasks and fairly good at gaming. The Titan X, Titan X, and Titan Xp are all shit for most workstation tasks, and really are only good for wasting money gaming.

Assuming that "workstation" and content creation means FP64 and nothing else. Turns out most people who want 12GB vram for creation reasons probably don't care about double precision.

[Jito463]

On 6/30/2017 at 0:48 AM, zMeul said:

you surely understand / know that the GPUs inside the Quadro cards are identical to those in GTX cards? the only diff is that Quadro cards have more VRAM and it's ECC

it baffles me when people say this is a workstation card and the RX will be different - it won't! that's not how it works, it's the same architecture ... the same

Except that the ECC RAM will make a difference in performance, as ECC is slower (but more accurate).  Also, the drivers are inherently different for the workstation cards than for desktops, which means the gaming performance will be slower.  So yes, the cards will behave differently.  You're trying too hard, Z.

[xAcid9]

3 hours ago, NvidiaIntelAMDLoveTriangle said:

How hard is it for you to understand that it's using the same GPU?

How hard to understand a hardware like a GPU need a proper software implementation to fully utilize it? Eg: Async Shader

3 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

• Nvidia can get the same performance as AMD with 21% fewer TFLOPs
• So a Vega card at 1600MHz (13.1TFLOPs) competes with a 2000MHz 1080 

Assuming Vega will actually bottleneck somewhere in the graphic pipeline like GCN.

 

With NCU tiled-base/hybrid tiled-base? rendering + new geometry engine, i say it will perform closer FLOPs/FLOPs compare to Nvidia card.

[Jito463]

On 6/30/2017 at 6:36 AM, Fonzie92 said:

What I don't understand is why do AMD users wait THIS long for a damn gfx card? Just mow your grandma's lawn for a month or so and get a 1080. 

 

I mean, what did they expect? Vega to come out far ahead of the 1080?  

 

Time is gold, and wasting it for waiting for "new stuff" is just silly imo.

I can't speak for others, but for me personally, my current R9 390 still does well enough (especially since I'm only doing 1080p).  Also, it's not so much about supporting AMD, as it is not supporting nVidia.  I take exception to their attempts to artificially lock people into their platform (amongst other things).

[cj09beira]

2 minutes ago, Tedny said:

So how lower rough computer performance make games run faster?  

he probably talking about the 1700 vs 7700k