Noise, Efficiency, Conclusions
Here is the tale of a blower cooler on a 300-watt GPU – it’s just is not a fantastic solution. The standard RX Vega 64 sits at a reasonable 35 dbA at idle but gets extremely loud when running a full load, even at stock settings. The 46 dbA score is significantly louder than the GTX 1080/1070 or even the GTX 1080 Ti that has to keep a 250 watt TDP in order. Doing the testing in an open-air test bed, it was obvious to the office which card was being run at any given moment. I don’t think the noise levels that the air-cooled cards cause is a total deal breaker, but you can see why AMD was hesitant to crank up the fan speed any higher by default, even when we pushed the temperature and power target higher.
Performance
Looking at how the Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 stand in a line up with the current GeForce family, they honestly both do better than I expected coming off the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition reviews I wrote last month. The RX Vega 64, and I am only going to reference the air-cooled variant for the time being, can trade blows with the GeForce GTX 1080, of which it shares the same $499 MSRP. Removing the ever troublesome GTAV out of the mix, which honestly isn’t fair to NVIDIA as it was and remains a very popular gaming title, the biggest losses for the RX Vega 64 come in the newly released Hellblade and Sniper Elite 4 running in the DX11 configuration. In Rise of the Tomb Raider the Vega 64 has the slight edge, though in other games like Hitman, Fallout 4, and Dirt Rally, the back and forth is close enough to call a tie. For all intents and purposes, the RX Vega 64 can compete with the GTX 1080.
The Vega 64 Liquid is an interesting beast. It improves on the air cooler performance by anywhere from 0-13%, with too many instances of low single digits average frame rate increases to impress me. It often is able to make the difference between a win and a loss for the Vega 64 family, but it does so with the added cost of $200 on the MSRP. Comparing a card starting at $699 to one starting at $499 is poor form, especially considering that the MUCH more powerful GTX 1080 Ti exists at that same $699 price tag. The RX Vega 64 Liquid is the sexiest of the bunch by far, but will only sell to true AMD fans that want the best Vega can offer and don’t care about the value they are buying into.
Most interesting is the RX Vega 56. With a $399 price tag that goes after the GTX 1070, it matches or beats the GeForce offering in every single test except Grand Theft Auto V. On average, we see that performance uplift hover in the 6-8% range, not enough to be earth shattering but enough to raise eyebrows at the aggressive move AMD has decided to go with on a very expensive collection of technologies. RX Vega 56 was created late in the game when AMD realized it needed an impactful “win” with this launch, and it clearly has done that. I’m not sure what the cost is for AMD financially, but consumers care about performance per dollar first and foremost.
I am very curious about the frame time variance that was apparently in our capture-based testing with all the RX Vega cards and in the majority of the games and configurations we tested. Only in a couple of cases was it large enough to notice in gameplay, it otherwise remains more of a technological oddity and curiosity that will warrant further investigation. Is there something inherent in the GPU or clock design that is causing it?
Power and Efficiency
There is no fun way to spin this one for AMD, the RX Vega architecture and the Vega 10 GPU is far behind the NVIDIA GeForce Pascal designs in terms of performance efficiency. Need to see that graphically?
If you care about performance per watt, whether for being “green,” for power costs, or for noise/heat, the Pascal architecture remains the best option by a considerable margin. The move to HBM2 was at least partially to offer lower power consumption through the memory interface but it is not enough to move the needle on Vega.
It’s fair to note that for some gamers and enthusiasts, power consumption doesn’t matter. They don’t care about noise of a system that is under their desk while they wear headphones during gaming sessions. In that case, the performance per dollar metric outweighs everything else.
Pricing and Bundles and Market Issues
The Radeon RX Vega 64 will be available starting today for $499 for the standard air cooled card, $599 for the limited edition in the Radeon Pack, and $699 for the liquid cooled. The RX Vega 56 will start shipping on August 28 at $399.
- Radeon RX Vega 64 – $499 – Amazon.com
- Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition – Amazon.com
- Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Edition – Amazon.com
- Radeon RX Vega 56 – $399
Pricing will be an interesting topic in the coming days. With the market still in turmoil from GPU scarcity caused in large part by cryptocurrency mining operations, cards priced near the MSRP are tougher to come by. As I discussed on the first page, this is a large part of the reason for the Radeon Packs to exist at all, as it gives AMD the ability to sell cards at $499 or $599 (for the RX Vega 64 at least) depending on the sell-through rate in near real-time. This allows AMD to profit a bit more off the mining craze if it continues to keep inventory low, or drop the price to the official MSRP for more stock if availability is stable.
While a smart move financially, I don’t think the intent of curbing sales to mining operations is going to pan out. Those who buy GPUs for profit rather than for gaming have no issue paying the $100 (or more) added fee for a card that pay for itself in X number of days. What that payoff day is still being determined (early testing on our part shows only 35 MH/s on Ethereum today) but it may spike lower as mining software is tuned for the Vega architecture.
It is a struggle to compare like for like cards at “$499” when options are hard to come by. For us, comparing the cards in a state that we believe the market will return to in a reasonable timeframe made the most sense.
Conclusions
(Editor's note: We still have much to test and dive into on Vega including a look at the architecture itself, how the use of the new Power Save options in Wattman improve efficiency, how HBCC states might impact games at 4K, etc. We had VERY limited time with this hardware before launch. Follow-ups soon. But I do not expect our view on the current status of the RX Vega products to change with that information.)
So, what do we make of all this Vega stuff? The combination of the RX Vega 64 and the RX Vega 56 put AMD and the Radeon brand back on the map for high end consumer graphics. It doesn’t bring them to a leadership position, as the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will continue to hold on to that spot, but it makes them competitive in a way they haven’t been since the release of the Fury X more than two years ago. The RX Vega 64 has a tough battle ahead of it with the GTX 1080, as it offers nearly equivalent performance but at the cost of noticeably higher power consumption and noise. The RX Vega 56 is a more significant victory as it means the GTX 1070 is no longer the fastest card at the $399 price point. Yes, the GTX 1070 is still much more efficient, but for consumers that don’t have interest in that area of discussion, the RX Vega 56 is a very compelling option.
I think I will be most interested in what AMD’s partners can come up with starting next month. I fully expect to see custom air-cooled cards from the likes of ASUS, MSI, and others that bring clock speeds at or near the level of the RX Vega 64 Liquid. Blower style coolers are necessary evils for some system builder situations but board partners are going to get more from this GPU without having to resort to the much more expensive route of liquid cooling.
With AMD’s cards now on the table, it’s time to see what NVIDIA chooses to do, if anything. Will they make any pricing moves on the GTX 1080 or GTX 1070 to take mindshare back from an aggressive Radeon marketing team? There appears to be no reason to release a higher performance part than the GTX 1080 Ti with it still holding a 25-30% lead over the GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64. It is also possible that NVIDIA remains confident in its lineup, its software advantage, and its power efficiency and chooses not to affect its own profitability with GeForce price changes. NVIDIA will likely wait and see how RX Vega inventory holds up, and how the mining market shifts in the coming weeks, before considering any major moves.
It took more than a year of news releases, architectural sneak peeks, unboxings, and reveals, but Radeon RX Vega is finally here. AMD is back in the high-end of the gaming market. It’s not a home run, but after getting hands on with Vega Frontier Edition, I don’t think we had that mindset anymore, and as a result I view the performance increases from it to RX Vega a strong move in the right direction. The question that remains is how many people they have just convinced to buy in.
Radeon RX Vega 56 for Price/Performance Leadership
Would have been interesting
Would have been interesting to see some ryzen based testing as well. Maybe you guys could do a follow up review with that?
How do Vega 56 and Vega 64
How do Vega 56 and Vega 64 compare to Vega Fe in professional workstation tasks? If half the vram don’t crush it two hard, Titan XP performance at half price would be sweet, (for those who aren’t in it for hardcore gaming.)
Take off, ya hosers.
Take off, ya hosers.
What a bunch of sell out’s
What a bunch of sell out’s gold really? Neither card deserves an award. much less gold.
I’m sorry if I missed it but
I’m sorry if I missed it but what was the clock speed of the gtx 1080 and 1070 or were they at stock speed?
From Anandtech’s Vega review:
From Anandtech’s Vega review:
“Connecting the memory controllers to the rest of the GPU – and the various fixed function blocks as well – is AMD’s Infinity Fabric. The company’s home-grown technology for low-latency/low-power/high-bandwidth connections, this replaces Fiji’s unnamed interconnect method. Using the Infinity Fabric on Vega 10 is part of AMD’s efforts to develop a solid fabric and then use it across the company; we’ve already seen IF in use on Ryzen and Threadripper, and overall it’s a lot more visible in AMD’s CPUs than their GPUs. But it’s there, tying everything together.
On a related note, the Infinity Fabric on Vega 10 runs on its own clock domain. It’s tied to neither the GPU clock domain nor the memory clock domain. As a result, it’s not entirely clear how memory overclocking will fare on Vega 10. On AMD’s CPUs a faster IF is needed to carry overclocked memory. But since Vega 10’s IF connects a whole lot of other blocks – and outright adjust the IF’s clockspeed based on the workload need (e.g. video transcoding requires a fast VCE to PCIe link), it’s not as straightforward as just overclocking the HBM2. Though similarly, HBM1 overclocking wasn’t very straightforward either, so Vega 10 is not a great improvement in this regard.”
Interesting so maybe that Infinity Fabric on Vega maybe crossing the same PCIe card and a dual Vega 56 card to take on 4K! More of this GPU based IF technology/IP needs to be looked at for maybe dual RX Vega 56 PCIe card SKUs to come!
Can that IF cross ove GPU dies like it crosses ove CPU dies is the big question to be looked at.
Vega gets its biggest
Vega gets its biggest performance gains from HBM2 overclock not by touching its already high Core clocks especially on the liquid version, so i’m confused has to why you touch the memory speeds?? Thats like 10% performance increase across the board with little impact on power consumption, @#% really??
I think I’ll just stick my 2
I think I’ll just stick my 2 x R9 Nanos.
There doesn’t seem much to gain by going to Vega.
Did you re-test Vega FE or
Did you re-test Vega FE or are you using the results from previous testing?
I guess, the actual question here is whether all the changes made for RX Vega also apply to Vega FE or not?
VEGA is good only in Canada,
VEGA is good only in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweeden and Russia, but there is a rumor that VEGA will be banned from global market because of global warming….
That wouldn’t be wise to have
That wouldn’t be wise to have all the Vega cards up north. Might detach a few giant icebergs from the northern glacier with all that excess heat.
Ha ha ha that’s funny but I’m
Ha ha ha that’s funny but I’m all for a consumer GPU Tax to maybe fund those 2 Toshiba/Westinghouse nuclear reactors in Georgia. So lets TAX consumer GPUs worldwide and get some Thorium reactors online and that should offset global warming. Lets make Toshiba/Westinghouse finish the job at break-even costs and use a consumer GPU tax to do so. Tax Toshiba’s NAND production also. Bit coin mining GPUs should be double taxed and any bitcoin farms should be inspected to make sure they are taxed enough to cover the global warming impacts of coin mining.
They could even build Thorium reactors at all the recently closed nuke plants and use the Thorium reactors to burn up all that nuclear spent fuel and generate power in the process until there is no more/little waste remaining that would need to be shipped off site and stored for hundreds of years.
I’d be for a GPU tax you
I’d be for a GPU tax you describe but with one caveat. The company with the least efficiency pays more, the company that makes more efficient cards should be penalized less. A petrol tax of a few cents would probably net more revenue however.
No that GPU tax is paid by
No that GPU tax is paid by the consumer at the point of sale and all consumer GPUs need a global warming tax. No business or professional GPU tax as that’s GPUs used for productive uses. Petrol is already taxed. All gaming/mining GPUs need to be taxed because that usage in not as necssary as say GPU’s used for medical/medicine research, engineering, real productive usage of CPUs/GPUs.
AMD’s Vega GPUs, if they are underclocked can be closer to Nvidia’s effency levels and AMD’s Vega GPUs clocked lower and used for compute workloads can even beat Nvidia in the compute performance/Watt metrics.
So only consumers gaming and coin miners should get to pay the GPU tax, because those usages are not essential and use plenty of power and tax the grid. Add some CPU taxes there also for non professional CPU usage.
You do not tax Companies on any things but net profits and it’s the companies’ Stockholders that get to pay capital gains taxes. Taxing Net profits encourages companies to invest more of the profits back the companies product development and that also creates more jobs.
I also believe in a military draft lottery based on finding those military age gamers with a propensity towards FPS/military games usage where everyone of military service age across the whole population gets a single draft number and a single capsule to be tossed into the military draft lottery barrel.
And then for each FPS/Military game purchased that purchased game nets that gamer an extra required capsule with his’s/her’s/inbetween’s extra draft capsule added to increase that person’s chances of geting some real FPS/Military gaming experience without the chance of respawn if they are taken out!
Special methods should be used to find and reward the FPS/Military high score earners with some extra capsules earned into the draft lottery barrel and an an even greater chance of getting some really high resolution war games experience as the proud property of U-Sam’s Government Issue FPS/Wargaming team.
No that GPU tax is paid by
No that GPU tax is paid by the consumer at the point of sale and all consumer GPUs need a global warming tax. No business or professional GPU tax as that’s GPUs used for productive uses. Petrol is already taxed. All gaming/mining GPUs need to be taxed because that usage in not as necssary as say GPU’s used for medical/medicine research, engineering, real productive usage of CPUs/GPUs.
AMD’s Vega GPUs, if they are underclocked can be closer to Nvidia’s effency levels and AMD’s Vega GPUs clocked lower and used for compute workloads can even beat Nvidia in the compute performance/Watt metrics.
So only consumers gaming and coin miners should get to pay the GPU tax, because those usages are not essential and use plenty of power and tax the grid. Add some CPU taxes there also for non professional CPU usage.
You do not tax Companies on any things but net profits and it’s the companies’ Stockholders that get to pay capital gains taxes. Taxing Net profits encourages companies to invest more of the profits back the companies product development and that also creates more jobs.
I also believe in a military draft lottery based on finding those military age gamers with a propensity towards FPS/military games usage where everyone of military service age across the whole population gets a single draft number and a single capsule to be tossed into the military draft lottery barrel.
And then for each FPS/Military game purchased that purchased game nets that gamer an extra required capsule with his’s/her’s/inbetween’s extra draft capsule added to increase that person’s chances of geting some real FPS/Military gaming experience without the chance of respawn if they are taken out!
Special methods should be used to find and reward the FPS/Military high score earners with some extra capsules earned into the draft lottery barrel and an an even greater chance of getting some really high resolution war games experience as the proud property of U-Sam’s Government Issue FPS/Wargaming team.
remove double post, s p a m
remove double post, s p a m filter be crazy!
I would strongly suggest you
I would strongly suggest you stop blaming me for your mistakes.
Through no fault of you own,
Through no fault of you own, the entire software stack with which respect yours/others websites runs on is buggy from the Drupal, Open Source CMS framework, on down into the call stack into the IE/Other browsers and deeper down into the windows OS software frameworks and that includs the frameworks that any web provided Spam filter(service) is based on(open source and proprietary). And that’s just the nature of the complex software/hardware state machine designs that the entire computing industry is based on from since forever with respect to computing systems and that buggy software state of affaris that can never be proven entirely correct.
That said, I do get your /S.
But it appears that M$ has Over-Tweaked Its windows Base, and derived, Textbox Class Objects and that’s as buggy as hell also by any resonable software standards. So double posts are par for the course and somtimes it’s the failure of the spam filter software stack and sometimes other software stacks especially where web based posting functionality and software framework systems transactional atomics are concerned.
Just try posting on your website a reply to a post on the second or higher page, if your forum posts/replies run into multi-page lengths, and that is buggy with respect to users PC OS systems, and the Drupal/script/PHP/DB/other systems software stacks also.
But thank goodness that the latest M$ cummulative IE 11 security updates has fixed some of the problems with long running ad scripts totally borking the browser(IE11) because that was really a problem for a few months there, and IE11 is not the best way to browse by any stretch on the imagination.
There is no better example of why Linus Torvalds insists on using C and not C++ for the Linux Kernel when one looks at some of the windows OS/frameworks(C++ mostly) and how Buggy they are. Linus Has the right Idea, but even C is not without its issues.
I am the spam filtre, there
I am the spam filtre, there is no automatic filter in place.
Currently “You” are, but not
Currently “You” are, but not always and there is that captcha thingy that freaks out and drupal nurples from time to time also, along with the spam filter service borking.
And NOW we know that you are in fact a Turing complete AI, Jeremy! How’s your brother Max doing! I hear that he went into a VR bar and got so row hammered that he had to be cold booted.
Have been since we moved to
Have been since we moved to Drupal years ago. There can be flakiness with double posts, especially on iThings but that is a different issue.
Max is hanging out with a bad crowd now, Enzo and he are trying to convince Dot to start a video site.
No cards available at
No cards available at launch.
Checked all my usual sites.
Now I have been in work and constantly checked yesterday and today. Couple of times an hour. 5 different sites. In Ireland/UK.
The Pre-Order prices have added extra 100.?
No its not suppose to be any better mining than a fury, so whats going on
I wouldn’t be getting one except I have a wide screen free sync monitor.
Might hook my 1080 up and see what its like and just get another one.
The extra $100 was added by
The extra $100 was added by AMD as rebate was only limited to initial batch of Vega 64 cards. What’s this now AMD is gouging it’s customers. I thought they were the good guys.
Ryan – you guys are killing
Ryan – you guys are killing me with the fonts on these graphs, are they for ants?
Any word on what monitor
Any word on what monitor outputs are on these cards? The only thing that will make me want a new video card is 4k+ resolution with 120+ Hz refresh rate support.
Three displayport 1.4 ports
Three displayport 1.4 ports and 1 HDMI 2.0. Supposedly you can have 120hz support at 4k with DP 1.4.
Vega interest me alot from
Vega interest me alot from the technical side, how much of this translates into additional performance i dont know but it will impact it. Currently so many features of vega arnt enabled, and alot of the stuff even when enabled will do diddly squat for most games out now.
But off the top of my head things not enabled are HBCC, that could have a huge effect not on performance exactly but 512tb of vram is just mind blown.
Primitive shaders, that could be a massive pump in performance.
Rapid packed math, which is basically black magic to me but as i understand it thats basically hyperthreading for a gpu, if thats wrong please correct me.
FP16 packed math hasn’t
FP16 packed math hasn’t anything to do with hyperthreading, it’s just combining two 16 bit operation on a single FP32 ALU dubling performance at the cost of reduced precision but is not a magic bullet, there was a reason if the industry moved from FP16 to FP32 15years ago, 16bit aren’t enough most of the graphics
A GOLD award for vega? You
A GOLD award for vega? You are joking right?? It’s a piece of hot shit, a total technological failure, a regression in almost every possible way. More than 2 generations behind the competition now and priced like garbage. You guys are tarnishing your reputation with that nonsense. AMD doesn’t need your charity awards.
Go read that techgage article
Go read that techgage article linked to in many posts on this forum thread! Vega 64 is a compute monster for thousands less than that Quadro P6000-24GB! Even the Titan XP falls to Vega on some workstation compute workloads.
AMD’s stockholders Know that Vega is a winner in that professional compute/AI market that counts more for some higher margin revenues than any gaming only market will produce. And Nvidia’s JHH Knows this also about compute/AI markets!
Vega 64 is right up there with the GTX 1080 in gaming in spite of that extra compute, ditto for the Vega 56 with a little more compute stripped out but still enough ROP/TMU resources to closely match the GTX 1080’s ROP/TMU resources. So that Vega 56 will beat the GTX 1070 and most likely be overclocked to get nearer to the GTX 1080 in gaming performance metrics.
And the miners and pro markets love all the extra compute that the Vega 10 GPU micro-arch can spare, and that’s money in AMD’s bank, same as any gaming only money/revenues!
Money Be Money Sonny!
You mean many post made by
You mean many post made by the same guy with different name? 🙂
Compute monster… really? Vega has the same theoretical compute power of GP102 but in practise due to their lower compute core occupancy it won’t even match it
A gold award for matching
A gold award for matching yesteryears performance? Wow PCPer… what happened to you guys? *sigh* I remember when you used to have integrity.
see GinormousDaftsNot’s reply
see GinormousDaftsNot’s reply to Anonymousdfdf3!
Go read that techgage article
Go read that techgage article linked to in many posts on this forum thread!
So they awarded the gold for someone else’s article?
Vega 64 is a compute monster for thousands less than that Quadro P6000-24GB! Even the Titan XP falls to Vega on some workstation compute workloads.
Wasn’t the Frontier Edition made for that purpose? This is a gaming card you putz. Nobody gives a crap about compute in gaming cards – they should be judged for their GAMING performance. Goddamn intellectually bankrupt shills.
Vega is ok. A Custom cooled
Vega is ok. A Custom cooled over clocked
1070 or 1080 will easily beat Vega out of the box and use less power. The higher production costs might limit availability.
see GinormousDaftsNot’s reply
see GinormousDaftsNot’s reply to Anonymousdfdf3!
Why does this review show
Why does this review show such a large difference between RX Vega 64 and Vega Frontier Edition when this Witcher 3 video shows that they’re essentially identical?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNXGr-8jcnE
I just picked one up in
I just picked one up in Akihabara.
Winter is coming. This will power my games and make a good space heater.
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