AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 16GB Review

[FormatC]

The Radeon Vega FE strives to be all things to all people: a workhorse and expensive toy in one. AMD even allows the FE card to support its Radeon Pro drivers.

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 16GB Review : Read more

 

[Ne0Wolf7]

Too bad its been so well optimized for Creo, I hate that one... Anyways, is it possible to include Autodesk Inventor in the suite? I want a card that can be used as a hybrid like this (of course I'll have to wait for it to come down in price) but its hard to decide I want something if my main software is not included in the benchmarks. Either way, I'm exited and this is a good review

 

[cknobman]

Not sure what to think here (in regards to hopes for the fx versions).

I cannot expect to see a huge % boost in games just on a driver update. Maybe 10% tops?

What bothers me the most is the heat/power and throttling concerns.
I dont think those will change with a fx version of the card.

So it would appear that 80-90% of the time Vega 64 will be running closer to 1200mhz, which is a major bummer and why it wont surpass a 1080.

Almost wish there had been a review of the watercooled version as well to see if it was able to maintain higher avg mhz.

 

[cats_Paw]

Dont know much about workstation so my comment does not take that into consideration.
It seems like it eats a lot of power for a very similar performance to a 1080 in gaming but at the same time its faster than Titan Xp in some workstations?

Doesn't that suggest driver/optimization issues?

 

[Yarvolino]

Ho comes that Vega and 1080Ti specs are pretty much the same, even greater numbers for Vega, and the result is that Vega is 40% slower and it drains +50% of power ?

Considering Vega also costs much more, I label it as an april fool

 

[LORD_ORION]

Wow, what a horrible review.
2 games, 1 resolution... and just where does this card fit in the vega lineup? You didn't even list the details of the other vega cards in a handy chart for comparison.

*starts looking for reviews on other sites*

 

[demonsoldier]

So there has been a few people tackling this and i found that lowering certain things about the card undervolting by 110mv has found to fix the clock speed issue keeping at a stable 1600 mhz with better cooling and it out performs the 1080 at that point. Can you guys do a second attempt at this with undervolts to see if that helps anything? AMD cards have been this way everytime they come out needing to have power draw issues fixed later on.

 

[sparkyman215]

Wow, what a horrible review.
2 games, 1 resolution... and just where does this card fit in the vega lineup? You didn't even list the details of the other vega cards in a handy chart for comparison.

*starts looking for reviews on other sites*

wh-what? Toms stated like four times that this *is not a gaming card* and shouldn't be treated as one. They simply included the gaming benchmarks to be inclusive. Also, there's not really a point in showing benchmarks under 4k for such high end cards, because at that point (like 1080p) it's a CPU bottleneck - the GPU has nothing much to do. Considering listing other Vega cards, those are in a different class and not relevant, however it would be nice to have the details of the other cards, I guess.

 

[nyannyan]

Looks like a great choice for workstations.

 

[yeeeeman]

Even though AMD says with each ocassion that this graphics card is not indicative of RX Vega's performance I would say that they are trying to avoid early dissapointment. The matter of the fact is that whatever feature they have disabled right now on Vega FE, it won't bring too much performance on RX Vega. Lets face it, if they were using half of CUs on Vega FE, then I would expect huge gains from RX Vega, but as it stands, RX Vega wil be ~ GTX 1080, one year later, + 100W and hot like a stove.
I really wonder how could they make a new GPU on a big better process (28nm vs 14nm) and still get more power consumption compared to Fury X. What is more surprising is that they have the same number of CUs, approx same performance with Fury X, a lot more transistors, a lot more frequency and still the improvement is minimal.
They are either hiding some huge block which doesn't do anything in graphics scenarios which consumes a lot of power just idling or they are rubbish at power optimization or maybe the HBM2 consumes a lot of power, don't know.
Everything on this card is strange, starting with performance, specs, power consumption, everything...

 

[Pompompaihn]

Seems like a very nice card if you're a home office person and need your system to do double duty. Good enough for high end gaming and comparable to expensive NVIDIA pro cards.

 

[redgarl]

A workstation card... not a gaming card... however, you can use it to play games... and the drivers are not release for Vega yet... just cmon.

Why even bothering rating the gaming benchmarks? Typical Toms... first line of these page should be "Take these with a grain of salt!"

 

[Ne0Wolf7]

Wow, what a horrible review.
2 games, 1 resolution... and just where does this card fit in the vega lineup? You didn't even list the details of the other vega cards in a handy chart for comparison.

*starts looking for reviews on other sites*

Not everybody uses their computers to play video games. This is a workstation card with workstation drivers for doing work with your computer.

 

[Ncogneto]

The water cooled version of this card is able to maintain it's boost frequency, thus putting it right on par with the gtx 1080, and that is before the gaming version is even out the door with its enabled additional hardware, and better optimized drive. When third party partners get ahold of it and add there own optimizations and cooling solutions we should see a card that is very much as good or not better than the GTX 1080/1080ti and a substantial savings. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

 

[derekullo]

Wow, what a horrible review.
2 games, 1 resolution... and just where does this card fit in the vega lineup? You didn't even list the details of the other vega cards in a handy chart for comparison.

*starts looking for reviews on other sites*

wh-what? Toms stated like four times that this *is not a gaming card* and shouldn't be treated as one. They simply included the gaming benchmarks to be inclusive. Also, there's not really a point in showing benchmarks under 4k for such high end cards, because at that point (like 1080p) it's a CPU bottleneck - the GPU has nothing much to do. Considering listing other Vega cards, those are in a different class and not relevant, however it would be nice to have the details of the other cards, I guess.

Just let him switch sites.
He obviously doesn't even read the articles as it is.

 

[COLGeek]

I actually have one of these (installed since 5 July). It is clearly optimized for 4k. It also handles everything I throw at it with ease. Performance is actually stronger in "pro mode" vice "game mode". I suspect future driver improvements will only make it better.

This is a pro level device and not intended for most users. Keep all this in mind when comparing it to other products.

 

[caustin582]

If you're someone who is in the market for a P6000, this card is a gift from heaven. About 1/5 the price with comparable workstation performance. Truly a game changer.

On the other hand, the gaming performance is frighteningly bad. Yes, this card wasn't intended for gaming, but the numbers here have major implications for AMD's upcoming RX Vega cards. Gaming-oriented drivers are only going to take the Vega GPU so far. Unless there's something AMD disabled on Vega FE that is *severely* holding it down, the future looks pretty grim for RX, considering how those cards are all going to have reduced specs compared to FE.

 

[drwho1]

16GB sounds like a lot, I mainly game, is it 8GB enough?

 

[dusty13]

Not sure what to think here (in regards to hopes for the fx versions).

I cannot expect to see a huge % boost in games just on a driver update. Maybe 10% tops?

What bothers me the most is the heat/power and throttling concerns.
I dont think those will change with a fx version of the card.

So it would appear that 80-90% of the time Vega 64 will be running closer to 1200mhz, which is a major bummer and why it wont surpass a 1080.

Almost wish there had been a review of the watercooled version as well to see if it was able to maintain higher avg mhz.

give it two months. do not forget that this is in fact a new arch. it would not be the first time amd / ati pushed out gains way north of 25% with drivers on a new architecture. certain features are not even active yet in drivers (dsbr - a rasterizer) and that alone will give you some gains (in certain games very substantial ones it looks like) but more than that it shows how "raw" those drivers still are at this point.

the focus seemes to (logically) have been totally on the pro part of vega not the gaming one up to now.

i for one am going to go for the 56 ncu version of vega. since that will likely not be out before october anyway we should have a somewhat better picture of actual performance by then with drivers having matured at least a bit.

 

[bit_user]

Nice review, but it really needs some deep learning benchmarks.

 

[Ne0Wolf7]

16GB sounds like a lot, I mainly game, is it 8GB enough?

16 GB is a lot, that's the amount of my whole system. 8 is fine for gaming.
If you want help choosing a card, make a thread, you'll get more help that way

 

[drwho1]

Thanks, I will when I'm closer to my next build.

 

[alextheblue]

Ho comes that Vega and 1080Ti specs are pretty much the same, even greater numbers for Vega, and the result is that Vega is 40% slower and it drains +50% of power ?

Considering Vega also costs much more, I label it as an april fool

The Vega FE is a workstation card. Not a gaming card. It even has Pro drivers. English is obviously not your first language so I understand why you might be confused, but you should still know the difference. The Vega RX cards are the gaming cards, and they're not out quite yet.

 

[falchard]

For a workstation card, the choice will always come down to research research research. Get the card that performs the best in your particular workload because the cards perform wildly differently with other workloads.

 

[bit_user]

If this thing is as good at deep learning as AMD's DeepBench results suggest, then it should be a Titan Xp killer for machine learning researchers. Even price/performance-wise, it could potentially give the V100 some serious competition.

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-vega-nvidia-pascal-gp100-performance-benchmarks/