michael_732 :
i totally disagree. under what metric are you quoting "relatively low performance"? there are no reputable benchmarks with release drivers to be found. only rumors, speculation, projection, and spin. using "game-mode" drivers on a pro card (where it is an afterthought) have nothing to do with real world benchmarks with real world *gaming* drivers. i'm not saying it is the second coming either. it is a competitive card in what is now a competitive market. thank god for that. the real deal with vega is not power consumption either. although the power consumption is notable, it is not remarkable in the history of gpus.
AMD's own promotional slides for RX Vega 64 have it performing about on par with a GTX 1080 in gaming, which costs the same amount, uses significantly less power, and came out over a year ago. In other words, it's only barely competitive now. With the geforce 20 series expected out next quarter, Vega's relevancy seems like it will be short lived.
the real deal with vega is the architecture. it is scalable ! in the 7nm node (next up), the node itself will take care of the majority of power draw. what they are doing atm is tweaking performance like normal, but also looking at places to gain efficiency on the 7nm node. and scale-ability will bring us multi-core gpus as we tackle the *big science* with sub-5nm processes and euv/x-ray lithography.
Pretty much any architecture should be able to be scaled down to a smaller process with some tinkering. Smaller process nodes will help Nvidia too, so I'm not sure how that's supposed to help AMD gain an advantage.