Looks like guys from PCWorld have the world’s first hands-on (p)review of a Vega-based graphics card.
AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition preview
AMD has given an exclusive first look at Radeon Frontier to PCWorld. They were allowed to test it in few synthetic benchmarks like SPECviewperf or Cinebench OpenGL, however pure gaming benchmarks were out of the question. Although they were allowed to play Doom, Prey and Sniper Elite 4, no detailed performance metrics were revealed. PCWorld describes:
While AMD didn’t want to reveal any gaming performance, it agreed to give us a taste of how Radeon Vega Frontier Edition performs in gaming. So we switched out the 8K Dell panel for a pair of Acer 34-inch, wide-aspect 3440×1440 panels, and AMD let us play games on both the Titan Xp and the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.
To show it wasn’t just an API advantage, AMD let us play Doom using Vulkan, Prey using DirectX 11, and Sniper Elite 4 using DirectX 12. All of the games were set to their highest game settings, and we played at the native resolution of the panels. Although the identical panels were FreeSync-based, FreeSync was switched off on the AMD GPU.
[…]
From what we’ve seen, that concern may be misplaced. It appears to be plenty fast and, at least for the settings and the games we played, indistinguishable from the competition. Our original estimates after seeing Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with Sniper Elite 4 at Computex still hold: The cards appears to be faster than Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and close to that of a GTX 1080 Ti card.
As for synthetic benchmarks, we are looking at 15 to 50% higher performance than TITAN Xp:
In the given time we had to run the tests, we saw the Frontier Edition outscore the Titan Xp by 28 percent in Catia and Creo to 50 percent in SolidWorks. We also ran Maxon’s Cinebench, a popular OpenGL benchmark, in which the Frontier Edition was about 14 percent faster. The numbers echo what we already knew about the Frontier Edition, but this time we could see the performance demonstrations live.
Interesting tidbits from the videos:
- Vega can run on 6-pin power connector, but it wasn’t specified if they were talking about Frontier or RX Vega;
- Frontier will support gaming, but to take the full benefit from game optimizations, RX Vega is still recommended.
- Frontier will run in multi-GPU configurations, but it was not designed for multi-GPU gaming;
- Air-cooled and Liquid-cooled (gold edition) of Frontier have the same PCB design, although Liquid edition has higher TDP (375W vs 300W) and better operating temperatures;
- DIP switches on the back will allow you to change the color of the GPU Tach LEDs;
- AMD Rep did not want to reveal what the color of RX Vega will be;
- RX Vega will be launched on July 30th at SIGGRAPH
Source: PCWorld