AMD Vega Frontier Edition Unboxed and Benchmark

I think in the end the drivers will shake out and the performance will be relatively fine. I don't think these results are indicative of the actual hardware. It's just a really bad way to release a new series, especially one as hyped as Vega is.

 

If that was the case, why release with gaming drivers at all?

Me too, to be honest, but I would prefer it to be a bit more delayed than bad.

 

All this comments. Just wait for the gaming version of this GPU, maybe it will be clocked higher, also it seems there are issues with the drivers, so like any AMD GPU, performance will rise, a lot with future drivers. I should know.

 

if this fails with its target applications then we have a problem. gaming is something else.

maybe because the other drivers give even worse gaming performance, so they put in a gaming mode to unlock some gaming features and performance.

 

You're failing to address the main issue which is that this GPU was released with gaming drivers.

 

"Rushed"?

If AMD wait until drivers are fine, Volta will be here (drivers included).

The hardware comes late and his drivers are not going to make a miracle bump in gaming performance.

Too much HYPE= Big expectation= Big disappointment

 

people really need to try to listen to AMD.

they said

maybe that includes freesync and other things.

 

What's with the attitude? I said not to make snap conclusions because we didn't have any proper numbers or benchmarks. Now we actually have numbers popping up and we can say something about it.

Spoiler

And as you can see in my post, I kept an open mind, because we only had snippets of information.

You really need to get out of this attitude of being hostile towards others, I've seen you make posts like this before, particularly towards the user, Undying, it's impolite and disrespectful.

Anyway, on topic, it certainly doesn't look good but apparently, the card is throttling because it's being starved of power (Onna states in his thread that the PSU used is 550W can anyone confirm this?).

There are two things we can derive from this though, 1. Vega is not very good or 2. something is very wrong with software or hardware configuration.

Maybe it really is a case that this revision is not meant for gaming but for compute purposes which if we believe AMD's statements then yes that would make sense but how do we know AMD haven't been saying that, just as a means to pass off the performance we've had a glimpse of. I'd rather prefer to see actual proper benchmarks anyway from the likes of Guru3d and Anandtech.

Personally I reckon we still have to wait and see, hopefully the consumer version of Vega will indeed live up to expectations but if it doesn't, well I guess the graphics card industry is not going to look good in the future.

 

I don't think Volta is going to release consumer variants until next year. I could be wrong, but my opinions are based on that. If AMD spent another 1-2 months cooking good drivers for a proper release, I don't think it would have bit them as hard as releasing the cards in this state. Especially after the majority of the AMD community spent the last 6 months hyping the fact that Vega should be the first GPU released with "proper" drivers.

 

These are not gaming cards...
Plus drivers are not optimized: when Polaris came out it had crap drivers too. One year later and the drivers made the card gain allot of performance.

Plus complaining about it being a heater...

I'm sure they only marketed this as a workstation card, so no gaming drivers ready.

Agree.

If it wasn't, people would bash it for that...
You can't please everyone it seems.

AMD drivers do make big bumps in performance. Not saying Vega will have a big bump though.

 

What are gaming drivers? Just because one IHV calls "game ready" it's driver, "gaming drivers" means nothing. Of course professional GPUs run DirectX graphics, as they run OpenGL and Vulkan, but this does not those GPUs have some tweaks like surface surface format substitution or some floating point optimizations enabled, but all this doesn't prevent you to run a "gaming" application on those GPUs.If there is something to blame on this card, is that they did not bring back FP64 top performance. It would be nice to see a 4->2->1 configuration for FP16-FP32-FP64.

 

A couple of months more after August Vega Gaming variants and we are in Q4. I suppose AMD GPU driver team knew that VEGA release was planned on Q3 many months before us.

That's the main problem: hype.

Some ppl still believe in empty promises.

 

There is a chance, that it was a problem with the testing

 

This isn't quantum physics man, it's marketing 101. You don't tack on a mode called "gaming mode" and then expect people not to take the results at face value in gaming. You also don't compare/market the card to a Titan Xp, which is regarded as a "gaming card hybrid thing" then when it fails at beating it go "oh well it wasn't intended to compete in gaming!" despite the fact that their own marketing used the Titan Xp as a comparison in a workload the Titan Xp also wasn't intended for.

I don't think either me or PrMinister are complaining about the drivers or the card itself - it's more of AMD's marketing team once again dropping the ball. The amd subreddit is filled with people complaining about the performance. The fact that we are having this discussion right now means that the marketing failed. Which is my main complaint.

Better choice would have been to forego the gaming mode and brand the card WX and seed it to review sites focused on workstations/deep learning. No one would have complained. No one would have cared about it's gaming performance.

 

Drivers can partially alleviate a lack of hardware performance.

AMD drivers made a big jump in DX11 performance in the first half of 2015 but even that was insufficient to reach Nvidia DX11 drivers performance.

 

There are gaming drivers ready for it. It even has a (buggy) software switch for that. If it was just a professional card (which it should have been), they shouldn't have included the gaming driver.

I actually believe it will. That doesn't make their decisions up to now unquestionable.

There is no IHV games here. AMD does ship this card with a software switch between "gaming" and "professional" drivers. That alone is confusing. They should have shipped it with only the pro driver until the other part was ready.

On the other hand, the person testing this doesn't seem to have an adequate PSU, and judging by the rest of his comments he's not exactly a system optimizer. A bit of patience, more of these will popup. Not that AMD's list of bugs for the current drivers seems non-alarmist.

 

That's not how a graphics driver works. There is no thing like "gaming driver" except for single application profiles. Everything else is just fancy useless software like "Wattman" "Relive" "Chill" or whatever are named (the same happen with the other IHV).

EDIT: to be clear, of course there could be (I bet there are) different driver branches for that card. On one branch could work one team (focusing on professional software optimizations) and another branch where another team is working on general APIs support and optimizations, and another branch where another team is just working in the control panel GUI features. But this doesn't mean AMD is working on 2 or more set of different drivers, this is just the common procedure when you work on project that isn't just a school homework. Different branches for different software pieces are meant to synchronize with each other after a piece of work is down and then start another job, all this in loop.

 

At least AMD could make a better design for this workstation card, it looks like "retro" design , like 10 or more years old style. That said, the performance of this AMD Vega FE with that 300+ Watt power draw is really disappointing

 

It performs worst than GTX 1080 and it costs at least double from GTX 1080, wonder who will ever buy it?

 

This situation is not really a surprise. AMD had Vega chip ready from last year but they missed the opportunity because of HBM2 memory being buggy and not ready for mass production. So the product was delayed and delayed until now when it is not really relevant on the market and the price is over the roof.
I really hope they have received some money back from SK Hynix or whoever makes HBM2 because they were left in the dust for so long.
I would point out also the fact that NVIDIA was wise. It knew that HBM2 was buggy and skipped it for Pascal. And they, as usual, made the right decision.