AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
Alongside the release of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper, a new AMD graphics generation has arrived too. Called “Vega”, it’s the fifth incarnation of AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, and introduces numerous enhancements over the fourth “Polaris” generation. Foremost is the second version of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), but it also increases instructions per clock and clock speeds.
The first Vega card to arrive is the unusual Radeon Vega Frontier Edition found in this month’s Armari workstation ( see overleaf); this sits in AMD’s professional Radeon Pro range but is intended to span professional and gaming markets. There are drivers and modes for GPGPU (general-purpose GPU) compute tasks, workstation usage, game development, and pure gaming.
Two versions of the Frontier Edition are available. The one in our Armari system was the air-cooled variant, which costs just under £1,000 inc VAT. But there’s also a water-cooled version that will cost you closer to £1,600.
Both have a hefty 4,096 stream processors and a typical engine clock of 1,382MHz. It’s backed up by 16GB of HBM2 running at 945MHz on a 2,048-bit interface, providing a whopping 483GB/ sec of bandwidth.
One unusual feature of the Frontier Edition for professionals is the one-year warranty. However, there’s a Radeon Pro WX9100 imminent with nearly identical specifications and the three-year warranty that is more normal for professional cards.
AMD has also now launched Vega for consumers. The Radeon RX Vega 64 has a similar specification to the Frontier Edition, but the RX Vega 56 cuts the number of stream processors to 3,584.
Unfortunately, unlike the Ryzen Threadripper, the Vega isn’t a clear winner over its main competitor. But it does have plenty to commend it. In some areas, it can come close or even surpass the near-£2,000 Nvidia Quadro P5000.
In SPECviewperf 12.1, its 3dsmax-05 result of 151.6 beats the P5000, as does 85.8 in medical-01, 20.6 in energy-01 and 108.4 in showcase-01, while 116.5 in maya-04 runs the P5000 closely.
But 144.4 in catia-04, 93.4 in creo-01, 148.5 in snx-02 and 118.1 in sw-03 are way behind the P5000, albeit still very commendable scores. The Maxon Cinebench R15 GPU score of 137 is again decent but, compared to the Nvidia Quadro P5000, disappointing.
Overall, then, the AMD Vega GPU is good value for the performance on offer, but not a Quadro killer. For 3D animation with Autodesk 3ds Max or Maya, it’s very competitive. But Nvidia’s Volta architecture is just around the corner, which could have AMD playing catch-up all over again where professional graphics are concerned.