AMD RADEON RX VEGA 64
All bark and no bite?
WELL, FOLKS, WHAT CAN WE SAY? AMD has well and truly screwed the pooch on this one. It’s been 16 months (at time of writing) since Nvidia launched its highend Pascal GPU lineup, featuring the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, and 12 months since AMD launched its Polaris architecture. In that time, we’ve seen marketing ploys, press events, and more, all labeling Vega as the new king of compute, the prodigal son, even demolishing Nvidia’s yet-to-bereleased Volta architecture in some cases.
What we’re left with, then, is a check that the mouth can’t cash. From the get-go, we knew something was up—the fanfare that surrounded the launch of Threadripper was suspiciously absent when it came to Vega’s arrival. The press reps fell quiet, there were no unboxing videos, no launch events, all was quiet. Our sample arrived in the post, not with the flurry of notifications that we’re used to, but with silence. We threw it on the bench and, alas, our suspicions were confirmed.
Performance wasn’t as impressive as we first hoped. It’s a card that isn’t quite capable of beating the GTX 1080, never mind the heady heights of Nvidia’s 1080 Ti. At 1080p, performance was solid enough: We saw scores of 48fps in TotalWar:Attila, 103 in FarCryPrimal, 104 in TheDivision, and 62 in RiseoftheTombRaider. Bump up to 1440p, and you’re still hitting over 60fps in Primal and TheDivision, and then 40-ish at 4K. Compare it to the GTX 1080, however, and you’ll notice that performance is ever so slightly lacking. Synthetic benchmarks score well, but aside from that, the RX Vega 64 falls slightly behind in all of our benchmarking suite.
Take it overclocking, however, and you can expect an extra 100MHz out of the core, and 200MHz out of the memory— not a huge amount, but still enough to draw those Fire Strike scores up by an extra 500–2,000 points where it counts. Unfortunately, voltage control, as with the Fury X, isn’t available right now, so we can’t push it further; but, to be honest, you probably wouldn’t want to.
The biggest problem by far is the power draw. At stock, under load, our reference GeForce GTX 1080 in our test rig draws 252W from the wall. Compare that to Vega, and the difference is staggering: 403W under load. That’s 151W more, and 49W more than even our reference GTX 1080 Ti. That’s no small amount. We can’t say for sure, but the amount of voltage AMD has had to throw at the architecture, purely to get even vaguely comparable performance up against its Nvidia rivals, makes us doubt whether we’re likely to see anything competitive from team red.
Then there’s the price. Partly due to its crazy-high hash rate drawing every wannabe cryptocurrency miner this side of the Atlantic to it, and another part due to a lack of available stock on AMD’s part, Vega 64 is available right now for $680 for the standard reference design—limited to one per customer. If that isn’t to your liking, you can pick up a GeForce GTX 1080 for $510 instead. Hell, a GTX 1080 Ti is only $70 more than Vega, and that nets you an EVGA aftermarket design, with a 20MHz overclock, and a triple-fan cooler, plus average performance over 22 frames higher in most titles.
Look, we don’t want to rage at AMD. We’re not doing it just for the sake of it. The company needs to do well—Nvidia needs real competition, because it drives innovation; we’ve already seen this with Intel and Ryzen. But Vega 64 has fallen well short of the mark and, given its current availability, price, performance, and power draw, the hype train has left both the station and Vega far behind. For $170 less, you can get similar, if not better, performance by going with team green, and that genuinely saddens us.