Vega Thread

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-...73-18.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-...73-19.html

We praised AMD’s cooling solution in our Vega Frontier Edition review. However, a pleasant breeze turns into a raging tornado this time around due to power consumption that's way too high. Then again, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition with a 295W maximum power target is almost as loud.

The version of AMD’s cooling solution used on Radeon RX Vega 64 is significantly different from the one we found on Vega Frontier Edition. It’s too aggressive, too hot, and, of course, too loud. Designing a thermal solution to be "good enough" never works out well for thermals or noise.

Let's get the messy stuff out of the way first. Radeon RX Vega 64 is late. It's hot. It's aimed at the competition's third-fastest product (which is 15 months old, uses a lot less power, and is quieter). And a lot of the architecture's new features are future-looking, rather than beneficial today.

AMD chose a $500 price point to match the 1080, then gave Nvidia enough time to make sure cryptocurrency-inflated prices on its cards were reigned in ahead of Vega 64's launch. So now you have a whole handful of third-party GTX 1080s in stock at $500 online.

Yes, AMD does surprise us with performance that typically exceeds our expectations. Based on the company's earlier hints, we were anticipating Radeon RX Vega 64 to tie GTX 1080, at best. However, AMD enjoys an advantage in Doom, The Division, and Dawn of War III. It roughly matches GeForce GTX 1080 in Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, Metro, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. And it only really loses in Ghost Recon and The Witcher 3. The card is exceptional for 2560x1440 and respectable at Ultra HD, where you'll need to make quality compromises in certain games for smooth frame rates.

Of course, AMD had to flog its Vega 10 GPU to get there. Gaming power consumption in excess of 280W is particularly painful when GeForce GTX 1080 is 100W lower. Even the much faster GeForce GTX 1080 Ti barely passes the 210W mark, based on our measurements. Obviously this isn't an ideal situation, especially when we factor in the temperature and noise measurements. So Vega 64 includes two BIOSes with three power profiles each, allowing enthusiasts to dial in the right balance between performance and acoustics. We plan to test the various outcomes of these settings, but suspect that enthusiasts paying top-dollar for high-end graphics won't want to readily give up frame rates in exchange for a quieter fan. After all, certain GeForce GTX 1080 partner cards already address Vega's shortcomings and have been sitting on shelves for months.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/...64/37.html

AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 delivers good performance that, when averaged, roughly matches GTX 1080 Founders Edition. This makes the card almost 20% faster than GTX 1070, 30% faster than R9 Fury X; 30% slower than GTX 1080 Ti. What is interesting though is that individual benchmarks show huge differences between NVIDIA and AMD. In some games NVIDIA is far ahead, in others AMD is the clear winner. The difference here doesn't seem to be DirectX 12 (which was the case with Polaris). For example in Hitman, which even is an AMD sponsored title, the GTX 1080 is quite far ahead. What is also worth taking a look at is games that are CPU limited, like Civilization VI. Here we see AMD's Vega cards bunched up to an invisible wall; a wall which sits at a lower FPS value than on NVIDIA. This suggests that AMD's drivers consume more CPU time than the NVIDIA drivers to complete the same tasks, leaving less CPU time for the game. Given the numbers we see in our review, we can't recommend RX Vega 64 for 4K gaming - it will shine at 1440p though. AMD needs to promote its new architectural features such as packed math and primitive shaders, to game developers. A game that utilizes Vega's hardware resources the way AMD intended, will be significantly faster than on the GTX 1080 including optimizations for "Pascal."

Power efficiency has been AMD's weak point for a while and RX Vega 64 can't really make that a thing of the past. It seems that in order to achieve the clock speeds required to beat GTX 1080, the company had to increase voltages far outside the comfort range of the Vega GPU, which results in terrible power consumption. Power consumption alone won't matter for most people, but higher power means more heat, which the cooler has to deal with, which usually means more fan noise. AMD has done what it can to limit noise levels by capping fan RPMs and allowing temperatures to go up to 85°C, but it's just not enough. The card is very noisy with 45 dBA in gaming, which almost disqualifies it for people who are noise-sensitive. I'm also missing the idle fan noise off feature that turns off the card's fans while doing desktop work, Internet browsing, or even light gaming. Some coil noise at high FPS is audible on our sample, other reviewers confirm this, too.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/...56/37.html

AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is the little sister of Vega 64. It comes at a 20% lower price than the RX Vega 64, and yet it only has 12.5% fewer stream processors, and runs lower operating frequencies. In our testing, we see a surprisingly small performance impact as a result of cutting down the "Vega 10" silicon, with performance being just 11% lower than on the RX Vega 64. This makes the RX Vega 56 card 6% faster than the competing GeForce GTX 1070, and 12% slower than GTX 1080, at only $399. I would recommend Vega 56 over Vega 64 for 1440p gaming as it provides perfectly sufficient framerates for that scenario, especially when paired with a FreeSync monitor, which will give you a stutter-free experience, even if FPS dip a bit below 60. The saved money over Vega 64 could be used to get that FreeSync monitor, or let you upgrade other components of your system, like moving from HDD to SSD.
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Besides good performance the other big surprise is how power-efficient Vega can be, if it's operating in the right clock/voltage band. Our testing shows power efficiency being close to the GeForce GTX 1060, which means Pascal is not that far away, when running at the right settings. This increased efficiency translates into lower power draw, which means less heat is generated. This lets the cooler work less hard and results in less fan noise distracting your ears.

The card is by no means silent, but it is clearly quieter than the RX Vega 64, running lower temperatures at the same time. If AMD had optimized the fan profile a bit better (allowing higher temperatures), then fan noise could be well below 40 dBA at full load, especially on custom designs, where board partners will most certainly use better coolers than the AMD reference solution.