AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56 Reviews [*UPDATED* Aug 28]

[Head1985]

Since the other thread got locked, curious about your prior expectations of Vega 56. Do you still see yourself swapping over to it?

i will buy vega 64 AIB, but only if cost same as GTX1080 AIB.Right now vega 64 reference cost like 10-15% less than aftermarket 1080TI which is like 40% faster.

 

[krumme]

I think the minimum recommendations are something like 500W+ for a Vega 56.

I will run a rx64 from a 550w ps.
No probs.
Recommended ps says nothing. Actual perf on the rails is what counts.

 

[AtenRa]

So that's me - I use 450W power supplies.

Then your not in the GTX1070/VEGA 56 market , you should be looking at the GTX1060

edit: since when competitive is only about power consumption ??

 

[Mercennarius]

I seriously am taken back by anyone trying to buy a top of the line $500 GPU to game at ultra settings and high res yet are stuck on using a sub 500W power supply...

And for what it's worth i'm still using my OEM Lenovo power supply...it just happens to be 1200W.

 

[AtenRa]

You now see my extreme frustration when I read reddit, here, etc. And amd focused forum posters completely didn't care about the 1080ti bracket of performance and price.

It seems maybe that amd is realizing this too that they're better off ceding the super high end and focusing on the mainstream parts.

You dont think that VEGA 56 is competitive against GTX1070 at all ?? (as consumer/gamer)

 

[Ranulf]

GTX 1080ti is NVidia's best offering. Vega comes nowhere near it.

MSRP for GTX 1080 is $499, and GTX 1070 is $349. This is better pricing than AMDs.

AMD only looks better when comparing it's MSRP to NVidias mining inflated street pricing.

It also looks like there were only a token amount of cards at AMD's MSRP, and most are selling for $599, making Vega a worst deal at street pricing as well.

Mostly the negativity is because Vega is VERY late to the field, and was hyped more than Ryzen, leading many to expect a Ryzen type breakthrough when all that arrived was an expensive, second tier competitor that has VERY poor perf/watt.

Heh, there has never been a 1070 at $349 that is worth a damn cooling wise. Maybe some sale deals if you count game deals. And as you say, due to mining prices (last year it was just supply/demand) you're lucky to find a 1070 for $400.

 

[Rifter]

You dont think that VEGA 56 is competitive against GTX1070 at all ?? (as consumer/gamer)

It will come down to price. No one can answer that yet as we dont know the price.

 

[Elixer]

I will run a rx64 from a 550w ps.
No probs.
Recommended ps says nothing. Actual perf on the rails is what counts.

What the heck is the rest of your system? What PSU you got?
Running the V64 on some demanding game will hardly leave you any room for anything else.

 

[PeterScott]

Then your not in the GTX1070/VEGA 56 market , you should be looking at the GTX1060
edit: since when competitive is only about power consumption ??

Since when is power not a factor?

If the GPUs are otherwise close to equal, I am going lean heavily toward the one using less power.

If one draws a lot more power, there better be some kind of counter advantage to offset that.

Heck even when I am looking at upgrading to a GTX 1060 vs Polaris, I prefer the GTX 1060 because of power draw and I have a 600 W PS, even more now that RX 580 uses 8 pin (or 8pin + 6 pin) power and GTX 1060 uses 6 pin. My PS has dual 6 pin connectors, no 8 pin.

Using more power is a negative, and unless there is something balancing that on the other side it definitely factors into my decision.

 

[PeterScott]

I know the current street price, yes, I have multiple Polaris cards. I'm referencing MSRP, and also the fact that it's true you could pick up an RX 480 for 20% off launch MSRP only 3-4 months after release. I know because I did. And it's certainly possible that could happen again.

Could happen is meaningless, and you keep acting like it's definitely going to happen. Lot of things could happen. Ether mining could go bust and we end up floating in $300 GTX 1070s...

 

[krumme]

What the heck is the rest of your system? What PSU you got?
Running the V64 on some demanding game will hardly leave you any room for anything else.

Its some highend be quiet thing. Running a r7 1700 and a ssd and a hd plus asus strix sound card.
To be fair the ps is actually over the rated ps and i would surely run my rx64 undervolted so there is spare left. It depends on noise really how close i will get. My preliminary guess is at most max 250w for the gpu is what i will allocate. But hey as i remember the psu is good for 630w from the specs on the rails and its conservative numbers. So all good.
My point was just that rated ps power is meaningless.

 

[crisium]

You dont think that VEGA 56 is competitive against GTX1070 at all ?? (as consumer/gamer)

Going off MSRP, not really. $350 1070 vs $400 Vega 56. Which card is faster depends on how a reviewer weighted DX11 vs DX12. Which card uses more power is clear. Best case scenario, Vega 56 is single digit % faster.

Compared to 390 which was equal price vs GTX 970, not $50 more. 390 was single digit % faster too. It used more power too. But it also had at least twice the VRAM.

So if Vega 56 MSRP was the same as 1070 ($350) had twice the VRAM (16GB) then I would consider it competitive. Note that the market as a whole would not: 970 outsold the 390 greatly.

All theoretical since MSRP has a minor factor now. Though with enough supply, Vega 56 should be cheaper than GTX 1070 eventually. 1070 mining efficiency beats it cleanly, so the market will pay more for it. If/when this happens I will definitely recommend Vega 56 for some users.

 

[krumme]

Since when is power not a factor?

If the GPUs are otherwise close to equal, I am going lean heavily toward the one using less power.

If one draws a lot more power, there better be some kind of counter advantage to offset that.

Heck even when I am looking at upgrading to a GTX 1060 vs Polaris, I prefer the GTX 1060 because of power draw and I have a 600 W PS, even more now that RX 580 uses 8 pin (or 8pin + 6 pin) power and GTX 1060 uses 6 pin. My PS has dual 6 pin connectors, no 8 pin.

Using more power is a negative, and unless there is something balancing that on the other side it definitely factors into my decision.

I have it the same way.
What i will do for my rx64 is trade some temp and perf for far better efficiency.
Surely this vega looks very bad and deserve some flak. But if we go back to the 780ti launch things were not so so bad but nearly. The 780ti was clearly much faster than the 290x that sounded like a jetplane and sucked up power.
We tend to forget how bad the refefence 290x looked here.
Go back and look at the discussion we had back then. The 290x was hammered.
Time were very good for the 290x. Very. We know that.
I dont think vega will fare nearly as good but there is clear facts for perf that defenitively points the right direction. And its near future imo. And power can as i showed with tpu rx 56 review pretty much be solved. The bashing of this gpu is a bit over the top.
I think the problem will be availability and thereby price. The problems goes far beyond the arch.
If its priced over their counterparts it clearly doesnt make sense.
But so what. Then you just get a gpu with another name.

Its an utterly useless gpu for mobile but its amd problem. Mm2 and hbm2 the same.

I seem some people will better support amd. It makes no sense. In reality its supporting mubadala. An incompetent investment fund. Buy the gpu that solves your need.

 

[tamz_msc]

There is no way that MSRP will be reflected at launch. The cheapest GTX 1070 on Newegg is 440$. By the time AIB Vega 56 cards available, it will be anybody's guess as to what the final prices will end up like after 1-1.5 months. If there is no improvement then we may very well end up with the same price for the GTX 1070 AIB cards and Vega 56 AIB cards. If that is the case, then it's clear to me that the GTX 1070 will be the better option because of it's much lower power consumption, since the lead that Vega 56 has at the moment isn't convincing. It's 5-10% here and there.

This is just the situation in the USA, it's much worse in other parts of the world, where Vega is selling at the price of the packs, not the standalone cards, plus tax.

 

[Malogeek]

They didn't? They didn't release a GPU that matches or beats 1070/1080 performance in most scenarios at $399/$499 MSRP? Weird..I thought that's what all the reviews showed.

Except it's no longer $499, and was only that price for less than an hour and was an early adopters discount apparently. It's now officially $599 until AMD decides otherwise (with the 2 free games).

 

[tential]

You dont think that VEGA 56 is competitive against GTX1070 at all ?? (as consumer/gamer)

It's obviously the best part. And no surprise look at the 290, 7950, fury, before it?

I'm not surprised it's a competitive gpu.
As we both know, reviewers are too incompetent to get full performance out of an amd card. Vega 56 is the only card to get. We both know that Vega 56 should perform just like Vega 64 minus a couple percent given how we have been able to tune prior amd cards.

Like I said multiple times, it's extremely sad when the only card to get excited about is a power hungry gtx 1070.

Great for you guys at 1440p or who want to do reduced settings at 4k.

For me, nothing amd released is anywhere close to what I was expecting to use for my monitor. I was expecting significantly in between 1080/1080ti with it being closer to the ti than not.

I personally don't see why I'd work with this level of performance at 4k for myself. I'll cut my losses and play 4k gsync and enjoy the full range. If amd has the same range gsync did... Then actually this wouldn't matter. Also, I just don't see why I'd continue to pray amd will hold high end performance when Nvidia assuredly will.

If I had gone gtx 1070/gsync at launch it'd been a way better deal than Vega 56/freesync but hindsight is 20/20.

 

[krumme]

Except it's no longer $499, and was only that price for less than an hour and was an early adopters discount apparently. It's now officially $599 until AMD decides otherwise (with the 2 free games).

The rx64 is not interesting anyway. Its a bit of a strawman.

Either rx 56 is available at aprox or a bit above 1070 price or vega is not selling. I dont think it will happen but rx 56 is clearly what is interesting for the discussion.

 

[DaQuteness]

I know this thread is for 64 and 56, but I do have a comment on the FE. I'm only bringing that up because I hope in the newer driver iterations there will actually be an improvement on both cad and maybe a bit of gaming. I'm interested in compute power, so Vega is right up my alley.

Having said that... take a look at the hilarious release notes for the latest beta drivers out today for FE:

Fixed Issues

• Resolved compatibility with Maxon Cinema 4D R19 Beta
• Resolved intermittent system instability when rendering using Blender

Known Issues

• Flickering may occur when enabling or disabling VSync with Unigine Heaven
• When resuming from S3, ReLive users may experience unexpected recording behavior
• Unexpected behavior has been observed when using Eyefinity with 4 or more displays
• Visual corruption may be observed with Microsoft Outlook and PowerPoint
• During prolonged FurMark stress runs, system may exhibit instability
• May hang while launching Counter-Strike Go (CS GO)
• Unexpected behavior may occur when rendering using Radeon ProRender in Maya 2017
• When using CrossFire, the user may experience difficulties enabling and disabling ECC
• System can exhibit unexpected behavior when enabling CrossFire from secondary GPU
• Flickering line corruption has intermittently been observed in 3D applications using CrossFire with Eyefinity
• The user may experience unexpected behavior creating 4x1 or 6x1 Eyefinity display configurations with 5K displays
• Unity Engine games may stall on exit or first launch with SteamVR
• When running Far Cry Primal for prolonged periods of time, Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) has been observed to occur
• Unexpected behavior has been observed with complex Blender scenes such as system hanging

What the hell? )

 

[Malogeek]

Either rx 56 is available at aprox or a bit above 1070 price or vega is not selling. I dont think it will happen but rx 56 is clearly what is interesting for the discussion.

I think AMD are going to price it higher as long as it still sells, as I believe it will still sell well irrespective of comparative price/perf/power. I guess good on them as they need the revenue. If the 64 is still selling out by the time the 56 arrives, then it will release at $499, not $399.

 

[bystander36]

"The other big surprise besides good performance 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. "

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_RX_Vega_56/37.html

Get one while you can !

I was curious about that statement. When running at the proper clocks and settings, what is the performance like? I couldn't find the answer in the review (I might not have looked close enough).

 

[krumme]

I was curious about that statement. When running at the proper clocks and settings, what is the performance like? I couldn't find the answer in the review (I might not have looked close enough).

Imo its unfunded in the review. At 4k the 6gb 1060 is at 128%. The 1060 3gb is 103% but that thats just irrelevant for reasons we know.

You need undervolting or other powerprofile to get there. Look at gamers nexus for results. Its crazy. I dont know what amd did but polaris and hawai undervolting is nothing compared to this. Talk of factory overclocked product.

But if if look at perf at 4k the rx56 in tpu review its nearly halfway between a 1070 and a 1080. Not to bad in a game suite that reflects today load.

If we take more forward looking engines like doom its just outright 1080 perf at 4k/1440p. The rx56 is a damn fast card.

I think their good review is a result of that.

All under the asumption of msr price. Yes.

I think miners is going for this. I can smell it. They know something we dont. Or some rumors.

 

[krumme]

Gibbo say todays launch price is smoke and mirrors
https://www.techpowerup.com/236177/amds-rx-vega-launch-prices-might-be-just-smoke-and-mirrors

 

[Rifter]

Gibbo say todays launch price is smoke and mirrors
https://www.techpowerup.com/236177/amds-rx-vega-launch-prices-might-be-just-smoke-and-mirrors

If thats true, and prices rise 100 $/pounds, then vega is DOA. Period.

 

[Phynaz]

Then your not in the GTX1070/VEGA 56 market , you should be looking at the GTX1060

edit: since when competitive is only about power consumption ??

My total system load Using a Gigabyte GTX 1070 doesn't exceed 260W, right in the sweet spot of a 450W PSU.

So yes, I am in the GTX 1070 market.

I'm am not - along with many others - in the Vega market because it is a ridiculous power hog. It's 88 degrees here right now, who wants another 100W of hot air blowing at them?

So there you go. Is Vega 56 competitive? Yes, for some fans. Is Vega 56 very competitive? Absolutely not once all the downsides are taken into consideration.

 

[Mercennarius]

If prices shoot up i'll be the first to say that is a major failure...the MSRP prices of $399 and $499 are fair and competitive against Nvidia. Raising the prices above that makes the cost/performance lower than Nvidias and when your already considerably behind in market share that is a bad place to be.