AMD Vega (FE and RX) Benchmarks [Updated Aug 10 - RX Vega 64 Unboxing]

[Elfear]

Live testing of AMD Vega Frontier Edition

One result already obtained: TIme Spy 6785 graphics score

Edit: Comment thread in Reddit r/Amd if you're interested reading the testing's results in text.

One cliff note from the thread: "Tester doesn't think it will touch the 1080 Ti performance-wise, only 1070-1080s"

If this is true I don't even know what to think. The Fury X is within a few percentage points of a stock 1070 and Vega has:

Process advantage (14nm vs 28nm)
Core clock advantage (1600Mhz vs 1050Mhz, although it isn't clear what speed Vega is actually running at)
2yrs worth of architecture improvements

And it's in the same performance tier as Fiji?

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Yeah it must be so easy for anybody to walk right out of AMD with the vhdl files and see how it performs in advance.

Well technically you'd need the RTL, standard cell + macro + IP + (maybe custom cell) libraries, and Cadence + Synopsys + whoever else's tool licenses to simulate it

 

[swilli89]

One cliff note from the thread: "Tester doesn't think it will touch the 1080 Ti performance-wise, only 1070-1080s"

If this is true I don't even know what to think. The Fury X is within a few percentage points of a stock 1070 and Vega has:

Process advantage (14nm vs 28nm)
Core clock advantage (1600Mhz vs 1050Mhz, although it isn't clear what speed Vega is actually running at)
2yrs worth of architecture improvements

And it's in the same performance tier as Fiji?

I think this is enough to tell you that something is awry. It sucks but performance this bad basically tells me we have to wait for RX Vega benchmarks to know where Vega will truly fall.

 

[.vodka]

Process advantage (14nm vs 28nm)
Core clock advantage (1600Mhz vs 1050Mhz, although it isn't clear what speed Vega is actually running at)
2yrs worth of architecture improvements

And it's in the same performance tier as Fiji?

Yeah. Something doesn't add up.

Either RX Vega is fundamentally different in whatever obscure technical reason that trades speed for accuracy (needed in the professional market) at the driver or GPU level (factory configuration of the dies I suppose) and we're in for a Ryzen style surprise when it launches, or the bolded part is actually GCN turned into GPUdozer/R600/NV30 redux..

or we're simply seeing the effects of having a shoestring budget shared between the CPU and GPU divisions. Ryzen had to succeed at any cost, and had the biggest share of that little budget for the past five years. For what it's worth a Hawaii sized Polaris would've been a much more compelling product gaming wise than what Vega is right now.


I'm not holding my breath for Siggraph. There has to be a real reason why Raja and AMD have repeatedly stated FE Vega isn't gaming Vega apart from the obvious. I'd love to be wrong on calling Vega GPUdozer, though. We'll see in a month.

 

[ZGR]

I'm hesitant on calling Vega a failure before we see some more mature drivers. The raw power of Vega is obviously being underutilized, but so was Fury for the most part....

 

[swilli89]

or we're simply seeing the effects of having a shoestring budget shared between the CPU and GPU divisions. Ryzen had to succeed at any cost, and had the biggest share of that little budget for the past five years. For what it's worth a Hawaii sized Polaris would've been a much more compelling product gaming wise than what Vega is right now.

Except that was a huge push by Dr. Su. Compared to 2015 (when Vega work was probably just getting underway) the RTG headcount has increased by 60%
https://fortune.com/2017/06/28/amd-ai-chips-comeback/

RTG has been given MORE funds and heacount since the days of Hawaii and Fiji.. with added talent. Industry sources have said that the pushed back deadline will be "worth it". Guys I'm not trying to be a blind optimist but I really think we should withjust hold judgement on Vega and RTG's efforts until we see what a final piece of gaming focused Vega can do with a full software support.

Yes it is possible it is a blunder on the scale of Bulldozer.. but the thing is, graphics workloads are actually pretty well understood. When Bulldozer was developed the path to multi-core CPU's wasn't nearly as clear. I have to believe that Raja, the guy Apple of all companies trusted to lead design on their GPUs, at least knows how to NOT REGRESS from Fiji IPC.

I mean we aren't even seeing what amounts to 60% faster than Fiji despite 60% faster clocks. What about tiled rendering? Tons of other new architecture features.. I have to believe that Vega isn't truly stretching its legs. However time will tell.. of course.

 

[geoxile]

Except that was a huge push by Dr. Su. Compared to 2015 (when Vega work was probably just getting underway) the RTG headcount has increased by 60%
https://fortune.com/2017/06/28/amd-ai-chips-comeback/

RTG has been given MORE funds and heacount since the days of Hawaii and Fiji.. with added talent. Industry sources have said that the pushed back deadline will be "worth it". Guys I'm not trying to be a blind optimist but I really think we should withjust hold judgement on Vega and RTG's efforts until we see what a final piece of gaming focused Vega can do with a full software support.

Yes it is possible it is a blunder on the scale of Bulldozer.. but the thing is, graphics workloads are actually pretty well understood. When Bulldozer was developed the path to multi-core CPU's wasn't nearly as clear. I have to believe that Raja, the guy Apple of all companies trusted to lead design on their GPUs, at least knows how to NOT REGRESS from Fiji IPC.

I mean we aren't even seeing what amounts to 60% faster than Fiji despite 60% faster clocks. What about tiled rendering? Tons of other new architecture features.. I have to believe that Vega isn't truly stretching its legs. However time will tell.. of course.

Fiji was probably already in development in 2015 when that happened. It's more likely that RTG China's team is just really bad. A lead can only do so much with poor talent.

 

[.vodka]

Yeah. It's bewildering. Something is REALLY wrong somewhere. I hope RX Vega is going to be another Ryzen style surprise in a month however implausible that seems to be. Ryzen did improve *a lot* with a month of tweaking...

Just one more month to see if Vega gets to join R600 and NV30. In these architecture's defenses, R600/Terascale gave us the excellent HD4000-6000 series and NV30/CineFX was fixed to perform really well on the 6000 and 7000 series cards. A bad first step doesn't mean doom for the entire effort, just a crappy first year until it's fixed in a future product.

 

[swilli89]

Fiji was probably already in development in 2015 when that happened. It's more likely that RTG China's team is just really bad. A lead can only do so much with poor talent.

You're correct, even more to my point. Fiji was released in 2015 so I'm sure work on that had begun years prior. With 60% more engineers than they had during the time of Fiji's release.. even if there were a lot of new engineers right out of school.. this thing was being led by Raja and his top guys.

 

[beginner99]

Is there any body home in amd gpu marketing and pr department?

Whenever you think a launch can't be any worse, AMD doubles down.

Who the hell though it was a good idea to release a pro card with optimized drivers in an uncontrolled fashion? I build a new uArch, a new brand and then in one single stupid action more or less tarnish the whole investment. Just stupid. Like with Hawaii and the heat issues ruined the launch of a good product.

At this point I can only hope it also sucks at mining (seems to be the case) and if not that the cripple mining in drivers. No joke. If they can magically improve gaming performance for RX Vega, they should cripple mining performance. Then they can release it at a low price for gamers.

 

[geoxile]

You're correct, even more to my point. Fiji was released in 2015 so I'm sure work on that had begun years prior. With 60% more engineers than they had during the time of Fiji's release.. even if there were a lot of new engineers right out of school.. this thing was being led by Raja and his top guys.

It's also possible they decided to put their best guys on Navi, which was probably started a year or so after Vega was started, maybe even at a similar time.

 

[jackstar7]

Looks like my upgrade path remains clear for the coming year: don't upgrade.

Very curious to see where this comes out. If AMD goes for absolute bang/buck, they could inspire me to give it a try if it's something akin to the 5000/6000 series.

 

[Bacon1]

I got 100fps at 1080p

101fps at 1440p

66fps at 4k

Same settings of course.

Tested with 1080ti ftw3@2050mhz

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6k41et/vega_running_witcher_3_100_in_city_ultra_1080p/djj92eg/

Looks to be CPU bound since this guy got ~100 fps at both 1080 and 1440p and same fps as the guy testing Vega and also the 980 Ti test we've seen here.

Why not 1440p and 4k testing <.<

 

[wanderica]

Yeah. It's bewildering. Something is REALLY wrong somewhere. I hope RX Vega is going to be another Ryzen style surprise in a month however implausible that seems to be. Ryzen did improve *a lot* with a month of tweaking...

Just one more month to see if Vega gets to join R600 and NV30. In these architecture's defenses, R600/Terascale gave us the excellent HD4000-6000 series and NV30/CineFX was fixed to perform really well on the 6000 and 7000 series cards. A bad first step doesn't mean doom for the entire effort, just a crappy first year until it's fixed in a future product.

I bashed AMD earlier in this thread mostly for their marketing of this thing, but after thinking on it, I believe you're correct here. There's got to be something off with this. It just doesn't add up. I couldn't guess what that is, though, unless the gaming drivers for FE were so last minute that they missed a huge bug.

On the other hand, this isn't a "whoops" moment for AMD. They know full well (and have for months) the true performance of Vega. If the RX version is so much better, then why is FE so bad? I can't believe (even with the caliber of AMD's marketing team) that they would be stupid enough to let a $1000 card out the door as a flagship, no less, unless it was all they could manage. I hope I'm wrong, as I prefer AMD, and have since my 6950s, but if this is truly the best Vega FE has to offer, then I don't see this ending in anything less than disappointment for many AMD hopefulls.

 

[swilli89]

I bashed AMD earlier in this thread mostly for their marketing of this thing, but after thinking on it, I believe you're correct here. There's got to be something off with this. It just doesn't add up. I couldn't guess what that is, though, unless the gaming drivers for FE were so last minute that they missed a huge bug.

On the other hand, this isn't a "whoops" moment for AMD. They know full well (and have for months) the true performance of Vega. If the RX version is so much better, then why is FE so bad? I can't believe (even with the caliber of AMD's marketing team) that they would be stupid enough to let a $1000 card out the door as a flagship, no less, unless it was all they could manage. I hope I'm wrong, as I prefer AMD, and have since my 6950s, but if this is truly the best Vega FE has to offer, then I don't see this ending in anything less than disappointment for many AMD hopefulls.

My bet is the Vega FE cards have early silicon with a bad stepping, some critical flaw that was patched in BIOS/Drivers with a large performance penalty, thus delaying the retail RX Vega cards for a new stepping to build enough quantity to ship to AIBs, whilst the older flawed stepping stock was quickly gobbled up internally by AMD to create an emergency "Prosumer" card which wouldn't be hurt as much by the performance penalty. Just a thought but didn't some industry insiders tweet AMD intentionally delayed Vega and that it was a bold yet worthwhile move? This could be it.

 

[Armsdealer]

Stages of grief going through this thread... As for the denial, higher r&d spend doesn't translate into a better product, it translates into amd having an actual product at nodes that are extraordinarily expensive to develop products for. 14nm chips cost manyfold more to develop than 28nm. It's a miracle amd is in the game at all. Vega simply does suck. The good news about gpu is the industry dynamics are turning very favorable. It's gone from being a dying industry (dgpu is going to be replaced by integrated) where the number one player was trying to push out the number two player, to one that's actually growing very rapidly due to datacenter and now the number one player wants margins and market expansion more than they want share. If AMD can create a good offering nvidia will form a duopoly with them because there is consensus that the industry is growing. AMD is going to endure in gpu and this product - as raja said at an analyst day recently - was developed while the mindset was that of two years back: that dgpu didn't have a bright future. Now with the financial markets understanding very well that gpu is a 10 year growth story (machine learning, vr) amd will refocus and I'm sure they'll do better in the future.

 

[railven]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6k41et/vega_running_witcher_3_100_in_city_ultra_1080p/djj92eg/

Looks to be CPU bound since this guy got ~100 fps at both 1080 and 1440p and same fps as the guy testing Vega and also the 980 Ti test we've seen here.

Why not 1440p and 4k testing <.<

Think the guy that was live streaming was doing 4K and was getting in the 40-45 range.


Gonna wait for more info, and more importantly RX Vega, but the sails on my ship have deflated.

EDIT:

Yeah then he ran Witcher 3 again to test (with no difference) and I noticed he had vsync on as well. It must have been running triple buffering.

The video definitely looked janky. I tuned off at that point. Made me realize AMD just put out their newest GPU and I'm watching some live streamer for morsels of info. Twas not a good showing.

 

[Cloudfire777]

So Vega FE is about 20-30% faster than Fury X, with 20-30% higher clock, where the heck are the architectural advantages Raja have been speaking about?

IPC seem pretty much unchanged from Fiji. Isnt that disastrous I dont know what.

Power draw is still in the air but that high TDP also suggest no change here.

So what is the point of Vega?

 

[richaron]

So Vega FE is about 20-30% faster than Fury X, with 20-30% higher clock, where the heck are the architectural advantages Raja have been speaking about?

IPC seem pretty much unchanged from Fiji. Isnt that disastrous I dont know what.

Power draw is still in the air but that high TDP also suggest no change here.

So what is the point of Vega?

I guess some people will use good logic to come to bad conclusions. And it's surprising how often those conclusions are negative

Obviously the performance figures are off and the assumption IPC is unchanged from Fiji is wrong. But sure, instead you ask "what is the point of Vega?".

 

[DDH]

To say that the current performance figures in games of Vega FE arnt disappointing would be a lie.

But having said that, the biggest mistake I see AMD making in all of this is not controlling the narrative around the Vega FE launch. Right now we have a couple of random people with FE doing benchmarks, and that is it! No sort of control that we know of, so many uncertainties, all relayed through back channels. Reddit with its prepubescent emotional maturity has gone rabid.

AMD should have given some cards to reviewers with the the clear instruction to benchmark some games, sure, but also benchmark the performance metrics for the target audience. And emphasise that it is a pro card!

Most pro cards probably dont get this kind of scrutiny. The reviews are hard to come by and usually dont peak the interest of gaming enthusiasts. But as soon as they knew the FE was going to be released a full month prior to their gaming variant they should have realised the impact this would have on the community, and the narrative surrounding the launch. Right now its almost toxic. People are saying its the same as a 1080, but with much more power draw. That it doesnt even stack up to fiji, had fiji been running the same clocks. That the performance is in between a 1070 and a 1080!

As a publicly listed company, perception and image are so very important. Maybe the enthusiast community is small fry compared to the target audience and they dont care. But IMO if they had that attitude, that is a slap in the face to all stock holders.

 

[SpaceBeer]

I don't see where Vega FE failed? It is between P4000 and P5000, with price closer to the first one, and performance to the latter. For sure it is better offer than $1500 Pro Duo (Fiji) and maybe even $1000 Pro Duo (Polaris)

IIRC, gaming cards had 10-15% better performance in games than pro cards (same arch) with same compute power (TFlops). Though I doubt RX Vega will have better clocks, so TFlops will probably remain the same as on FE.

This is also the first time (IIRC) we see Pro card is released before gaming version when new architecture is presented. So I'm quite sure it was/is due to software(driver) issues

 

[exquisitechar]

I don't see where Vega FE failed? It is between P4000 and P5000, with price closer to the first one, and performance to the latter. For sure it is better offer than $1500 Pro Duo (Fiji) and maybe even $1000 Pro Duo (Polaris)

IIRC, gaming cards had 10-15% better performance in games than pro cards (same arch) with same compute power (TFlops). Though I doubt RX Vega will have better clocks, so TFlops will probably remain the same as on FE.

This is also the first time (IIRC) we see Pro card is released before gaming version when new architecture is presented. So I'm quite sure it was/is due to software(driver) issues

It's a massive failure of an architecture if this is all it can do.

Still seeing rumors that the FE is far below RX Vega's performance. As a potential buyer, I certainly hope so, but I don't know what could be holding the FE back so much. I'm not expecting much...

 

[french toast]

I don't see where Vega FE failed? It is between P4000 and P5000, with price closer to the first one, and performance to the latter. For sure it is better offer than $1500 Pro Duo (Fiji) and maybe even $1000 Pro Duo (Polaris)

IIRC, gaming cards had 10-15% better performance in games than pro cards (same arch) with same compute power (TFlops). Though I doubt RX Vega will have better clocks, so TFlops will probably remain the same as on FE.

This is also the first time (IIRC) we see Pro card is released before gaming version when new architecture is presented. So I'm quite sure it was/is due to software(driver) issues

. Even if this were true and amd could extract 15℅ higher performance from gaming drivers this is not nearly enough I'm afraid.

Yes they could cut their margins right down and make it a great perf per £ card, but that would be a hollow victory and would make them look horrible on a technical basis vs essentially a 15 month old dx11 era Pascal uarch.

Let's face it there is not enough rops here, not enough shader engines, probably too few shaders and not enough bandwidth, the 14LPP process is average at best, certainly not on par with tsmc 16nm circa 2016.
Gcn is a high IPC uarch, it is not designed for high frequencies and neither is 14nm lpp, they should have stuck to its strengths rather than the route they seem to have taken.
I'm hoping this is all one big misunderstanding and proper games drivers are going to extract another 35% gaming performance, which with a brand new uarch is probably not impossible, just unlikely.

Very strange these results, something does not add up.

 

[SpaceBeer]

I said FE isn't failure, not what RX will be

It is possible new driver will add 10-15%, but specific optimizations will be needed for more. We know there are many arch. changes, but we can't expect old games are able to utilize those without patches. I think RX Vega might disappoint in gaming benchmarks. So AMD needs at least one or two Vega optimized games where RX Vega is as fast as (or faster than) GTX 1080 Ti, just so people would know what to expect in upcoming games. I suppose it might be possible in DOOM (Vulkan), BF1 (DX12) or Deus EX (DX12), since in those games, Fury X is little bit faster than GTX 1070 in 4K

 

[beginner99]

My bet is the Vega FE cards have early silicon with a bad stepping, some critical flaw that was patched in BIOS/Drivers with a large performance penalty, thus delaying the retail RX Vega cards for a new stepping to build enough quantity to ship to AIBs, whilst the older flawed stepping stock was quickly gobbled up internally by AMD to create an emergency "Prosumer" card which wouldn't be hurt as much by the performance penalty. Just a thought but didn't some industry insiders tweet AMD intentionally delayed Vega and that it was a bold yet worthwhile move? This could be it.

While this sounds like grasping at straws, this theory at least explains a lot. Constant delays and now poor performance and assurances that RX Vega will be faster for gaming. If it actually isn't clearly faster (at least 10%), then we caught them lying again. "bulldozer will have higher IPC".

Another option could be the memory controller. Maybe it has issues with lots of RAM and has to run slower with 16 GB compared to 8 GB on the gaming cards and hence being bandwidth limited.

Anyway it really sounds like a hardware issue the know the can solve. Else how could they claim higher performance for RX Vega? They can't know what they will be able to deliver with drivers. Also said drivers would then just as well work with the FE making both cards equals fast (or slow). So yeah, different stepping makes sense.