AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition review: Hiking between the worlds

This means that it is already in the approximate, where AMD actually wants to go. While Nvidia has to be careful not to cannibalize its own sister card, the Quadro P6000, AMD does not (currently) have an in-house sister, which can be used with it. With Vega, AMD is now offering a new generation of GPUs that will have received over 200 changes and improvements in the redesign of the architecture. Even if in the end it probably boils down to a kind of new GCN generation: AMD emphasizes that the... Disassembly and radiator details Removing the upper hee cover requires some suitable tools. With a small Torx screwdriver (T5), the six small swivels that hold this cover can be turned out.... Board layout AMD has definitely thought a little bit about the division of the board, especially since the elimination of the external memory modules opens up new possibilities. Exactly in their place you now place the individual power supplies. We... Foreword to the application benchmarks Why we use the Quadro P6000 as a counterpart and not the Titan XP or GeForce GTX 1080 Ti certainly has several reasons, which we have already partially mentioned on the first page. In addition, there is nat... Cheat as you cheat can? It's easy to explain why we've changed our benchmark selection slightly compared to the recently released CPU tests. Since we have to compare several graphics cards from different manufacturers, it falls... Gaming with a "Prosumer" card? Yes, but... AMD itself says that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is not an explicitly gaming graphics card, but you can still do so with it. Another problem arises ... Even with DrectX12, we probably can't expect any miracles after the results we have just seen. Should a driver bang give a real boost, then the difference between DirectX11 and Directx12 performance could still be ... DirectX12 and Doom in the window The game Volcano vs. OpenGL 4.5 has been interesting for a long time when it comes to testing Doom. Annoyingly, the Creators Update of Windows again presented us with problems when it comes to the perfor... Power consumption at a glance We measure a value of 14 watts for the card in the idle, which is so okay in view of the scope of performance, even if we had hoped for a little less. But you can really live with that. For the multi-monitor... Temperature curve and clock rate The fan control is quite conservative, so that the maximum temperature of 84°C (short-term also up to 85°C) is reached relatively quickly. But then the card already has approx. 10% of their performance from the cold... Summary There was once a film called "The Great Bluff" - a classic in which you didn't really know who died in whose arms and who gets whom in the end. So either AMD has all enjoyed over a year on the nose ring...

Summary

There was once a film called "The Great Bluff" – a classic in which you didn't really know who died in whose arms and who gets whom in the end. So either AMD has happily led everyone around the nose ring for over a year and unleashed completely new performance storms with a dsbr (Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer) with the driver expected at the end of July for the Radeon RX Vega. ) or after all the hot hours of the last few months, it will be nothing more than a balmy evening wind. At the moment, however, we cannot and do not want to judge this, but see today's test merely as an inventory, which, however, has already been somewhat ambivalent.

Let's start with the credit page. AMD deliberately does not market the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition as a gamer card. How one may now see this in context with the above paragraph is up to everyone. But what she can do is work well. Leaving aside the dead-optimized mainstream benchmarks, the Frontier Edition offers itself in some of the tested full versions as a true workstation graphics card with clean OpenGL support and decent color depth, which is then also available in the OpenGL overlay Works. Unfortunately, this feature is not available with Nvidia's Titan XP, as it is limited to DirectX only.

We were really surprised by the performance in this area, because it's a niche where you could put even significantly more expensive competitor cards with a similar feature set in trouble. Of course, always provided that the Radeon Pro drivers also play along. Even if AMD doesn't call it that, the Vega FE is actually a kind of real WX card and not a semi-cooked hybrid between workstation and gaming.

You can only get it by donating the janus-headed driver for both to the card. This gaming part is actually only in the activation of other features such as the gaming profiles, Wattman & Co. and this driver cocktail can also convince professional applications to collaborate thanks to the Radeon Pro switch.

That's what gaming does, but you'll probably have to practice something at AMD. We can't and don't want to miss out on more, because nobody knows what's going to happen with the Radeon RX Vega and possible great drivers. If we are to be honest, we were already expecting a little more. But perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised.

But so it is with the gaming performance, which even in many cases narrowly misses a GeForce GTX 1080, as with a hyped long jump star, who even needs 10 meters to stand: one admires a steeled body, but waits and waits for the Knot finally bursts.

Conclusion

The conclusion is difficult, because we cannot judge anything that (possibly) is yet to come (or not). But: A fast workstation card with a "gaming-can-it-also" approach already has a certain charm. This is especially true, especially if it is still priced in the right way. As an enthusiast card for the well-heeled gamer, it is nothing, but it is already suitable for work if you belong to the target group.

And if one of the favorite pro applications on the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition still works really well, even if you're not a "prosumer", then it's almost a bargain. Full driver support for a fraction of the competitor prices – at least in this way, the flight into the niche can also become a successful flight forward. Well, at least could, because in the end it is still the customer who decides.

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