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...

Even with DrectX12, we probably can't expect any miracles after the results we have just seen. If a driver bang gives a real boost, then the difference between DirectX11 and Directx12 performance could be added as a kind of offset. Had, could, would… No we do not (yet) know it and therefore state the actual state of affairs. We cannot do more than that.

DirectX 12 with "Tom Clancy's The Division"

It's not the wisdom of last resort, but it's still better than Hitman or Raise of the Tomb Raider. After all, the Radeon Vega FE can barely leave the GeForce GTX 1080 behind in the FPS. However, the backlog of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is a good 22%. If you could now press the actual clock from 1269 MHz to a constant 1600 MHz (however), then the Radeon Vega FE would even be very close to the front. But this beat, at least with our version and its cooling, is an illusion. No matter, because it shows at least once the way.

Next, we are interested in the corresponding FPS curve over the course of the entire benchmark run:

Of course, the pure frame times are also an important part of the consideration. That's why we compare all maps as both curve and bar charts. However, we can already see from the curves that apart from the rendering time, the spikes are very similar for all tested maps:

We also use the bars to see the percentage of the different length render intervals. Although the GeForce GTX 1080 has a slightly higher proportion of intervals between 16.2 and 22.2 ms, it is significantly weaker in the range below 22.2 ms and slightly more strongly in the range above 33.3 ms. So here the point goes to the Radeon Vega FE.

This is exactly what we find in the Frametime variances, where the GeForce GTX 1080 also draws the shortest, albeit only narrowly:

In the Unevenness index, the GeForce GTX 1080 is again a tiny touch in front, which may be surprising in the bare bar graphics. Let's leave that first …

.. to give us a more accurate picture of why in the respective individual graphics:

They are small things, but the change between the individual "speed levels" takes place in more places with the Radeon Vega FE than with the GeForce GTX 1080, which subjectively influences the impression a little bit. Experienced players will also feel such transitions, which can be identified in addition to the normal, short-term micro-ruckers. Whining at a higher level, but also not at the highest level.