AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Benchmarked

AMD, the disruptor of the status quo.

Competition is always good, and AMD has been quite the disruptor lately. The Intel-dominated enthusiast processor market, which has been stagnant for a while in the absence of a worthy competitor, finally received a much-needed jolt when AMD launched its Ryzen series of processors for both mainstream and high-end platforms. This has in turn, forced Intel to cut prices and rethink its strategy and processor offerings for these same platforms. Consumers win.

It’s similar for graphics cards, arguably the next most important component of any computer, where NVIDIA has had the luxury of running the playground all by itself with its GeForce GTX 10-series GPUs for over a year. Now, AMD is hoping that its new flagship Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics cards can give NVIDIA’s equivalent within the price segment, the GeForce GTX 1080 a run for its money and hopefully, give cause for NVIDIA to look behind their shoulders nervously as they had done to Intel.

Will they? We shall find out from the performance results in the next couple of pages. But first, let’s look at the card.

We have already covered the specifications and pricing details of the Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card in-depth previously, so we won’t be repeating those here. If you haven't had a chance to catch up on those matters, we encourage you to read them first. Onwards we go to reveal our performance findings on the next page!

Test Setup

The detailed specifications of the graphics card testbed system used are as follow:

• Intel Core i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz
• ASUS Maximus IX Hero (Intel Z270 chipset) motherboard
• 2 x 8GB Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4
• Plextor PX 256GB M8Pe solid state drive M9 (OS + benchmark + games)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gbps hard drive (general storage)
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

As previously mentioned, the Radeon RX Vega 64 is made to stand toe to toe with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. Besides the Founders Edition of that card, we have also included the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition cards and the Radeon RX 480 too. The idea is to give us a good gauge and comparison of where AMD’s flagship card stands in the competition pool. Both the RX 480 and RX Vega 64 cards used are also reference boards, so all the cards here run at their default specifications – without any factory tinkering that you’d expect from third-party cards.

For all benchmarks, the driver version used for all NVIDIA graphics cards is ForceWare 385.28. It is worth noting that the newer Crimson ReLive 17.8.2 driver was not available for the RX 480 at this point of writing.

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (ForceWare 385.28)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (ForceWare 385.28)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X (ForceWare 385.28)
• AMD RX 480 (Crimson ReLive 17.7.2)
• AMD RX Vega 64 (Crimson ReLive 17.8.2)
  
   

Benchmarks

The benchmarks we are using include the regular staples such as the latest 3DMark (2016), VRMark and a handful of the latest DirectX 12-based games. They are as follows:-

• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Ashes of the Singularity
• Total War: Warhammer
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Ghost Recon: Wildlands
• Gears of War 4

3DMark (2016)

In 3DMark, the results for all three GTX 10-series cards were as expected, with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti holding on to its crown. But it’s really the fight between the GeForce GTX 1080 and Radeon RX Vega 64 that we are interested in, and we can see the AMD card edging out the former in most of the tests except for Time Spy, a DirectX 12 focused test. We suspect this could be due to driver optimization issues on the part of AMD. Which also begets a question; are we possibly not seeing the full potential of the RX Vega 64 yet?

VRMark

Virtual Reality is still a relatively niche gaming platform, but both NVIDIA and AMD have been talking up about their respective cards as being optimized (in terms of power) for VR gaming. So how does the Radeon RX Vega 64 compare, to the one-year older GeForce GTX 1080 and even its sibling, the Radeon RX 480?

The Orange Room benchmark is a litmus test of your computer’s ability to meet the recommended hardware requirements for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift – the two most popular VR headset systems today. All the cards performed well, and choosing any of them will guarantee you a good VR experience. You will be forgiven for being surprised at the parity of FPS scores between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti cards, but this is due to the performance ceiling of our test system; 230fps or there about is pretty much the limit here. But if we must nitpick, then we must say the RX Vega 64 trailing behind the GTX 1080 was surprising, considering it did outperform the latter in the previous 3DMark benchmark.

The Blue Room is a much more demanding test. It's ideal for benchmarking top-end graphic cards such as the RX Vega 64, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. Blue Room benchmark is unique in that it sets the bar for future hardware generations (sort of a way to see how future proof your hardware is), with its massive 5K rendering resolution and spectacular volumetric lighting effects. It’s here that we see the RX Vega 64 not that far behind the GTX 1080.

With that said, if you are looking for a graphics card to pair with your HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, you can’t go wrong with the RX Vega 64 or even any of the other graphics cards tested here.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The first of our real-world gaming benchmark, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a popular third-person shooter game by Crystal Dynamics, Eidos. We ran it under a ‘Very High’ video setting, and now we see the RX Vega 64 lagging behind the GTX 1080, even if by a bit. What’s interesting is that while it seems to fall slightly behind the GTX 1080 at lower resolutions, the RX Vega 64 is very much on par with that card at 3,840 x 2,160 (or 4K) resolution.

Ashes of the Singularity

AMD-based GPUs have typically fared well in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks because the game takes advantage of asynchronous compute/shading in DirectX 12, which are available in recent Radeon cards – including the RX Vega 64. The GTX 1080 is fully capable of asynchronous computing too, but NVIDIA’s technique differs from AMD and does not work as well for certain games like Ashes of the Singularity.

This is very apparent if you look at the results between the RX 480 and the GTX 1060, where the disparity in performance (despite the small difference in memory) is quite large. So, it is a tad strange to see the RX Vega 64 not gaining any sizeable leads against the GTX 1080, even though it did score a slightly faster result at 1440p resolution. Again, and we are being presumptuous here; the current drivers might not yet be doing justice to the RX Vega 64.

Total War: Warhammer

Total War: Warhammer is an AMD Gaming Evolved release, meaning the developers had worked with AMD to improve the game on AMD GPUs. Especially when running on DirectX 12 mode. Here we see for the first time in our games benchmarks, that the RX Vega 64 being faster than the GTX 1080. Surprisingly, it even managed to be on par with the reigning champion GTX 1080 Ti when running at 1080p resolution. Not what we had expected, even for an AMD-optimized game.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided is a hardware demanding game and another AMD Gaming Evolved release, and so it’s not a surprise to see the RX Vega 64 outperforming the GTX 1080 quite convincingly. This time, however, the RX Vega 64 did not even come close to the GTX 1080 Ti.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands

The RX Vega 64 fared less well in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, falling behind the GTX 1080 more than it did in the other benchmarks. At resolutions of 1080p and 1440p, the RX Vega 64 ran between 10-18% slower than its competitor. Why so? That’s because the developers of Ghost Recon: Wildlands had worked with NVIDIA to optimize the game to run better on their GPUs. Ah…

Gears of War 4

Unlike the games tested earlier, Gears of War 4 is GPU agnostic – the game has no marketing or known optimization collaboration with the red nor green camp. Yet, we see the RX Vega 64 once again being edged out by the GTX 1080. But to put things into perspective, the differences are quite minute this time at the 1080p and 1440p resolution tests, with just 7% performance separating both cards. The margin between both cards is even slimmer at 4K resolution.

Closing Thoughts

AMD fans have been waiting for a high-end performance flagship graphic card that can take the fight to NVIDIA for a while now, and it looks like their wish has been granted – if only just so. AMD has positioned the Radeon RX Vega 64 to go head to head with the GeForce GTX 1080, and after having both cards trade blows with each other in our benchmarks, it’s not quite simple to determine if one card is better than the other just based on performance alone.

For one, games (and there are quite a few good titles present and upcoming, to be honest) that have the AMD Evolved Gaming label or logo will run better on the RX Vega 64 than the GTX 1080. Then games such as Ashes of the Singularity, that takes advantage of asynchronous shaders in DirectX 12, will likely run better on the RX Vega 64 too. But on the other hand, games that are optimized for NVIDIA’s GPUs (such as Ghost Recon: Wildlands) will always run better on the GTX 1080. Even 'GPU neutral' games, if we can call it such, is likely to run better on NVIDIA cards as well.

Then there is also this important afterthought: will the Radeon RX Vega 64’s performance improve with future driver releases? It is very likely.

Of course, there are other considerations that we have yet to elaborate upon. For instance, the Radeon RX Vega 64’s higher 295W TDP means that it will draw more power than the GeForce GTX 1080’s far lower 180W TDP. On the other hand, the AMD card also uses superior HBM memory over the GeForce GTX 1080’s slower GDDR5X. It’s the only consumer graphics card that features a technology that’s ahead of its time; known as the High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), it allows a user to assign a part of their system memory that the graphics card can then use as extra cache.

The Radeon RX Vega 64 is a massive step forward for AMD and, even though we do like it, we’d await some driver updates before we give it a final judgment. From a performance point of view, it might not be the perfect competition slaughtering product, but it is close enough to make that difference for the AMD camp.

Should we recommend buying the Radeon RX Vega 64? Now that question brings in the price proposition into play, but unlike the US$499 suggested retail price that it was supposed to stick to, supply shortages have pushed up their retail prices notably. It's quite apparent with its S$999 local price point, which is some way higher than the retail prices of GeForce GTX 1080 based graphics cards. Several overclocked GTX 1080 graphics cards can be had at the price asked of the Radeon RX Vega 64, which means you can get even faster solutions at the about $1k.

If you're an AMD fan who has been looking for a high-end graphics card solution, you're most certainly going to love what Radeon RX Vega 64 offers despite the price-performance consideration. For everyone else, at this juncture, NVIDIA still seems to offer the better proposition locally and is a more sane choice.

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