So we were invited by AMD for a sneak peak this weekend to have a hands of experience of their latest and highly anticipated mid-high tier GPU- The AMD Radeon Vega 56. We have all been waiting for AMD to get back in the higher end segment where Nvidia has been going rampant with their cards and pricing and finally they are back.
Note- Both, the Vega 56 and the GTX 1070 were tested on identical rigs, the specs of which are mentioned below:
The real question here, is definitely: Was it worth the wait?Spoiler Warning- IT DEFINITELY WAS WORTH THE WAIT. First let’s talk about the superficial side of things before getting into the specifics. For me personally, the main pulling point of Vega has definitely got to be the consistency it maintains throughout the gameplay period. While the GTX 1070 drops frames in many cases, the Vega has a more consistent framerate which results in a smaller gap between maximum and minimum fps. We were testing with a 2K monitor and while the GTX 1070 was great (I sorta knew what the results were going to be like since I own one of these), I was left thoroughly impressed with the performance of the Vega 56.
Now let’s get into the specifics with the benchmark results and my experience with the card:
Doom
Doom is a very well optimized game overall and while it does favor AMD cards, it’s not shy of pushing on the ‘greener’ side. I play on a 1080p 144 Hz monitor and get about 185-200 fps (Remember: 1080p). Here we were testing the game at 2K Ultra settings and the RX Vega 56 was thoroughly beating the game by an averagely 30 fps difference. And the best part about it, as I have mentioned before, was the consistency of the performance. While the GTX 1070 dipped down to as low as 95 fps in some cases, I din’t really notice the fps of the Vega 56 go below the 130 mark. The maximum frame rate was considerably higher as well, with the Vega peaking at somewhere near 165 and the GTX 1070 peaking at around 140. The average frame rate was of course higher for the Vega as a result of more consistent performance.
Battlefield 1
Battlefield 1 is another well optimized game overall and here we saw a difference of about 20-30 fps averagely which of course is an amazing result. As was the case with Doom, I was again impressed by the consistently good performance rather than just commenting on the average framerate.
Prey
Prey was more of a tie between the two cards with both of them trying to one up the other at various points in the game. It wasn’t noticeable in the moment to moment gameplay, because frame rates were high in both cases.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Now this is an Nvidia favoring game (Or at least from what I know) and the Vega did slightly outperform the GTX 1070 by about 5-10 fps. Sadly we were not able to test the game with hairworks switched On, on the AMD system because having that switched on would cause Geralt to get an instantaneous hair cut and hence it didn’t lose any frames since there was no hair to render.
We are working on getting the graphs and video benchmarks togeher. They will be up shortly after this article goes live. However we do have the synthetic benchmarks which can be sen below.
Sadly, due to lack of time we were not able to benchmark other games like Just Cause 3, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided etc and of course the Esports games like CSGO, DOTA2 etc, but we are going to try to get those numbers as soon as possible.
Concluding:
Overall I think that the RX Vega is definitely a beast and with the recent reveal of AMD’s Vega 64 cards pricing that look extremely favorable for an Indian consumer, the chance for the Vega 56 becoming a GTX 1070 killer is nigh, heck even I am thinking of selling my GTX 1070 and getting one of these.
1 comment