AMD Drops Hint That Top RX Vega Will Perform Similarly To GTX 1080

AMD’s next-gen Radeon GPUs, called RX Vega, are set to launch at the end of the month in Los Angeles, right before the premier graphics conference SIGGRAPH kicks-off. While we’ve been hearing about Vega straight from AMD’s mouth for quite some time, the closer we get to the launch, the more we wonder about how it will compete against NVIDIA’s GeForce cards.

After hosting the first leg of its RX Vega tour in Budapest, we get a clearer idea of what we should expect from the Polaris follow-up, and depending on your perspective, what you’ll see is either great, expected, or meh.

The demo PCs at this event were equipped with the top RX Vega GPU (that’s an assumption; it seems unlikely that AMD would have an even faster GPU and not use it given what’s at stake), as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080, revealing its overall placement in the grand scheme of things. We’d assume that the RX Vega beat out the GTX 1080 overall (it’s not often we see competitors brag about equal performance). It’s not the 1080 Ti parity some hoped for, but it’s still good.

Based on the GTX 1080’s performance, the top RX Vega chip would be overkill for 1080p (unless 144Hz is the goal), excellent for 1440p, great for 3440×1440, and good for 4K (reference table found on this page).

Even if the GTX 1080 were NVIDIA’s top chip right now, AMD does face some other potential obstacles with this launch. From the benchmarking folks who’ve managed to score a Vega Frontier Edition, which is said to perform on par with a GTX 1070, power consumption on Vega isn’t as efficient as NVIDIA’s.

When the folks at PC Perspective benchmarked Vega FE, they found that its stated peak TPD of 300W was accurate. With gaming performance comparable to the 150W GTX 1070, though, some obvious issues for gamers arises. If RX Vega’s top chip is faster in gaming than the Vega FE, it stands to reason it’d use even more power, increasing the delta between it and the 180W GTX 1080 further.

Credit: PC Perspective

That all said, even if RX Vega draws more power than NVIDIA, pricing can dictate the winner. And this all assumes that this is accurate. It could be that the Vega FE is in fact a horrible gauge of RX Vega gaming performance. The good thing is that we’ll know for sure in just a couple of short weeks.