AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition performs between Geforce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080

At the end of June, AMD kept its promise to launch the Vega architecture, but it did not happen for gaming enthusiasts. First out was the graphics card Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, which like Nvidia’s Quadro series is aimed at workstations and creators rather than gamers.

This did not stop PC Perspective from buying a graphics card and giving it a thorough review in its test suite, where it falls flat in games. In terms of performance, it is between Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, while it consumes 50 watts more than Nvidia’s worsting models GTX 1080 Ti and Titan XP.

AMD themselves claim that the Radeon RX Vega will be faster than the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition in games. How the company could achieve this with higher clock frequencies can, however, be considered doubtful, as the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition already draws around 300 watts and in PC Perspective’s tests never reaches its maximum clock frequency 1,600 MHz.

Instead, it is speculated that the way forward for AMD Vega are drivers optimized for gaming. Among them it is said that Tile-Based Rasterization, a new old feature in Vega that Nvidia reintroduced with Maxwell, is not enabled in the drivers available today.

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The question of whether the Vega architecture will take AMD back to the performance segment is expected to be answered at Siggraph 2017 on July 30, where the company will announce the game-oriented series Radeon RX Vega.