it all started out innocently enough in late june of this year we asked AMD for
a sample of the vega frontier edition we
were hoping that we could compare it against the titan xp and gtx 1080 ti
that back then cost a bit more and a bit less respectively and also use it to
guestimate the performance of the then upcoming rx vega
so why are we finally publishing this video
today well buckle up my friends because it's kind
of a long story and that story is brought to you by
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so AMD declined our sample request for frontier edition that happens sometimes
and it's fine now sometimes companies do this because
they don't want press looking too closely at a product but other times
it's for perfectly legitimate reasons either way it piqued our curiosity so we
put on our big boy pants ordered one for ourselves and a week later tore it out
of its box to bask in its blue brushed
aluminum and tacky yellow glowing
glory but what else is there in the box well
there's some foam and this weird booklet of like kickstartery promotional
material that's strangely for the product that we just already bought i
mean look at this stuff oh and
they are people who boundaries as starting lines did anyone even proofread
this the box might not seem important but this was actually a pretty pivotal point
in our experience with the frontier edition
because this was when we realized just how rushed and poorly thought out this
product was and it actually went downhill from there
we set up our closed GPU test bench downloaded the only available driver
that was on AMD's site up until it finally got an update over three months
later in october and fired up our blender test suite where vega ended up
on the bottom in the bmw and classroom tests then all the way on top in the
fishy cat test making it at best inconsistent and at worst
oh so at this point we ddu'ed and
reinstalled the driver but no joy there
and even tried switching to gaming mode in the dual mode driver which
also didn't help okay then
so since we're in gaming mode what about gaming unigin's super position and 3d
mark score saw it get absolutely spanked by the 700 1080 ti
and then the butt paddling continued in both deus ex mankind divided and rise of
the tomb raider at 4k in both directx 11 and directx 12 modes so between the
performance the stability the thermal throttling and the power
consumption the whole experience up to that point had frankly been super balls
at this point we were certain of just two things one was that vega frontier
edition existed only to cater to hardcore AMD fans
with what felt like it was an overpriced slap in the face
and two that rx vega was going to be a power
hungry dog at the rumored pricing
now throughout this we hadn't heard back from AMD about our problems so we forged
ahead and then just as our video was getting ready to be published actually
while i was down at AMD checking out their vega supercomputer demo they told
us well hey guys we think it's unfair of you to judge
vega's gaming performance on frontier
because raja kaduri posted in a reddit thread somewhere that it wasn't for
gaming and that our benchmark suite
wasn't showing frontier strength because workloads like blender didn't benefit
from its workstation dna and we didn't include enough scientific performance
analysis so what they offered was to give us some
help with the second part of it if we held off publishing the video to ensure
we were doing it properly okay fair enough then i guess but weeks
and then months passed and that help didn't materialize then while we sat
there waiting rx vega launched with
performance that put frontier neck and neck with vega 64 exactly as we'd
expected and laid out in our original script for this video and it makes
perfect sense other than color the only
differences between them are the driver the frame buffer size frontier edition's
higher bass and boost clocks and a locked maximum fan speed of 40
so i'm not gonna mince words we felt cheated as a customer remember we bought
this stupid thing for a thousand dollars and manipulated as press because it
seemed as though our video got buried to
prevent the negative pr from raining on rx vegas parade
and we made these feelings clear to AMD who renewed their commitment to helping
us benchmark frontier edition properly but
in the back of our minds what we wondered was if they were just
hoping that we would just forget about publishing a video about a months old
and now very irrelevant product and focus on their shiny new wx 9100
workstation card no such luck
so then for the first of two AMD
recommended benchmarks we'll be looking at spec uprf 12.1 a collection of 3ds
max maya solidworks and other workloads
for which AMD says frontier edition is optimized
and actually okay frontier edition does pull out
ahead of vega 64 and even gtx 1080 ti in
particular wherever edges are used in the rendering pipeline and in the memory
shredding scientific energy and medical tests
the titan xp though blows them all away
to see how much of this performance comes from the workstation driver path
we switched the driver mode to gaming where interestingly frontier ends up
well below vega 64 levels of performance
so it's clear that unless your loads specifically benefit from
gigs of vram any advantage to frontier is purely a
software switch though to be clear we aren't singling
out AMD for this behavior team green's titan and quadro lineups are
differentiated from g-force in a very similar manner
and to AMD's credit frontier's positioning as a sort of workstation
card like the original titan sparked a response from NVIDIA to give titan xp
back some of the professional features that they had removed over the years so
kudos for that the second of our two AMD recommended
benchmarks monero mining uses the vega
optimized cast xmr miner and AMD's beta
blockchain optimized driver and here we are actually greeted with
excellent results of up to 1.85 kilo hashes per second
though that quickly drops to 1.5 once thermal throttling kicks in
i do believe a driver fix unlocking fan speed is coming but until then even a
vega 56 outperforms frontier edition significantly
so then is vega frontier edition a legitimate
product or was it like an early access game with
day one dlc a beta where you pay AMD for
the privilege of reporting bugs and third-party software incompatibilities
like those blender crashes while they polish the real product wx9100
on paper frontier kind of makes sense it
gets more RAM and some workstation features compared to a consumer card and
that's for half of the price of the higher end workstation card that gives
you ecc memory support frame lock gen lock stereo 3d and far more professional
application certifications but in the real world wx 9100 street
pricing has fallen to just fifteen hundred dollars already for the
full-fledged vega experience and frontier's actual value add over a
regular gaming card is pretty limited
leaving us in no man's land unless we're concerned
with and only with some pretty specific
use cases i mean even AMD only managed to come up with one
benchmark that actually demonstrated its value for
us so then
if AMD had positioned frontier as a developer kit like the oculus dk1 or dk2
and even if it was paid and expensive
but available to developers like through their website we wouldn't be having this
conversation but as it is whatever they posted on reddit months
ago their actions were to put this product on sale to consumers in the
consumer channel even going as far as to bundle quake champions crap with the
water cooled version get upset when we wanted to talk about why it was a stupid
product for consumers then come up with only a couple of
pretty flimsy reasons why we shouldn't be pissed about the performance of our
castrated wx that we bought instead of a titan xp which incidentally would game
better in our spare time and consume less power
smells like early access to me i think the right way to fix this is for
AMD to just discontinue this thing and
even if it doesn't help the AMD enthusiast gamers out there who got
sucked into it turn around and unlock as
many of the wx 9100 features as they can
for the people out there who have them
what do you guys think we really do want to hear from you in the comments
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