Early Access Hardware – The Problem With AMD Vega Frontier Edition
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,746 words · ~8 min read
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it all started out innocently enough in late june of this year we asked AMD for
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a sample of the vega frontier edition we
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were hoping that we could compare it against the titan xp and gtx 1080 ti
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that back then cost a bit more and a bit less respectively and also use it to
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guestimate the performance of the then upcoming rx vega
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so why are we finally publishing this video
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today well buckle up my friends because it's kind
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so AMD declined our sample request for frontier edition that happens sometimes
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and it's fine now sometimes companies do this because
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they don't want press looking too closely at a product but other times
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it's for perfectly legitimate reasons either way it piqued our curiosity so we
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put on our big boy pants ordered one for ourselves and a week later tore it out
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of its box to bask in its blue brushed
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aluminum and tacky yellow glowing
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glory but what else is there in the box well
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there's some foam and this weird booklet of like kickstartery promotional
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material that's strangely for the product that we just already bought i
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mean look at this stuff oh and
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they are people who boundaries as starting lines did anyone even proofread
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this the box might not seem important but this was actually a pretty pivotal point
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in our experience with the frontier edition
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because this was when we realized just how rushed and poorly thought out this
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product was and it actually went downhill from there
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we set up our closed GPU test bench downloaded the only available driver
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that was on AMD's site up until it finally got an update over three months
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later in october and fired up our blender test suite where vega ended up
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on the bottom in the bmw and classroom tests then all the way on top in the
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fishy cat test making it at best inconsistent and at worst
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oh so at this point we ddu'ed and
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reinstalled the driver but no joy there
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and even tried switching to gaming mode in the dual mode driver which
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also didn't help okay then
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so since we're in gaming mode what about gaming unigin's super position and 3d
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mark score saw it get absolutely spanked by the 700 1080 ti
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and then the butt paddling continued in both deus ex mankind divided and rise of
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the tomb raider at 4k in both directx 11 and directx 12 modes so between the
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performance the stability the thermal throttling and the power
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consumption the whole experience up to that point had frankly been super balls
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at this point we were certain of just two things one was that vega frontier
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edition existed only to cater to hardcore AMD fans
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with what felt like it was an overpriced slap in the face
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and two that rx vega was going to be a power
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hungry dog at the rumored pricing
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now throughout this we hadn't heard back from AMD about our problems so we forged
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ahead and then just as our video was getting ready to be published actually
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while i was down at AMD checking out their vega supercomputer demo they told
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us well hey guys we think it's unfair of you to judge
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vega's gaming performance on frontier
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because raja kaduri posted in a reddit thread somewhere that it wasn't for
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gaming and that our benchmark suite
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wasn't showing frontier strength because workloads like blender didn't benefit
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from its workstation dna and we didn't include enough scientific performance
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analysis so what they offered was to give us some
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help with the second part of it if we held off publishing the video to ensure
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we were doing it properly okay fair enough then i guess but weeks
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and then months passed and that help didn't materialize then while we sat
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there waiting rx vega launched with
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performance that put frontier neck and neck with vega 64 exactly as we'd
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expected and laid out in our original script for this video and it makes
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perfect sense other than color the only
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differences between them are the driver the frame buffer size frontier edition's
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higher bass and boost clocks and a locked maximum fan speed of 40
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so i'm not gonna mince words we felt cheated as a customer remember we bought
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this stupid thing for a thousand dollars and manipulated as press because it
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seemed as though our video got buried to
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prevent the negative pr from raining on rx vegas parade
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and we made these feelings clear to AMD who renewed their commitment to helping
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us benchmark frontier edition properly but
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in the back of our minds what we wondered was if they were just
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hoping that we would just forget about publishing a video about a months old
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and now very irrelevant product and focus on their shiny new wx 9100
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workstation card no such luck
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so then for the first of two AMD
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recommended benchmarks we'll be looking at spec uprf 12.1 a collection of 3ds
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max maya solidworks and other workloads
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for which AMD says frontier edition is optimized
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and actually okay frontier edition does pull out
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ahead of vega 64 and even gtx 1080 ti in
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particular wherever edges are used in the rendering pipeline and in the memory
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shredding scientific energy and medical tests
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the titan xp though blows them all away
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to see how much of this performance comes from the workstation driver path
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we switched the driver mode to gaming where interestingly frontier ends up
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well below vega 64 levels of performance
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so it's clear that unless your loads specifically benefit from
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gigs of vram any advantage to frontier is purely a
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software switch though to be clear we aren't singling
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out AMD for this behavior team green's titan and quadro lineups are
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differentiated from g-force in a very similar manner
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and to AMD's credit frontier's positioning as a sort of workstation
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card like the original titan sparked a response from NVIDIA to give titan xp
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back some of the professional features that they had removed over the years so
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kudos for that the second of our two AMD recommended
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benchmarks monero mining uses the vega
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optimized cast xmr miner and AMD's beta
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blockchain optimized driver and here we are actually greeted with
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excellent results of up to 1.85 kilo hashes per second
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though that quickly drops to 1.5 once thermal throttling kicks in
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i do believe a driver fix unlocking fan speed is coming but until then even a
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vega 56 outperforms frontier edition significantly
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so then is vega frontier edition a legitimate
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product or was it like an early access game with
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day one dlc a beta where you pay AMD for
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the privilege of reporting bugs and third-party software incompatibilities
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like those blender crashes while they polish the real product wx9100
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on paper frontier kind of makes sense it
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gets more RAM and some workstation features compared to a consumer card and
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that's for half of the price of the higher end workstation card that gives
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you ecc memory support frame lock gen lock stereo 3d and far more professional
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application certifications but in the real world wx 9100 street
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pricing has fallen to just fifteen hundred dollars already for the
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full-fledged vega experience and frontier's actual value add over a
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regular gaming card is pretty limited
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leaving us in no man's land unless we're concerned
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with and only with some pretty specific
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use cases i mean even AMD only managed to come up with one
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benchmark that actually demonstrated its value for
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us so then
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if AMD had positioned frontier as a developer kit like the oculus dk1 or dk2
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and even if it was paid and expensive
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but available to developers like through their website we wouldn't be having this
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conversation but as it is whatever they posted on reddit months
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ago their actions were to put this product on sale to consumers in the
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consumer channel even going as far as to bundle quake champions crap with the
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water cooled version get upset when we wanted to talk about why it was a stupid
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product for consumers then come up with only a couple of
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pretty flimsy reasons why we shouldn't be pissed about the performance of our
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castrated wx that we bought instead of a titan xp which incidentally would game
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better in our spare time and consume less power
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smells like early access to me i think the right way to fix this is for
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AMD to just discontinue this thing and
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even if it doesn't help the AMD enthusiast gamers out there who got
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sucked into it turn around and unlock as
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many of the wx 9100 features as they can
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for the people out there who have them
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