We've already taken a look at the excellent Radeon RX Vega 56, the cut-down version of the full-fat graphics card reviewed here today - and it's a winner. A couple of outliers aside, it's as fast as Nvidia's GTX 1070 or significantly faster and it easily overclocks to push further ahead. It's AMD at its best - competitive, disruptive and adding value - but the same can't quite be said for the RX Vega 64. It's a good product overall and it's competitive enough with Nvidia, but it offers no knockout blow - in the here and now, at least.
But what's perhaps more concerning about the card is the fact that AMD has created an immensely powerful piece of kit with a raft of new features that - by and large - seem to be underutilised. The Radeon Technology Team have handed in the most fully featured DX12 GPU available on the market, etched onto a slice of silicon that's marginally larger than the GP102 processor within the latest Nvidia Titan, pairing it with the most expensive, state-of-the-art memory system money can buy. On paper at least, the architectural advances and sheer area consumed by Vega should be delivering a considerable generational leap, but real world performance doesn't seem to match the promise.
In terms of basic spec, Vega 64 is very closely matched to the outgoing R9 Fury X, based on the Fiji processor. There are the same 4096 stream processors spread across 64 compute units (or 'new' CUs in the later model). There's a similar complement of 256 texture units and 64 ROPs. However, Vega ups its transistor count by around 40 per cent, while increasing clocks by a factor of around 40 to 50 per cent (max boost clock is a variable, compared to Fury X's rock-solid 1050MHz). Curiously though, there is a spec downgrade: Fury X's 4096-bit memory bus handed in 512GB/s of memory bandwidth from its HBM memory. Vega 64 uses much faster HBM2, but cuts the bus in half, so there's drop of around 5.5 per cent in bandwidth. It shouldn't impact performance too much and it has the benefit of reducing the footprint of the memory controllers within the processor.
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