AMD Radeon RX Vega loses to GTX 1080 at 1080p

We're beginning to hear more on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics card, with the TechPowerUp GPU database being updated, and the upcoming Radeon RX Vega is now listed with 'relative performance' results at 1080p against various graphics cards.

TPU's relative performance chart shows the RX Vega being 5% slower than NVIDIA's stock GeForce GTX 1080, and 27% slower than the GTX 1080 Ti, at 1080p. Radeon RX Vega beats the Radeon R9 Fury X by 31%, and is just 11% faster than the GTX 1070 at 1080p. These results should be taken with massive handfuls of salt, and real-world testing will need to happen to ensure we're not being fooled.

The listing shows that AMD has 8GB of HBM2 on a 2048-bit memory bus, with the Vega GPU clocked at 1GHz stock, while it can be boosted up to 1.2GHz in reference form. The 8GB of HBM2 is clocked at 1GHz, and shouldn't be confused with the 11GHz+ on the GDDR5X on the new GTX 1080 11Gbps and GTX 1080 Ti cards because they use GDDR5X compared to the HBM2 tech on AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega.

The card will rock 9.8 TFLOPs of compute performance, which is impressive considering the GTX 1080 Ti has 10.6 TFLOPs of performance. All of this will come in a dual-slot card with a 225W TDP, powered by a 8+6-pin PCIe power connector up. AMD will reportedly have the Radeon RX Vega measuring in at 267mm.

Thoughts on these rumors:

I'm taking these results with a huge grain of salt, but let's just play with what we have here, shall we? If AMD's new Radeon RX Vega graphics card loses to the GTX 1080 at 1080p, that would make sense given it's not a card for 1080p - but for 4K and beyond.

HBM2 will scale incredibly well with high resolutions, but it will be the new High Bandwidth Cache technology inside of Vega that will be the most surprising thing (at least IMO) about the Radeon RX Vega. HBC will allow the 4GB HBM2-based Radeon RX Vega to perform closer to a high-end GeForce 10 series graphics card with 8GB+ of GDDR5X, something you can read more about here.

AMD will most likely focus Radeon RX Vega around 4K and 8K gaming on Quake Champions as well as DOOM, since they've just amplified their relationship with gaming powerhouse Bethesda. Quake Champions is right around the corner, and AMD has been working with id Software and Bethesda on the game - so much so, that we've already seen a purported Radeon RX Vega in a special edition Quake Champions bundle.

AMD needs to absolutely crush NVIDIA at 4K and beyond, where I'm expecting at least 15-20% additional performance over the GTX 1080 Ti at 4K/Ultra graphics in games like Quake Champions, DOOM, Rise of the Tomb Raider, etc. If AMD comes out with a Radeon RX Vega that can't beat NVIDIA's new $699 graphics card, then it needs to be priced ultra competitively... which is going to be very hard for AMD thanks to the exorbitant costs of HBM2.

Additionally, I've been hearing from industry sources that there will be very, very limited numbers of HBM2 for the remainder of the year. I'm hearing numbers of less than 15,000 - which could be extremely bad for AMD's numbers in the high-end discrete GPU market. Maybe that's why we're seeing this beautiful packaging for Radeon RX Vega - as I believe it will be one of the most sought after graphics cards of 2017... no matter what.