AMD could change the entire GPU game with Radeon RX Vega

AMD detailed its upcoming Vega GPU architecture during its recent Financial Analyst Day, announcing their new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, a new ThreadRipper 16C/32T processor, and the beast 32C/64T chip with Epyc.

But for the gamers, I think that the tease of HBCC (High Bandwidth Cache Controller) running on Rise of the Tomb Raider and seeing HBCC disabled and what I'm sure is the Radeon RX Vega running the game at 4K at 57.9FPS average, with 13.7FPS minimum. This puts the RX Vega at the speeds of the GTX 1080 11Gbps, but when HBCC is enabled - holy crap, there is a huge change.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega with HBCC enabled was running ROTT at 76FPS average (up from 57.9FPS without HBCC) but it's the minimum FPS that is where the magic happens: 49.1FPS with HBCC enabled, up from the 13.7FPS without HBCC. This is amazing, especially for enthusiast gamers like myself who want much better minimum FPS performance than brute force maximum FPS.

If you are running a 4K60 display, hitting 4K 60FPS is easy with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but the minimums aren't anywhere near as good as they are with HBCC on Radeon RX Vega. The big problem that we have here is that we now need to see HBCC's performance benefits, if there are any, to other games... all games. Show me PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Battlefield 1, CS:GO, Overwatch - where minimum FPS performance is very important, especially the twitch first-person shooters like CS:GO.

AMD could really nail it with minimum FPS performance for high-end/enthusiast/eSports gamers if they can provide 144FPS minimum and 200FPS average in something like CS:GO, it would benefit 2560x1440 @ 144Hz FreeSync monitor owners, and would be a graphics card that AMD could really push for enthusiasts. The other benefit is that FreeSync panels are considerably cheaper than G-Sync panels in 2560x1440 @ 144Hz, which is another tick for AMD.

We should expect a full unveiling either at Computex in two weeks time, or just after - with a launch before the end of June.