AMD RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 Review

The latest generation of AMD graphics cards is upon us and we put them to the test to discover if they can challenge nVidia in the way that Ryzen challenged Intel.


AMD RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 Review

Great vid, Really miffed at AMD about this, I wanted a full AMD rig i.e CPU+GPU but the lack of power and over the top power draw have killed all fancy of getting a Vega 64 card

Ryzen was a pure win, Fantastic product, Vega is...well...a big fat fail.

As a side note I did a test on the rig I'm currently using, 1800X overclocked to 4GHz, 16GB 3200MHz, 1080 Ti Strix overclocked to 2050/6000, All fans at full and the max I saw was 450 watts, Briefly, Very disappointing to see such terrible power draw from AMD.

It really paid off reviewing this a little later, im glad you said what needed to be said about the crappy pricing making it noncompetitive.

AMD just struck gold for nVidia. All those people that have been waiting for Vega will now go and buy nVidia cards.

Just complete and utter fail from AMD. If the mining hasn't gone up just before the launch of Vega I really think that AMD graphic division would go bankrupt.

I don't think they can continue like this for much longer. This is their 4th generation of cards that is demolished buy the green team, and the Volta is coming. nVidia will now just refine manufacturing process and continue to rule. In the past AMD offered good budget option, but now they are more expensive, they use 2x more power, they heat up like furnaces, and they offer roughly the same performance. Who in the right mind would buy Vega (apart from the pathological fanboys)?

I'm glad I bought a GTX 1080 when I did

It just puts AMD behind a bit again, that's all.

It's better than where they were I guess. They do now have an upper tear set of cards. But who will pick these up with the increased power draw and heat? Especially with inflated pricing. It just doesn't line up well on the shelf.

I waited, and waited, and waited, then I bought a 1080.

Hopefully the AIBs can do a bit of fun stuff to the boards and come out with some wins.

No pressure on Nvidia to release the Volta consumer adaptations if AMD's best can't get up to the level of last year's cards. Pascal may be it for the next 6-12 months. That's OK I guess. Maxwell/Pascal is a nice and stable platform for nvidia and AMD can use the time to polish their drivers and software.

AMD has started designing things without power consumption in mind. If you stick a waterblock on it and touch up the bios so the max power draw is much higher you would get amazing results, however that's not the point, it basically got raped by the nvidia cards.
Also about that pricing scheme... Why did you do that AMD?!?
Btw I think that the leaders of the RADEON technologies haven't changed in YEARS, I think since cgn 1.0

Just looked on Aria and for the price they have for the 64 you can virtually get any of the 1080 non super oc'd, don't know how correct I am in thinking even aftermarket 56 is going to be close to £500 which would put them in a close enough area to price wise to a 1080 which would be a no brainer

I wouldn't even give it a Gamer's Choice award personally—though it's your award and you know your own system better than I would. This is not the first time I've disagreed with you and it probably won't be the last. At $500/£450/€500, yeah, I would give it, but not at £600.

I wish I had not invested in Freesync and AMD. I just had a look at how much it would cost me to reinvest into a similar Gsync/1080 setup, and it's just so much. Either I'll have to wait six months for Vega to become reasonably priced, wait until Navi, or splurge and go back to Nvidia who is clearly the smarter choice for enthusiasts. Vega offers only one thing: solid performance. It offers nothing else.

Great review and very informative.

I will be honest I was looking forward to Vega, especially with the positive advancements that AMD have made in terms of Ryzen but the Vega 64 card as an overall is a let down. The amount of heat that is being produced and the power consumption is shocking.

I am also very disappointed with what AMD have done with the pricing of the 64, I expected better. I just hope that they manage to redeem themselves where the pricing of the 56 is concerned, but we will see.

I am planning on upgrading my rig soon and as it stands it looks like I will be returning to team green.

Thelosouvlakia said:

AMD has started designing things without power consumption in mind. If you stick a waterblock on it and touch up the bios so the max power draw is much higher you would get amazing results, however that's not the point, it basically got raped by the nvidia cards.
Also about that pricing scheme... Why did you do that AMD?!?
Btw I think that the leaders of the RADEON technologies haven't changed in YEARS, I think since cgn 1.0

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Pretty naive to say honestly. Polaris was a massive step towards lower power consumption. It's not that they don't care, it's just they are so far behind in R&D for there GPU development they cannot compete.

Besides if they didn't care, then explain why Zen is so damn efficient to the point it is extremely close to intel?

Seems like there's nothing special at all about Vega. It's just not worth splashing out that much money on a new card when you don't know what's ahead (like the 970 memory fiasco).
At least with the Nvidia 10 series we know there's probably no surprises in the future. The Vegas might start dying in a few months, or overheating, the new memory could be dodgy.. etc, we just don't know.
It's just not worth it when Nvidia are cheaper (who would have thought!) and have better power management.

Also, if Vega is hitting ~700W at the wall then a lot of people will need new power supplies too, like 1000W, so as not to run at 100% all the time.
They really need a big price drop to make it worth people's while.

NeverBackDown said:

Besides if they didn't care, then explain why Zen is so damn efficient to the point it is extremely close to intel?

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AMD has more in development with CPUs than with GPUs, and it doesn't help that they can't seem to make their mind up on whether or not to have AMD, ATI, Radeon, ATI, Radeon Technologies Group or simply just AMD. It's all a bit confusing.

It's the 290X vs 780/Titan all over again, as Tom said in the video and I can't disagree with the points made it's 2 years too late, too power hungry (doesn't matter about past Polaris announcements or claims of performance per watt it's already failed), too noisy and way too expensive when compared to NVIDIAs offerings. I sincerely hope that AMD do something with the current pricing because as it stands future AIBs are going to sit on shelves gathering dust while team green units continue to fly out.

got lucky

got lucky... snagged a vega for not much more than a price of a 1070, far less than 1080 prices in Australia. There were three pricing schedules I saw in oz... the odd card by itself, cards listed for $200aud more described but with no mention of games or discounts, and the odd combined bundle of gpu, cpu and motherboard. Always route(buy) for the underdog on price/performance, but this time round with the confusion AMD is lucky to get my dough.

I've been watching this whole thing, the warning signs.

No data just broad generalizations as launch time approached.

Statements about "Raja Koduri was not head of this project" originally for this GPU made. Attempting to absolve of responsibility.

Incredibly late to market.

As launch approached the big thing to show off was "Blind" tests of Gsync vs Freesync with no performance data.

AMD begins releasing data on the next GPU Navi

ALL of the above began to paint a picture of what was to come. Now this pricing debacle. This does not bode well for the market over the next 6-8 months at least. We are right back to Nvidia status quo. I suspect team green will now proceed to refresh pascal, with a die shrink. What this means is they can take there sweet time with Volta. The 56 has some potential as a value part, but this was far from anything remotely looking like the leap frog in performance many hoped for. I have a 980 Strix, I also have a freesync monitor and have been waiting for something not a side grade (And also not a furnace) to take advantage of my display. Honestly, I am tempted to take my money instead and buy a Gsync display, then get a new card later.

With Vega AMD has succeeded in making me finally get my wallet out for some overdue big purchases...a G-Sync monitor and a GTX1080.

At this stage I find it hard to trust AMD especially when it comes to anything videocard related, they promise way more than they can deliver and then all you get is a bunch of excuses about being "future proof", by the time their superior future performance kicks in(if it ever even does) I'm already in the market for my next card and don't care anymore.

Such a massive let down, yes they were overhyped but people were really hoping against hope for a great card, instead we get this over power hungry, over priced POS.
I said it before and I'll say it again they NEVER should have stayed with HBM2 they should have gone with GDDR and released these ages ago

Wraith said:

AMD has more in development with CPUs than with GPUs, and it doesn't help that they can't seem to make their mind up on whether or not to have AMD, ATI, Radeon, ATI, Radeon Technologies Group or simply just AMD. It's all a bit confusing.

It's the 290X vs 780/Titan all over again, as Tom said in the video and I can't disagree with the points made it's 2 years too late, too power hungry (doesn't matter about past Polaris announcements or claims of performance per watt it's already failed), too noisy and way too expensive when compared to NVIDIAs offerings. I sincerely hope that AMD do something with the current pricing because as it stands future AIBs are going to sit on shelves gathering dust while team green units continue to fly out.

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This is exactly my point. All the R&D went to Zen as well as the top engineers. So saying AMD has started designing products without a care for power consumption is just false and naive. Zen and Polaris(which is relevant in this argument whether you think or not) are very efficient and MASSIVE steps towards efficiency. Vega however was never going to be. Again lack of money and top talent, in order to keep up with Nvidia(we knew it wouldn't be a 1080ti killer) they had to throw out all the performance they can and it's still only a 1080 challenger. Power consumption considering it's better than a Fury X, is pretty good. However in the face of opposition who is so far away and ahead, it is not good.

I'm not saying Vega is awesome everyone go buy it. However I do think it's just naive to go saying AMD doesn't care about xyz blah blah. They've come a long way and are on the right track. CPU business is boomin' and next up is the GPU side of things. They just need time. They were going bankrupt, Su has turned this company around with time. Few more years and it'll be much better.

I think what AMD need to realize is right now if they think they can't compete with Nvidia in the high end, they need to design a super cheap powerful chip without all that extra unneeded crap(HBM/interposer/etc) and stick with GDDR5 and make something that Nvidia can't beat at a $300 price point and just stick to that market. No sense in playing with the big dogs if you're just a tiny mut. They should take what Nvidia will give them and focus on what matters and just plan ahead. Delay Navi if need be, they need something uber powerful. But they need power consumption to come down. There is no if or butts about it.


My current gripe with AMD is for GPUs, they tend to go ALL OUT on new tech that is to expensive when they don't have the architecture to back it up. Makes there stuff take way to long to release and expensive with low profit margins(terrible way to beat Nvidia) and makes drivers more complex.

Or alternatively in a few more years Nvidia will just continue to dominate the GPU market and I wouldn't count my chickens when it comes to the CPU market either. Last time AMD was on top of the CPU world Intel came back with such a vengeance that AMD was irrelevant for a decade and Ryzen still can't match Intel in single thread performance.

Linchpin said:

Or alternatively in a few more years Nvidia will just continue to dominate the GPU market and I wouldn't count my chickens when it comes to the CPU market either. Last time AMD was on top of the CPU world Intel came back with such a vengeance that AMD was irrelevant for a decade and Ryzen still can't match Intel in single thread performance.

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Nvidia has already dominated for some time. What's the difference?

Las time AMD was on top Intel weren't on the behinds sitting around. This time, they are. It's not all about single threaded performance and consumers ya'know. AMD have entered the HPC market. Nobody give's a monkey's behind about single threaded performance there. It's all about cores and sociability. Something which AMD excels at. Beisdes, games are getting more and more multi thread friendly. Which is why the 1800x can keep up or surpass a 7700k even when clock a full 1ghz lower. As time goes on single threaded performance will be less of an issue for AMD. Yeah some things require it and benefit from it, but when both companies start adding more and more cores(core war again) more applications will start using them.