PCWorld apparently had the chance to come up with a preview on the upcoming AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition graphics card. In a rather lengthy article they’ve described their experiences regarding the two pre-built systems by AMD they were allowed to fiddle with. It looks like the Pro Vega Frontier Edition is a strong performer when it comes to compute heavy benchmarks yet it also packs a punch dealing with recent games.

In the past there have been countless rumors regarding AMD’s upcoming Vega cards. Every once in awhile some new benchmark result surfaced which had the enthusiast community all around the world guess whether AMD is going to be able to compete with NVIDIA or not. Today PCWorld is going to shed a little more light on this topic although some things still remain in the dark.

As it appears AMD wanted to make clear that the Pro Vega Frontier Edition is a card geared a professionals, which comes at a lower price than NVDIA’s QUADRO accelerators. In this context it’s to be expected that PCWorld was allowed to give compute heavy benchmarks a shot such as Cinebench R15 running the OpenGL routine, where the Pro Vega Frontier Edition performs 14 percent faster than NVIDIA’s Titan Xp card. Apart from that the AMD card outpaced the mighty Titan Xp in Catia by 28 percent and a whopping 50 percent in SolidWorks.

As impressive as all this is especially gamers are concerned in finding out how Vega performs in current games. Apparently that is also a concern of AMD and therefore PCWorld could check performance in Doom with Vulkan API, Prey with DirectX 11 API and Sniper Elite 4 using DirectX 12 API. All of those games were set to maximum details and the resolution was 3440 x 1440 pixel. After having toyed around with the card for a while PCWorld’s conclusion was that the AMD accelerator must be a bit quicker than a GeForce GTX 1080 and a little bit slower than a GTX 1080 Ti. That in fact is nothing new and exactly what the whole world already expected.

Last but not least it’s interesting to see that AMD is marketing this card for professionals. Malicious tongues could be tempted to say that since the thing isn’t quick enough in games, AMD is trying to find a straw to cling on to since otherwise they would possibly struggle to get a return on their investment in research and development for these cards.




Source: PCWorld