AMD Vega one year on – has the fine wine approach payed off?

Today’s a big day for AMD’s RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 graphics cards: it’s their first birthday. The RX Vega’s jumble of HBM2 memory, compute units, and infinity fabric makes up what the Radeon team once described as the biggest change it’s made to the GCN architecture in five years. But what does that mean for gaming performance now that the cork’s been loosed? With all those architectural changes came the promise of ‘fine wine’ performance. That is, AMD’s fifth generation GCN architecture was going to get better with every passing day, eventually blooming like an Amorphophallus Titanum after ten long years building up a stink. This approach conveniently masked the less than competitive performance we experienced when this card first launched, but there was a glimmer of hope for lying in DX12 and Vulkan benchmarks. Sure, the Vega architecture played poorly with most legacy DX11 titles compared to Nvidia’s Pascal silicon back in 2017. But in modern titles, such as the DX12 and Vulkan APIs, Vega’s performance was up to a mark you could just about make an argument for. It wasn’t always up much, but it was a promise that with time it was all going to come together for Vega in the not too distant future.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2KUhjOF