Gadgetory

it all started out innocently enough in late June of this year we asked Vandy for a sample of the vega frontier edition we were hoping that we could compare it against the titan XP and GT x 1080 TI that back then cost a bit more and a bit less respectively and also use it to guesstimate the performance of the then upcoming RX Vega so why are we finally publishing this video today well buckle up my friends because it's kind of a long story and that story is brought to you by Tuttle Bayer Tritonal bear for free with no credit card required at tunnel bear comm /l tt it's the easy to use VPN so AMD declined our sample request for frontier Edition that happens sometimes and it's fine now sometimes companies do this because they don't want press looking too closely at a product but other times it's for perfectly legitimate reasons either way it piqued our curiosity so we put on our big-boy pants ordered one for ourselves and a week later tore it out of its box to bask in its blue brushed aluminum and khaki yellow glowing glory but what else is there in the box well there's some foam and this weird booklet of like Kickstarter II promotional material that's strangely for the product that we just already bought I mean look at this stuff oh and they are people who boundaries as starting lines did anyone even proofread this the box might not seem important but this was actually a pretty pivotal point in our experience with the frontier Edition because this was when we realized just how rushed and poorly thought-out this product was and it actually went downhill from there we set up our closed GPU test bench downloaded the only available driver that was on AMD site up until it finally got an update over three months later in October and fired up our blender test suite where Vega ended up on the bottom in the BMW and classroom tests then all the way on top in the fishy cat test making it at best inconsistent and at worst Oh so at this point we DD you´d and reinstalled the driver but no joy there and even tried switching to gaming mode in the dual mode driver which also didn't help okay then so since we're in gaming mode what about gaming unit in super position and 3d mark score saw it get absolutely spanked by the $700 1080 Ti and then the but paddling continued in both Deus Ex mankind divided and rise of the Tomb Raider at 4k in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 modes so between the performance the stability the thermal throttling and the power consumption the whole experience up to that point had frankly been super balls at this point we were certain of just two things one was that Vega frontier addition existed only to cater to hard core AMD fans with what felt like it was an overpriced slap in the face and to that our ex Vega was going to be a power-hungry dog at the rumored pricing now throughout this we hadn't heard back from AMD about our problems so we forged ahead and then just as our video was getting ready to be published actually while I was down at AMD checking out their Vegas supercomputer demo they told us well hey guys we think it's unfair of you to judge Vegas gaming performance on frontier because Raja Kaduri posted in a reddit thread somewhere that it wasn't for gaming and that our benchmark suite wasn't showing frontier strength because workloads like blender didn't benefit from its workstation DNA and we didn't include enough scientific performance analysis so what they offered was to give us some help with the second part of it if we held off publishing the video to ensure we were doing it properly ok fair enough then I guess but weeks and then months passed and that help didn't materialize then while we sat there waiting our ex Vega launched with performance that put frontier neck-and-neck with Vega 64 exactly as we'd expected and laid out in our original script for this video and it makes perfect sense other than coloured the only differences between them are the driver the frame buffer size frontier editions higher base and boost clocks and a locked maximum fan speed of 40% so I'm not gonna mince words we felt cheated as a customer remember we bought this stupid thing for $1000 and manipulated as press because it's as though our video got buried to prevent the negative PR from raining on our ex Vegas parade and we made these feelings clear to AMD who renewed their commitment to helping us benchmark frontier Edition properly but in the back of our minds what we wondered was if they were just hoping that we would just forget about publishing a video about a months old and now very irrelevant product and focus on their shiny new WX 9100 workstation card no such luck so then for the first of two AMD recommended benchmarks we'll be looking at spec you perf 12.1 a collection of 3ds max Maya SolidWorks and other workloads for which AMD says frontier Edition is optimized and actually ok frontier Edition does pull out a head of Vega 64 and even GT X 1080 Ti in particular wherever edges are used in the rendering pipeline and in the memory shredding scientific energy and medical tests the Titan XP though blows them all the way to see how much of this performance comes from the workstation driver path we switched the driver mode to gaming where interestingly frontier ends up well below Vega 64 level performance so it's clear that unless your loads specifically benefit from 16 gigs of VRAM any advantage to frontier is purely a software switch though to be clear we aren't singling out AMD for this behavior team Green's tighten and quadrille lineups are differentiated from g-force in a very similar manner and to AMD's credit frontiers positioning as a sort of workstation card like the original Titan sparked a response from Nvidia to give Titan XP back some of the professional features that they had removed over the years so kudos for that the second of our two AMD recommended benchmarks Manero mining uses the Vega optimized cast XMR miner AMD's beta blockchain optimized driver and here we are actually greeted with excellent results of up to one point eight five kilo hashes per second though that quickly drops to one point five once thermal throttling kicks in I do believe a driver fix unlocking fan speed is coming but until then even a Vega 56 outperforms frontier Edition significantly so then is Vega frontier Edition a legitimate product or was it like an early access game with day one dlc a beta where you pay AMD for the privilege of reporting bugs and third-party software incompatibilities like those blender crashes while they polish the real product WX 9100 on paper frontier kind of makes sense it gets more RAM and some workstation features compared to a consumer card and that's for half of the price of the higher-end workstation card that gives you ACC memory support frame lock genlock stereo 3d and far more professional application certifications but in the real world WX ninety one hundred Street pricing has fallen to just fifteen hundred dollars already for the full-fledged Megan experience and frontiers actual value add over a regular gaming card is pretty limited leaving us in no-man's land unless we're concerned with and only with some pretty specific use cases I mean even AMD only managed to come up with one benchmark that actually demonstrated its value for us so then if AMD had positioned frontier as a developer kit like the oculus dk1 or dk2 and even if it was paid and expensive but available to developers like through their website we wouldn't be having this conversation but as it is whatever they posted on reddit months ago their actions were to put this product on sale to consumers in the consumer channel even going as far as to bundle quake champions crap with the water-cooled version get upset when we wanted to talk about why it was a stupid product for consumers then come up with only a couple of pretty flimsy reasons why we shouldn't be pissed about the performance of our castrated WX that we bought instead of a Titan XP which incidentally would game better in our spare time and consume less power smells like early access to me I think the right way to fix this is for AMD to just discontinue this thing and even if it doesn't help the AMD enthusiast gamers out there who got sucked into it turn around and unlock as many of the WX 9100 features as they can for the people out there who have them what do you guys think we really do want to hear from you in the comments mass drop is a great place to get quality products at amazing prices and this year for the holidays they're making it easier than ever to find the perfect gift they've got a collection of over 20 of their most popular mass drop made products that are available to ship in two to three days so they'll make it to you by Christmas one of the products is the mass drop x AKG k 7x x audiophile headphones they're lightweight they're comfortable they perform way above their price point in terms of sound and they are highly recommended check them out 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