AMD Radeon Frontier Edition, a graphics card that reveals the company's problems with its new Vega-based graphics cards and because the AMD RX Vega for gaming is constantly lagging.

AMD Ryzen processors, despite the initial problems, with few motherboards and very green BIOSes, due to a precipitation of AMD when launching the processors, causing problems with the RAM, have already been far behind and have allowed AMD to recover market share, something that had not happened for almost two years. Despite this good data, AMD has a problematic open front and it is that of the AMD RX Vega, graphics cards, of which the presentation has been announced five times and which have not yet been shown, but what is the reason ?

Well, the reason can be given by the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, which carries a Vega 10 GPU, the first of this architecture and which shows various problems, such as performance, consumption and temperatures. The truth is that this graphics card presented by AMD, within the professional sector is at the height of the NVIDIA Titan Xp, but in games it is between the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. Of course, we are talking about a graphics for the professional sector that it has a game mode, we do not know how well optimized it is, although according to the tests, it is not very well optimized.

PERFORMANCE IN GAMES

We wanted to take only two games, DOOM and AOTS from the Gamers Nexus video, which we will leave at the end of this post so you can go to see in depth. We see that it is clearly between the GTX 1070 and the NVIDIA reference GTX 1080, very, very far from the reference GTX 1080 Ti, let alone the models of these overclocked graphics cards. This lets us see that the performance will not be as expected. There is talk that the RX Vega will have more frequency and will have more optimized drivers, in addition to the optimization that developers can perform, but will that be enough to pass the GTX 1080 and approach the GTX 1080 Ti?

We must take into account a determining factor, which is the bandwidth offered by the HBM2, which means that a good GPU should allow a brutal performance, capable of matching the GTX 1080 Ti, if the graphics processor were really powerful. Here we could consider two possibilities, the first is that the graphics chip has not come out as powerful as expected or that the HBM2 memories do not perform as they should. Whatever the problem, the truth is that the Frontier Edition is disappointing and causing concern among users.

UNEXCUSED DELAYS

CES 2017, Capsaicin & Cream 2017, Financial Analyst Day 2017, Computex 2017, are the names of the four important events where we should have seen an AMD RX Vega graphics card, according to the information we had and it never happened. In Las Vegas they showed a prototype, supposedly with a Vega GPU (we all questioned it already), at the C&C we saw a shirt, dressed by Raja Koduri, with the Vega logo, at the FADAMD we saw the Frontier Edition that became official in Computex and nothing else. SIGGRAPH 2017, is in theory, the event chosen by AMD to show the AMD RX Vega once and for all, but given what we have seen, we prefer to put ourselves in the worst situation.

There are many delays in this graphics card and no explanation has been given in this regard, it is more, it seems that a rehash of Polaris, the RX 500 Series, was launched to cover up the embarrassment a bit, although seen what is seen, just not It was a good idea to get some graphics with higher consumption and a performance of 5% compared to the RX 400 Series. The Frontier Edition would show what the problem is: performance and consumption. Vega does not seem to perform what it should and consumes more than what AMD said, two quite serious problems, which add to AMD's problem of not having a high-end, only mid-range graphics (the RX 400/500 Series compete with the GTX 1060 and thank you).

NVIDIA DELAY VOLTA

Many will not understand what NVIDIA paints in an AMD entry, but in this case it paints more than ever. NVIDIA let see that it had Volta ready months ago and there was information that pointed to an exit in the last quarter of the year, to compete with the AMD Vega. Recent events have meant that NVIDIA released another rumor, in this case that they will indefinitely delay the Volta graphics, well, more or less. They could arrive in the summer of 2018 and meanwhile rehash Pascal in 12nm, to overcome Vega without problems and not burn an architecture unnecessarily.

A rumor that seemed absurd with Vega around the corner, makes sense, because NVIDIA can continue with the optimization of Volta, implement it in the segment of artificial intelligence, a very succulent segment and continue to reign in the gaming market, without too much effort.

CONCLUSION

AMD has encountered an unexpected problem, which truncates the good start to the year that it had achieved with the AMD Ryzen. The company's situation in the graphics market is very worrying, because it is clear that something is not working correctly with Vega and unfortunately, we do not know what is not working, due to AMD's secrecy, although little secrecy, because the constant delay in its presentation and the Frontier Edition, make it clear that something is wrong. It's a real shame, because we had, like many, high hopes of seeing an epic battle for the supremacy of the graphics card market.