Hands-on With The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 (Benchmarks VS GTX 1070)

Guess who just spent an entire weekend tucked in a plush hotel with the new Radeon RX Vega? The Gaming Central crew, of course! We were invited for a sneak peak cum hands-on session with AMD’s latest, highly anticipated Vega GPUs and needless to say, we were flipping with joy.

The showcase was held at Taj Lands End in Mumbai, and honestly, there couldn’t have been a better venue for this event. The place had washrooms that were bigger than my bedrooms. And the view. God, I tell you, if it were up to me, I’d have stayed there for months. I’ve never seen a tech company go so big on an experience event in our country. Seriously, kudos to AMD for showing everyone else the ropes. We met with Mr Abhishek from the AMD team who talked us through the event schedule. We also got to hang out with the amazing people from Toolius Tech Tips and Indian Noob.

Two systems were built from scratch, with the exact same specifications, including a stock Ryzen 1800X. There was only one difference – the GPU. One system had a GTX 1070 while the other one was powered by the new RX Vega 56. And thus the shenanigans began. We spent the entire night playing games, comparing performance and talking all things tech. Did the hotel staff feel like they were in a geeky, foreign land? Well, we weren’t judging, cause for us it was nothing short of heaven. But it gets better, so much better. Here are the system specs:

We were thrilled to see the Vega 56 performing better than the GTX 1070 in most of the titles we played. The performance difference per title varied, of course, but as a whole, the Vega 56 turned out to be a complete winner. In Battlefield 1 DX 12 benchmarks, the Vega 56 left the 1070 behind with a staggering 20 FPS leap!  Similar results were observed in DOOM running on Vulkan, where the Vega 56 easily went over 140 FPS on Ultra settings. You may not think it’s a big deal, but did I mention that all the games were running at 1440p? You got that right. An average framerate of 120+ FPS at 2560 x 1440 resolution.

We also tested Rise of the Tomb Raider, which favours NVIDIA GPUs, running the game using DX 12. Here the performance gap was quite small, but nevertheless, the Vega 56 came out on top. As was the case with the RX 400/500 series, AMD cards seem to perform generally better in DX 12 than their green counterparts. The only title where we saw the red giant fall a little short was Prey, and even here the difference was almost negligible. Even in synthetic benchmarks, the numbers were in the favour of the Vega 56. We’re in the process of consolidating and charting the benchmarks, so you can expect a full review soon! For now, here are a few numbers screenshots for comparison.

Sadly, due to lack of time, we weren’t able to benchmark the Vega 64. And we also wanted to test out more titles and features, but alas, for now we had to be satisfied with it. And satisfied we were. For those who can’t wait to get their hands on these cards, the Vega 64 will be available starting 16th August. The Vega 56 is expected to come out a little later, most probably towards the end of the month. The 64 will be available in two variants, and prices are as follows:

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Air Cooled – INR 46,990 + taxes

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled – INR 51,990 + taxes

With Vega, Team Red finally has something to cheer about. With performance higher than the GTX 1070 by a decent 15-20% the Vega 56 is a strong contender to be the leader in terms of value for money for this generation. It’s been a long time coming for AMD. With the RX 400 series they more than made a comeback in the budget gaming sector, and with the Vega cards they can very well stir up a storm in the high end gaming market

Register with us for the best in gaming, and join us for video game discussions on our forums.