What are your guys take on the RX64 vs 1080ti after the lastest AdoredTV review?
Interesting question.
First I'll preface my answer by saying I am an irrational AMD fanboy. I support AMD even in cases where they are the clear loser. Part of that is just a long history with the brand, part of it is because they often offer good price for performance, and part of it is because we need competition in any case.
If you have a look at the functional units of Vega vs the functional units of the 1080Ti, you would expect Vega to be a lot closer. When you compare Vega 64 to the 1080Ti, the only thing it loses out on is the number of ROPs (96 vs 64) and the amount of memory (11GB vs 8GB). Otherwise, "on paper", it is equal to or superior.
But, real world results show that the 1080Ti is faster in almost all cases. Nvidia just makes really, really good GPUs!
However, I do think there is more to the story, and a number of things paint the RX Vega in a worse light than it perhaps deserves.
I am fairly sure that the drivers for RX Vega are not ready. There are questions regarding whether new features such as the Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer and the Primitive Discard Accelerator are enabled with the current drivers. They may not be. Even without those, Vega is different enough to Polaris that I expect optimization to take some time. Every single AMD GPU released previously has improved over time with drivers. They look bad on review day, but 6-12 months later, they generally move up a level and are punching above their weight. There is no reason to expect anything different from Vega. I think, one day, that Vega 56 will be closer to a 1080 in performance and a Vega 64 will be closer to a 1080Ti in performance.
Second... AMD needs Nvidia's voltage control magic. Search Google for AMD Vega undervolting and see what people are able to achieve with it. Massive reductions in power consumption for the same or better performance, because they reduce the voltage. Often from 1.2V to 1.0V, which is a huge reduction. But, you don't see people bothering to undervolt with Nvidia's cards, and the reason is because Nvidia has much better automatic voltage control which automatically selects the minimum voltage needed to sustain the particular performance state. This is one of the reasons they are so efficient and so fast. AMD sets a blanket voltage of 1.2V across ALL Vegas, Nvidia sets the voltage per graphics card and per performance state. They have much finer grained control. AMD has some level of automatic voltage control because it does go up and down a little, but nowhere near as good as Nvidia. This is also not something that drivers can fix, but if we are lucky, a future AMD product will have good voltage control.
Lastly, Vega is bottlenecked somewhere - rumours have it that it could be either the memory or geometry performance. If you overclock a Vega 56 to the same clockspeeds as a Vega 64, they perform about the same. This is strange because you would expect a Vega 64 to be a lot faster than a Vega 56.
