Hitman (DirectX 12)
2560x1440 Results
Despite its DirectX 12 renderer, Hitman favors the GeForce GTX 1080 by a narrow margin at 2560x1440.
Frame time spikes between scenes affect all cards equally, so we’re not particularly worried about the outcome of our frame time over run chart. The unevenness index is perhaps more meaningful in this case, and it shows most of the cards serving up a smooth experience. Only the Radeon R9 Fury X and 390X encounter passages where higher frame times become somewhat palpable.
3840x2160 Results
Naturally, the jump to 4K has a profound impact on performance, and now it’s fairly safe to say that those older AMD cards aren’t going to be as enjoyable in Hitman at the game’s Ultra quality mode. Even Radeon RX Vega 64 and GeForce GTX 1080 can’t be wholeheartedly endorsed at these settings. Scale back quality or snag a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti if Hitman at maximum detail is important to you.
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But I would be much more interested in a Vega 56 review. That card looks like a way better option, especially with the lower power consumption.
The GTX 1080 has been out for 15 months now, that's why. If AMD had this GPU at $50 less then it would be an uncontested better value (something AMD has a historic record on both in GPUs and CPUs). At the same price point however to a comparable year and three month old GPU, there's nothing to brag about - especially when looking at power use comparisons. But I will agree that if you include the cost of a G-Sync monitor vs. a FreeSync monitor, at face value the RX 64 is the better value than the GTX 1080.
However two Vega 56 in CF might be extremely interesting. i did that with two 290x 2 years ago and it might be still the best combo out there.
I do see promise in the potential of this new AMD architecture moving forward.
As DX12 becomes the norm and more devs take advantage of async then we will see more performance improvements with the new AMD architecture.
If AMD can get power consumption under control then I may move back in a year or two.
Its a shame too because I just built a Ryzen 7 rig and felt a little sad combining it with an Nvidia gfx card.
That's where the positives end. I'm upset with the lack of progress since Fury X like everyone else. There was a point where Fury X was evenly matched with nVidia's best cards during the Maxwell generation. Nvidia then released their Pascal generation and a whole year went by before a proper response from AMD came around. If Vega64 launched in 2016, this would be totally different story.
Fury X championed High Bandwidth Memory. It showed that equipping a video card with HBM could raise performance, cut power consumption, and cut physical card size. How did HBM2 manifest? Higher memory density? Is that all?
Vega64's performance improvement isn't fantastic, it gulps down gratuitous amounts of power, and it's huge compared to Fury X. It benefits from a new generation of High Bandwidth memory (HBM2) and a 14nm die shrink. How much more performance does it receive? 23% in 1440p. Those are Intel numbers!
Today's article is a celebration of how good Fury X really was. It still holds up well today with only 4GB of video memory. It even beat the GTX 1070 is several benchmarks. Why didn't AMD take the Fury X, shrink it to 14nm, apply architecture improvements from Polaris 10, and release it in 2016? That thing would be way better than Vega64.
edit: Reworded some things slightly. Added a silly quip. 23% comes from averaging the differences between Fury X and Vega64.
Let us not forget how AMD approaches graphics cards and drivers. This is base performance and baring any driver hiccups it will only get better. On top of that this testing covers the air cooled version. We should see better performance on the water cooled version that would land it between the 1080 and the Ti.
Also, I'd really like to see what low end and midrange Vega GPUs can do. I'm interested to see what the differences are with the 56, as well as the upcoming Raven Ridge APU. If they can deliver RX 560 (or even just 550) performance on an APU, AMD will have a big time winner there.