The Witcher 3 (DirectX 11)
We had to pull our cards back out after wrapping up benchmarking to confirm what you see here: that The Witcher 3 averages slightly higher frame rates on Radeon RX Vega 56 than 64.
While our test sequence is a manual run-through and subject to some variation, we do know this game is power-hungry. It’s plausible that this DX11-based title isn’t utilizing AMD’s NCUs efficiently, keeping Vega 64’s extra Stream processors/texture units from augmenting performance. At the same time, higher power consumption could put a cap on Vega 64’s clock rate that Vega 56 isn’t limited by. In any case, Vega 56’s match our expectations more than what we’ve repeatedly measured from Vega 64.
Jumping up to 4K puts more stress on each GPU’s ability to render pretty pixels quickly, so Vega 64 assumes its position ahead of Radeon RX Vega 56 at 3840x2160, as we'd expect. Vega 56 notably leads the two GeForce GTX 1070 cards as well, turning what we considered to be a curious loss in our Vega 64 review into redemption for AMD’s derivative model.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content