Incorrect, they have gaming mode and code.
And yes I still plan to get a Vega provided someone makes a sub 250mm sized card with a blower or water cooler 120mm, and if the prices are not stupid expensive, again it can´t cost more then a 1080GTX or it will flop.
ATM in australia a 1080gtx sells for $699AUD, I don´t really see the point paying over that for a top end Vega card that struggles against a 1080gtx half the time.
PcPer put out their Full review here:
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Edition-16GB-Air-Cooled-Review
interesting tidbits:
Calling this “not a gaming card” is a fair statement, as long as you also agree then the GTX Titan, Titan X, Titan Xp are also “not gaming cards.” But they are, despite NVIDIA segmenting it off as well. Plenty of professionals will buy this hardware, but discerning gamers that want the best of the best will also be purchasing Titans and FEs well into the future. “Professional graphics cards” have certified drivers and specific code paths in place for applications like 3ds Max, Maya, etc. Neither Titan nor Vega FE have that and instead will depend on the driver stacks we are used to seeing in GeForce and Radeon systems.
The drivers are old.
There were concerns over the last couple of days that the driver for Vega FE on the site was from January of this year. As it turns out, reading version numbers of the Radeon driver package is difficult, and the driver we used in our testing, and the ONLY driver that supports Vega FE today, is not old. To be clear though, the driver IS from a different branch than the currently available Radeon RX 500-series driver, but the exact time of that branch, and how it affects performance on games or other workloads, isn’t information AMD is interested in sharing at this time.
The driver isn’t optimized for gaming.
I saw this pop up a lot during our stream yesterday, that the driver isn’t meant for gaming so it hasn’t been optimized for gaming. Instead, it’s only targeting “professional” level applications. First, that’s not the case and AMD has confirmed that. The driver has all the gaming optimizations that the other Radeon drivers would include up until at least the driver branching mentioned above. After that time, optimizations may or may not have made it in, as AMD tells it.
The one caveat to this is that the Vega architecture itself is still unoptimized in the driver. But this would affect gaming and non-gaming workloads most of the time. So if the driver isn’t ready for ANYTHING, then that’s a valid concern, but it applies to ALL workloads and not just games.
Gamers nexus teardown of the Vega frontier card
There might be something to it that the drivers are just completely foobared.
In the professional tests the FE is trading blows with a Titan Xp, even in OpenGL.
We'll have to wait and see. I'd guess that some of the optimizations in AMD's driver should still apply to Vega since its still a GCN card, but to the extent is a complete mystery to me. AMD claims that a Vega is a large architectural advancement so maybe the optimizations in the existing driver aren't that applicable to Vega as an architecture? Idk, but I can give AMD the benefit of the doubt I guess. Maybe with a month of time AMD can get the performance level closer to the Gtx 1080 to Gtx 1080 Ti performance gap that we were hoping Vega could hit. Still, AMD has to make some serious improvements. PcPer tested 6 games, and in those 6 games Vega FE was an average of -15.667% behind a Gtx 1080 in average Fps. If we're hoping Vega can sit in the performance gap between Gtx 1080 and Gtx 1080 Ti in games, then Vega needs somewhere in the range of a 20% performance improvement. That's a lot.
just because you can install radeon drivers doesnt always mean a card is great at gaming, you've been able to install Radeon drivers on Pro cards for some time now. I.e. the Pro Duos are able to be either Pro cards, or Radeon. Just not able to switch on the fly.
also
i only just noticed that if you look closely at the graphs the Founders Edition card is only hitting 1382-1400 mhz on the stock cooler.
I wonder how much of a difference the water cooled ones will make if they actually can maintain 1600Mhz.
That would be around 10-15% or so bump in speed if the core speed and performance are linear.
so ... making the workstation Vega card perform roughly around a 1080 with the water cooler. Again, if core speed and performance scale linearly which is probable
also makes this
less
@1920.1080p.1280.720p (I don't know why this didn't pop up as a reply to your post but there you go.)
The funny thing is that the RX 480 had an extremely overbuilt VRM, utilizing the same design that AMD implemented on the R9 290X. (Albeit with lowered power limits). It's been pretty much par for the course with AMD overbuilding VRMs for their reference cards.
Don't expect miracles. When Polaris performance was being leaked everyone just assumed it'd be a 1500MHz ASIC, but we saw most samples balking at anything over 1350MHz. Now we've seen more samples of Polaris creeping toward that original estimate but nothing has shipped with those clocks. Vega has got to be pretty close to its limits. We might see 1800MHz at the extreme cost of power.
Honestly, they did that to themselves. They're using expensive cutting-edge technology and implementing it in three different ways (HBM2 w/ ECC, HBM2 as HBC, HBM2 w/o ECC) so not only did they add time to the tape-out with these different renditions they also now have to balance drivers to work with these differently and at the peek of their abilities. I hope it works out but it'll probably be a couple months before they nail it down.
That would also really increase power usage, and its contingent on a core that big (564mm2) being able to clock that high in good yields and maintain stability. I mean when PcPer ran the fan at 100% too keep the core temp down and the clock up, the card sustained power usage at a bit less than 300 watts
This bitch is THIRSTY
people seeing vega FE being tested on drivers that are akin to a new born baby that's still covered in Amniotic fluids, does score anywhere from 1070 to 1080 levels in gaming.
people really thinking to themselves that somehow AMD managed to launch a card that has regressed in throughput clock for clock compared to Fiji, a bootstrapped underutilized GPU built on tech from 2012.
I'm really enjoying the shitstorm AMD caused with the FE launch, absolutely priceless reaction from headless chickens that don't think this is driver based.
I'm going to laugh when the actual gaming cards launch and perform exactly the same as the FE... Its going to be hilarious because I've seen companies do this thing many times before, their not going to fool me into thinking Vega is a 1080Ti competitor or even comes close....
I mean, the gaming performance of Vega FE will definitely improve in the next month. The driver will be optimized for Vega, and as precedent has shown for AMD cards prior, they are able to get a lot of performance improvements over time through drivers.
There's also something else going on here too because its actually performing worse than the demos we have seen
Maybe the demos we've seen have been running with some of the in-progress vega specific optimizations?
I'll leave this until end of July or so when someone has a gaming version of the card, cya all then. Hopefully I will be hearing people telling me I TOLD YOU SO and not the other way around 
Perhaps but it is now performing worse than the first Doom demo. I'd imagine things have advanced rather than regressed since then
What I meant was that maybe that doom demo was using some vega specific optimizations that are still in the works, but not in this driver. The PcPer article said that no specific Vega optimizations were in this drivers, so maybe they were using some of the stuff they have specifically for vega that's just still in progress and hasn't yet been rolled into the driver?
Perhaps.
It better be one hell of a driver then because this performance is garbo
In a month's time, we'll see. Fingers crossed vega's price is good, and the driver improvements are great...
There is some suggestion or evidence pointed out over at RedGamingTech that the drivers are behaving like old Fiji drivers and are also not doing screen space culling among a few other things. I certainly hope that is true and that getting 1600mhz core is possible on the gaming version of the cards without a nuclear meltdown...
If they fucked the driver that hard ... that would be bad even by old AMD standards.
But I hope it is true, still would like to see that thing kick nvidia's ass.
