Gamers Nexus also found issues with Vega FE’s overclocking performance, noting that it was unable to overclock the GPU without the memory clock speed being cut in half. The Vega FE only went on sale Friday (buy here), so its drivers will likely remain flaky until AMD irons out any issues.
While the gaming performance of Vega FE is disappointing, there are questions surrounding how representative it is of the AMD’s upcoming RX Vega graphics cards, which are aimed directly at gamers. Vega FE straddles the line between professional users and gamers, offering a unique set of drivers that supports both sets of applications, but without the reassurance of certification that comes with AMD’s Radeon Pro line and Nvidia’s Quadro.
However, RX Vega will be based on similar technology to Vega FE, which sports 4,096 stream processors and 16GB of HBM2 memory on a super-wide 2048-bit bus. GPU clock speed is rated for 1600MHz (although reviewers found 1440MHz more common). With a clock speed bump and a streamlined set of drivers, it’s possible that RX Vega will offer at least some performance improvement, coming in much closer or better than a GTX 1080.
