AMD Radeon Pro Vega TESTED !

A lucky customer has already gotten his hands on one of these coveted, sky-powered AMD graphics cards, and is currently in the process of setting up his system. Given the absence of review samples from AMD to any outlet - a short Vega Frontier Edition supply ensured so - there isn't any other real way to get impressions on this graphics card. As such, we'll be borrowing Disqus' user #define posts as a way to cover live pics and performance measurements of this card. Expect this post to be updated as new developments arise.

After some glamour shots of the card were taken (which really are justified by its unique color scheme), #define mentioned the card's build quality. After having installed the driver package (which, as we've covered today, includes both a developer and gaming path inside the drivers, granting increased performance in both workloads depending on the enabled driver profile, he is now about to conduct some testing on SPECViewperf and 3DMark, with both gaming and non gaming profiles.

Specs of the system include an Intel Core i7 4790K (apparently at stock 4GHz), an ASUS Maximus VII Impact motherboard, and 16 GB (2x8) of Corsair Vengeance Pro Black DDR3 modules, running at 2133 MHZ, and a 550 W PSU.

Update 1: #define has made an update with a screenshot of the card's score in 3DMark's FireStrike graphics test. The user reported that the Pro drivers' score "didn't make sense", which we assume means are uncooperative with actual gaming workloads. On the Game Mode driver side, though, #define reports GPU frequencies that are "all over the place". This is probably a result of AMD's announced typical/base clock of 1382 MHz and an up to 1600 MHz peak/boost clock. It is as of yet unknown whether these frequencies scale as much with GPU temperature and power constraints as NVIDIA's pascal architecture does, but the fact that #define is using a small case along with the Frontier Edition's blower-style cooler could mean the graphics card is heavily throttling. That would also go some way towards explaining the actual 3DMark score of AMD's latest (non-gaming geared, I must stress) graphics card: a 17,313 point score isn't especially convincing. Other test runs resulted in comparable scores, with 21,202; 21,421; and 22,986 scores. However, do keep in mind these are the launch drivers we're talking about, on a graphics card that isn't officially meant for gaming (at least, not in the sense we are all used to.) It is also unclear whether there are some configuration hoops that #define failed to go through.

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