For those of you that opted for a Radeon RX Vega 64 over a GTX 1080...

1x4xx9

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Hey all... I've been on [H]ard|Forum since 2007, just recently found out about this place (if you frequent there too you will know me as Mr. Bluntman. And it was supposed to be 1x4x9 but I flubbed and double tapped the x 🤣)
Anyways, in search of a viable DX12 option in an "elegant" single slot form factor long since lost since 2008/2009 on the consumer side, but still is a thing in the pro market as some of you may know.
Original thread here: https://hardforum.com/threads/my-recent-gpu-experiences-with-amd-as-a-long-time-nvidia-user.2023987/
Anyways, cutting to the chase, when I threw actual gaming loads at the card in a negative pressure case, and even in something as timid a workload as Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, I'm seeing temps up to 93°C at 100% (~4580-4600RPM) - it's just not fast enough to keep up with the given heatsink. And with the modded drivers, voltage controls are out. Pro drivers have terrible game performance, so that is out. Long story short, I am giving this card to someone running a FirePro W7000 4GB (basically GT 950/R9 280 performance with slower but double the VRAM) with much more active airflow across the GPU. And I found a good deal on a Dell XPS system pull on eBay. I expected slightly better than GTX 1080 performance because of the rewritten DX11 driver in the Adrenalin driverset, but when I read this...

https://www.techspot.com/review/2523-amd-vega-gpu-revisit/
I was surprised to see just how much performance improvement in some titles was presented. Slightly less expensive than a 1070 Ti, but 1080 Ti/Titan X Pascal or better performance in a few titles. In a nutshell, AMD kept working on improving performance even in GPUs going on 6 years old now, whereas nVIDIA only focuses on the current and last generation of GPUs more often than not. So in the end GCN 5.x ended up having longer legs in the end in more things than not than Pascal, and complete support for the DX12.1 support, something that Pascal lacks (is 12.0 only). But I'm excited to get it and see how it handles in a Ryzen 9 5000 series setup. Anyways, thought I'd share! Laters ^_^
 
I have a pair of GIGABYTE 1080's that we're my last SLI cards. Together they were impressive but as a single card, not so much. I also have a Strix 1080 Ti OC edition that Kyle actually gave me tips on overclocking and I loved that card. Seriously used it so much that eventually I started hearing sounds from the cooling fan bearings. That card probably got the most use of any I've owned so far, although the 2080 Ti that succeeded it came close.

I totally agree though, the fine wine effect is well known and a testament to AMD's commitment to those cards. I'm keeping a close eye on how things go with the 7900XT/XTX.
 
It's great to see something other than the very newest cards continue to get improvements. I've always been annoyed by people who complain about it. What could possibly be bad about older cards continuing to get performance improvements? It's great since the vast majority of people don't buy a new card every time one is released and can make good use of extra performance.

For those of us who have been around for a while we know that nVidia used to hold back performance improvements until a competitor was releasing or announcing a new card. I distinctly remember back in the day of Detonator drivers that nVidia would magically and mysteriously drop a new driver with 20%+ performance improvements as soon as another card looked to be meeting or surpassing their cards. Beyond that, it's now typical for nVidia to basically abandon any cards which aren't the absolute newest with regards to driver improvements.

Some of the AMD "fine wine" detractors make a really stupid argument. The argument basically states that a company has failed unless drivers are basically perfected within months of a card's launch. That makes absolutely no sense and in the video card space has never been the case for any company. There will always be fixes and improvements over time even on older architectures because better ways will be found to make the drivers more efficient or make better use of the architecture.
 
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