AMD Vega GPU Makes Cameo Appearance In CompuBench Besting GTX 1080

There's a lot about AMD's upcoming RX Vega series of GPUs that we don't know about, but one thing's certain: the hype has blown up to extraordinary levels. Today, we have more fuel for that fire, in the form of OpenCL compute benchmark result that shines an unknown AMD GPU in a great light.

CompuBench has a name that leaves nothing to the imagination: it's a compute benchmark. While most GPU benchmarks test out gaming and 3D graphics capabilities of a GPU in gaming APIs, CompuBench tests them with a computational focus, with the results potentially useful to those working with GPUs for medical, energy, workstation rendering and complex research subjects.

The result of particular interest above is the one for "AMD 687F:C1", reported to be an RX Vega card and given its performance in relation to NVIDIA's GPUs in the same area. In this particular test, the AMD card performs better than the GTX 1080, and even better than AMD's top-flight creator card, the Radeon Pro Duo.

It's worth pointing out that there are some oddities in this ranking, such as how the GTX 980 Ti ranks above everything, including this AMD Vega card, when it should place much lower. Aside from that, though, AMD's card seems to perform very well against NVIDIA's current-gen cards, which might explain why NVIDIA preempted AMD's launch with its own GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which we took a look at earlier this week.

It's also important to note that this is strictly a compute benchmark, and AMD has typically performed very well against NVIDIA in these particular OpenCL workloads, as you can see in our recent review of NVIDIA's Quadro P6000 and P5000 series.

Even so, this gives us hope that Vega could be the GPU family that AMD fans have been yearning for, for a long time now.