Latest AMD RX Vega Benchmarks Leaked—Now Faster than GTX 1080

Benchmarks relating to AMD‘s latest flagship Radeon RX Vega GPU has leaked onto the web. In particular are 3DMark 11 benchmarks showing the familiar 687F:C1 hardware ID that has surfaced for several months now. This is the reference Radeon RX Vega card that is intended to head against NVIDIA’s GTX 1080. While AMD is dialing down and preparing to nail the launch of the RX Vega, NVIDIA aggressively positions ahead with the GTX 1080 Ti in March. NVIDIA also made sure to price it low enough so that AMD is forced to offer it at a competitive pricing as well when it comes out months after their latest flagship.

For the past three months the 687F:C1 hardware ID leaks 3DMark 11 scores that have shown constant improvement. It runs with 1630MHz core clock and HBM2 memory at 945MHz. Some of the earliest entries for the 687F:C1 ID for example, show a graphics score of 27890. The latest entry however, sees that score jump to 31873. This is exclusively the graphics score which is completely independent from the CPU performance. 3DMark isolates those scores and only the total score is affected by the CPU. So the fact that one uses a Ryzen 1800X CPU while the other uses an Intel Core i7-6700K has no bearing on the result.

Still Too Early to Call

As WhyCry from Videocardz.com points out, the results are from an OC’d card and 3DMark 11 does not recognize unreleased overclocked graphics cards very well. The 3DMark benchmark can approximate the performance in relation to other video cards from their database. Doing that, the graphics score puts all 687F:C1 entries well above the aftermarket, factory-overclocked GTX 1070s.

The good news is that it does outperform reference GTX 1080, but still a bit shy from convincingly putting away factory overclocked GTX 1080 graphics cards. An MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X with a 1898MHz core clock for example, nets a 30400 graphics score. A reference GTX 1080 graphics card gets around ~27,500 while a reference GTX 1080 Ti gets ~38,300.