[Manuel Calavera]

In an interview at CES 2017 with AMD’s head of the Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri it was revealed that the impressive 4K/60FPS+ DOOM demo that the company showcased was in fact running on the company’s brand new high-end Vega 10 GPU, rather than the smaller mid-range Vega 11 chip. No only that, but the Vega 10 powered Radeon graphics card engineering sample was later pictured.

The card did indeed look like a high-end part. It was quite long, noticeably longer than the RX 480, and boasted a bold LED-lit Radeon emblem. Raja was later pressed to reveal whether the demo unit was boasting the full Vega 10 configuration or a cut-down variant of Vega 10 but he wouldn’t budge.
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One very interesting question that came up during the interview, which you can find here, was whether Vega 10 would still “beat the pants off the GTX 1080” if the DOOM demo was ran on OpenGL instead of the more efficient Vulkan. This is an important question because low level APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan have shown a clear tendency to favor AMD’s graphics architecture over Nvidia’s. While older highly abstracted APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX 11 continue to favor Nvidia’s GPUs. If Vega 10 can maintain its lead over the GTX 1080 in OpenGL this would bode well for the GPU’s performance in DirectX 11 titles as well. The answer to the question was yes, Vega 10 would still outperform the GTX 1080 had OpenGL been selected.

There was an important caveat to Raja’s answer however. He said that Vega 10 should in fact beat the GTX 1080 running the same 4K resolution. Although, at lower resolutions where the game is more CPU bound there would be less of a performance differential between the two. Speaking of low level APIs, Raja confirmed that 2017 is going to be a much bigger year than 2016 was for DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles. The number of DirectX 12 and Vulkan game releases this year is expected to be exponentially higher than last year. Something that Raja was clearly very excited about.
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When Raja was asked about what AMD expects out of Vega 10 in terms of overclocking he said that RTG engineers are still figuring that out themselves and should have more information in a couple of weeks time.

When our own Keith May sat down with Scott Wasson, technical marketing manager at RTG, he talked about Vega 10’s high clock speed potential with a huge grin on his face but would not give us any specific details. Overclocking potential is one of those things that’s incredibly hard to predict early on, so definitely expect more info as we get closer to Vega’s launch.