AMD recently held a closed press event where the upcoming Vega GPU was shown beating the Nvidia GTX 1080 in DOOM on the Vulkan API at 4K ultra settings. It’s only a few frames faster in Vulkan which favors AMD. We need to see the full landscape of API and engines to see who the real winner is.
AMD Vega is clearly faster than Nvidia GTX 1080 in Doom but what about other games?
Sure, AMD designed a great GPU with Async Compute etc however they didn’t spend the money on their DX11 drivers so lost performance. Anyway, people will have a MIXTURE of older and newer games so it’s not as simple as saying AMD or NVidia is better. It just doesn’t work that way.
It will take a few years for actual DirectX 12 and Vulkan based games to come out. Those ported games will not take full advantage of the API. So don’t expect to see huge changes in their performance. But we’re sure people will try to construe the bench results to favor the other.
Doom managed to do it with Vulkan, which is newer than DirectX 12, and that was like 7 months ago. We think it’s a lot more work for developers to take advantage of these new low-level APIs and they’re just not going to put the extra work in. They’ll just spend a fraction of the time and throw a DirectX 12 wrap on it so they can check off a box.
Also, remember guys, this is running doom with Vulcan, which runs much better with AMD hardware than the Nvidia equivalents. We doubt that this will outperform the GTX 1080 in just about every other title. Although that wouldn’t matter much if they priced this under $400.