AMD Radeon RX Vega Spotted Taking On GeForce GTX 1080 In Budapest

radeon vega frontier edition
Radeon RX Vega is nearly here, and to help get the festivities kicked off early, AMD is taking its graphics show on the road. There are three stops on the tour, the first of which occurred yesterday in Budapest, Hungary. Next, AMD will make a stop at PDXLAN in Portland, Oregon (July 21-23) and the Radeon RX Vega will make its official debut later this month at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles (July 30).

However, we’re here to talk about what happened at last night’s event in Budapest. For AMD enthusiasts that showed up to get their hands on Vega-based hardware, that were greeted with systems that were configured with either a Radeon RX Vega or an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. According to redditor szunyogg, both systems were equipped with Ryzen processors and were otherwise identical with the exception pf the graphics card utilized. AMD representatives would only confirm that a Radeon RX Vega was being used in the testing, and didn’t not specify whether it was a top-of-the-line XTX, or one of the lesser XT or XL variants that are rumored.

There’s is at least one wrinkle in the specs showdown, however. Both monitors used with the test systems had their identifiable bits covered, but we do know that each graphics card was paired with a complementary FreeSync or G-Sync enabled monitor. Both monitors were also reportedly using 100Hz panels.

Participants were able to play Battlefield 1 and Sniper Elite 4 (at a resolution of 3440x1440), and weren’t told which system was which. Unfortunately, there were no frame count counters present, so we don’t have any concrete numbers on how either system performed (which was a purposeful omission on the part of AMD).

One participant, NoExits, indicates that one of the systems appeared to be struggling in Battlefield 1 at (3440×1440). “One of them performed noticeably worse in the mid 50s (3/3 of us thought so). We were all asked which one we liked more and most of the people thought the same.”

One additional takeaway from the shootout was that AMD representatives commented that the system with the Radeon RX Vega was priced $300 below that of the NVIDIA system. There’s no way that AMD is going to be undercutting the GeForce GTX 1080 ($499) by $300, so it stands to reason that some of the savings must be attributed to the monitors being used during the event.

Unfortunately, that’s all we have to go on from the Budapest event; hopefully we’ll be able to glean additional details from the upcoming even in Portland before “The Full Monty” is revealed next weekend.