Intro

This RX Vega 56 showdown is a follow-up in our Vega “unleashed” series. We benchmark 28 games at 4 resolutions to determine the overall winner between the GTX 1070 Founders Edition and the reference RX Vega 56 at the $399 price-point.

Last month, AMD released its new Vega 64 processor in a vain attempt to beat the GTX 1080 and to take the performance crown from NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 Ti. We have put our liquid-cooled flagship Vega 64 and the Founders Editions of the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1080 Ti through their paces with ten VR games and also each overclocked to the max with 28 modern PC games, and in most cases, the $549 GTX 1080 FE is faster while the GTX 1080 Ti is in a class by itself as the world’s fastest gaming video card. And now we are going to compare the GTX 1070 FE with the reference RX Vega 56 which are both priced at $399 although the Vega 56 is still mostly out of stock.

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Since we are using the reference version of both cards, we have set each card to its maximum power and temperature limits – and in the case of the RX Vega 56 – we have increased its minimum fan speed and allowed it to spin up to maximum so that it does not throttle, and we saw our overall stock-clocked Boost average around 1646MHz. We had originally planned to post overclocking results between the RX Vega 56 and the GTX 1070 FE, but AMD’s latest 17.9.1 drivers do not allow the core nor memory overclocks to be set under WattMan.

Our testing platform is Windows 10 Home 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-6700K at 4.00GHz which turbos all cores to 4.6GHz as set in the ASRock Z170 motherboard’s BIOS, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the two cards being tested. We will compare the performance of 28 modern games at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, 3440×1440 and 3840×2160 resolutions with maximum settings.

Let’s see how well a non-throttling RX Vega 56 matches up with a Founders Editions of the GTX 1070.