Powercolor Vega Red Devil 56 - Non-Review Stuff

[garwynn]

Hello folks!

You may have noticed on Twitter that we have the Powercolor Red Devil Vega 56 in the house for review. But since our reviews will remain largely focused on Linux, even for GPUs, I wanted to find a place to ask and discuss anything else that readers may want to know. That's where this will come in.

If there's anything you want to see - certain photos, tests (3DMark or game benchmarks) - let me know. For Windows I can throw it in the Coffee Lake test bench while I let another grind out the actual benchmarks for the review.

 

[garwynn]

Here's the progress on the benchmarks:

3DMark (Windows, so I don't put in the review): Under 5% difference versus the 1080 Founder's Edition on Fire Strike & Time Spy.
Destiny 2 vs 580: Noticeable but hard to measure. I think 1080 is still okay to compare 580 and Vega, but I think I want to run additional benchmarks (higher resolutions) to better test against the 1080.
GPU Computing: So there has been a change from Polaris to Vega in OpenCL support. Vega was the starting point to transition to Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) and so the support for OpenCL is not as easy as before. Matter of fact, I'm unable to get OpenCL tests to work after two days. Going to spend some more time on it soon but I'm growing concerned - this is one of biggest things in testing GPUs for XDA. Developers have legit reasons to use these beyond gaming and we want to highlight that - just like I did when testing the 1080 Founder's Edition on Thunderbolt 3.

Hopefully we can get this going here soon. This is our first GPU we've received for review and I want to really do this right. Will have more here hopefully soon.