Mar 13, 2017 03:02 PM EDT By Josh McClaren, UniversityHerald Reporter

The AMD Vega GPU has been spotted in a third party benchmark, CompuBench, where it falls behind NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti by a mile in one test and just slightly in another. Obviously, the GPU in its current pre-final stage will have more tweaking needed before it debuts at the second half of this year but the potential of having many stream processors is already hinted.

An OpenCL compute benchmark results shows the potential of an unannounced AMD Vega GPU. The CompuBench test is known for its focus on computations and not on gaming or 3D graphics. It is a valuable benchmarking tool providing benefits for those in the medical and energy sectors as well as workstations rendering and complex research subjects. The reported GPU uses the ID, AMD 687F: isC1, which is the same ID seen in January in a "Doom" 4K Ultra demo. Now that Vega has already appeared in CompuBench, all evidence points to the completion of its developmental process but any potential gains right now are still premature.

Digital Trends reported how the AMD Vega GPU performs against the GTX 1080 Ti with the Vega trailing behind the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti in the Vertex Connection and Merging test. It places 7th on the list with 11.567 megapixels per second as against 15.545 megapixels per second and even bested by the GTX 980 Ti. It did fare better than current generation NVIDIA cards like the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. However, the AMD GPU posted better results in the ocean surface simulation test with 3,782.357 interactions per second, bested by the GTX 1080 Ti's 3,967.891 by a slight margin.

Clearly, the AMD Vega GPU in its current state is not yet ready to topple its closest rival, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. In the past, AMD GPUs have usually performed very well when pitted against NVIDIA particularly for OpenCL workloads, Hot Hardware has learned. This may still be the case after the Sunnyvale-based company further improves on its upcoming GPU, which is expected to be like the Titan X. More details may be unveiled in the coming days as rumor has it that Vega may arrive at the earliest by end of March.

What the CompuBench reveals about the specifications of the AMD Vega GPU is on its compute units, which is at 64 compute units. If AMD stays with its Graphics Core Next (GCN) design, then it will group 64 stream processors in just one core. This will give Vega a total of 4,096 stream processors and its 64 OpenCL compute units may be running at two maximum clock frequencies. It is believed to have 8.2 TFLOPS raw computing units running at 100MHz or the 9.8TFLOPS at 1200MHz.

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