 It all started out innocently enough. In late June of this year, we asked AMD for a sample of the Vega Frontier Edition. We were hoping that we could compare it against the Titan XP and GTX 1080 Ti that back then cost a bit more and a bit less respectively and also use it to guesstimate the performance of the then upcoming RX Vega. So... Why are we finally publishing this video today? Well... Buckle up my friends because it's kind of a long story. And that story is brought to you by TunnelBear. Try TunnelBear for free with no credit card required at tunnelbear.com slash LTT. It's the easy to use VPN. So AMD declined our sample request for Frontier Edition. That happens sometimes and it's fine. Now sometimes companies do this because they don't want press looking too closely at a product, but other times it's for perfectly legitimate reasons. Either way, it piqued our curiosity so we put on our big boy pants and we got a sample request. And we got a sample request for Frontier Edition. Perfectly legitimate reasons. Either way, it piqued our curiosity so we put on our big boy pants, ordered one for ourselves, and a week later tore it out of its box to bask in its blue brushed aluminum and tacky yellow glowing... glory. But what else is there in the box? Well, there's some foam and this weird booklet of like kickstarter-y promotional material that's strangely for the product that we just already bought. I mean look at this stuff. Oh and... They are people who boundaries as starting lines? Did anyone even proofread this? The box might not seem important, but this was actually a pretty pivotal point in our experience with the Frontier Edition. Because this was when we realized just how rushed and poorly thought out this product was. And it actually went downhill from there. We set up our closed GPU test bench, downloaded the only available driver that was on AMD's site up until it finally got an update over three months later in October, and fired up our blender test suite where Vega ended up on the bottom in the BMW and Classroom tests, then all the way on top in the Fishy Cat test making it at best inconsistent and at worst... Oh. So at this point we DDU'd and reinstalled the driver, but no joy there and even tried switching to gaming mode in the dual mode driver, which also didn't help. Okay, then. So since we're in gaming mode, what about gaming? Unigine Superposition and 3DMark score saw it get absolutely spanked by the $700 1080 Ti, and then the butt-paddling continued in both Deus Ex Mankind Divided and Rise of the Tomb Raider at 4K in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 modes. So between the performance, the stability, the thermal throttling, and the power consumption, the whole experience up to that point had frankly been super balls. At this point we were certain of just two things. One was that Vega Frontier Edition existed only to cater to hardcore AMD fans, with what felt like it was an overpriced slap in the face, and two, that RX Vega was going to be a power-hungry dog at the rumored pricing. Now throughout this we hadn't heard back from AMD about our problems, so we forged ahead and then just as our video was getting ready to be published, actually while I was down at AMD checking out their Vega Supercomputer demo, they told us, well, hey guys, we think it's unfair of you to judge Vega's gaming performance on Frontier, because Raja Kaduri posted in a Reddit thread somewhere that it wasn't for gaming, and that our benchmark suite wasn't showing Frontier strength because workloads like Blender didn't benefit from its workstation DNA, and we didn't include enough scientific performance analysis. So what they offered was to give us some help with the second part of it, if we held off publishing the video to ensure we were doing it properly. Okay, fair enough then I guess. But weeks and then months passed, and that help didn't materialize. Then, while we sat there waiting, RX Vega launched with performance that put Frontier neck-and-neck with Vega 64, exactly as we'd expected and laid out in our original script for this video. And it makes perfect sense. Other than color, the only differences between them are the driver, the frame buffer size, Frontier Edition's higher base and boost clocks, and a locked maximum fan speed of 40%. So, I'm not gonna mince words. We felt cheated as a customer. Remember, we bought this stupid thing for a thousand dollars, and manipulated as press, because it seemed as though our video got buried to prevent the negative PR from raining on RX Vega's parade. And we made these feelings clear to AMD, who renewed their commitment to helping us benchmark Frontier Edition properly. But, in the back of our minds, what we wondered was if they were just hoping that we would just forget about publishing a video about a months old and now very irrelevant product, and focus on their shiny new WX9100 workstation card. No such luck. So then, for the first of two AMD recommended benchmarks, we'll be looking at SPECviewperf 12.1, a collection of 3ds Max, Maya, Solidworks, and other workloads for which AMD says Frontier Edition is optimized. And actually, okay, Frontier Edition does pull out ahead of Vega64, and even GTX 1080 Ti, in particular, wherever edges are used in the rendering pipeline, and in the memory shredding scientific energy and medical tests. The Titan XP, though, blows them all away. To see how much of this performance comes from the workstation driver path, we switched the driver mode to gaming, where, interestingly, Frontier ends up well below Vega64 level of performance. So, it's clear that unless your loads specifically benefit from 16 gigs of VRAM, any advantage to Frontier is purely a software switch. Though, to be clear, we aren't singling out AMD for this behavior. Team Green's Titan and Quadro lineups are differentiated from GeForce in a very similar manner. And to AMD's credit, Frontier's positioning as a sort-of workstation card, like the original Titan, sparked a response from Nvidia to give Titan XP back some of the professional features that they had removed over the years. So, kudos for that. The second of our two AMD recommended benchmarks, Monero Mining, uses the Vega-optimized CastXMR miner and AMD's Beta blockchain-optimized driver. And here, we are actually greeted with excellent results of up to 1.85KiloHashes per second. Though, that quickly drops to 1.5 once thermal throttling kicks in. I do believe a driver fix unlocking fan speed is coming, but until then, even a Vega56 outperforms Frontier Edition significantly. So then, is Vega Frontier Edition a legitimate product? Or was it like an early access game with day one DLC, a beta, where you pay AMD for the privilege of reporting bugs and third-party software incompatibilities, like those Blender crashes, while they polish the real product, WX9100. On paper, Frontier kind of makes sense. It gets more RAM and some workstation features compared to a consumer card, and that's for half of the price of the higher-end workstation card that gives you ECC memory support, frame lock, gen lock, stereo 3D, and far more professional application certifications. But in the real world, WX9100's street pricing has fallen to just $1,500 already for the full-fledged Vega experience, and Frontier's actual value add over a regular gaming card is pretty limited, leaving us in no-man's land unless we're concerned with, and only with, some pretty specific use cases. I mean, even AMD only managed to come up with one benchmark that actually demonstrated its value for us. So then, if AMD had positioned Frontier as a developer kit, like the Oculus DK1 or DK2, and even if it was paid and expensive, but available to developers, like, through their website, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But as it is, whatever they posted on Reddit months ago, their actions were to put this product on sale to consumers in the consumer channel, even going as far as to bundle Quake Champions crap with the water-cooled version. That would upset, when we wanted to talk about why it was a stupid product for consumers, then come up with only a couple of pretty flimsy reasons why we shouldn't be pissed about the performance of our castrated WX that we bought instead of a Titan XP, which incidentally would game better in our spare time and consume less power. Smells like early access to me. I think the right way to fix this is for AMD to just discontinue this thing, and even if it doesn't help the AMD enthusiast gamers out there who got sucked into it, turn around and unlock as many of the WX9100 features as they can for the people out there who have them. What do you guys think? We really do want to hear from you in the comments. Mastrop is a great place to get quality products at amazing prices, and this year for the holidays, they're making it easier than ever to find the perfect gift. 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