As we saw in our review of the Radeon RX Vega 64, generally speaking, the graphics card offers roughly equivalent performance to Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – but not in Forza 7, where in a surprising turn of events the Vega 64 outstrips the GTX 1080 Ti by a good amount.
Yes, we said the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia’s powerhouse GPU which is a lofty step above the vanilla GTX 1080. And when running Forza 7 in DX12, AMD’s Vega 64 beat the 1080 Ti by no less than 23% in Full HD resolution.
This was in a test conducted by CompterBase.de using a PC built around a Core i7 6850K processor (overclocked to 4.3GHz) with all graphics options maxed and 8x anti-aliasing turned on in 1920 x 1080 resolution. AMD’s card hit almost 137fps compared to 111fps for the 1080 Ti.
Even more surprisingly, the Vega 56 also outdid Nvidia’s card, recording a result of 122fps.
This is one specific circumstance, of course, in one particular game, so we can't go drawing too many conclusions. But nonetheless it’s a really eye-opening benchmark, we’re sure you’ll agree.
Cranking up the resolution closed the gap: at 2560 x 1440 the Vega 64’s lead was 115fps to 103fps, and notching things up to 4K saw the 1080 Ti come out on top, with a frame rate of 90fps versus AMD’s 83fps.
GPU puzzle
As Techspot reports, Nvidia confirmed that CompterBase’s testing was indeed accurate. The German website noted: “The ranking in Forza 7 is very unusual. Nvidia has confirmed [to] ComputerBase, however, that the results [are] correct, so there is no problem with the system in the editorial regarding GeForce.”
The key pieces of the puzzle here, then, seem to be DX12, and of course the fact that Forza 7 is evidently very well-suited to Vega. We also have to bear in mind that the 1080 Ti is hardly aimed at Full HD gaming; it’s more for pushing pixels at the 4K level (where it does indeed perform better than AMD’s card, as you would hope).
But even given all the caveats, this is an undeniably impressive result for AMD when it comes to Microsoft’s racing game, given the comparative price tags of these GPUs.
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