AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition vs Nvidia Titan Xp

The guys at PCWorld posted an article on the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (air-cooled) vs Nvidia Titan Xp. They focus on two compute-heavy tests, SPECViewPerf 12.1 and Cinebench R15 (OpenGL) Vega seems to outperform the TITAN Xp.

The tests are very limited as they seem to be restricted in what they are allowed to post, but PC World states on the Vega card's gaming performance that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition offers gaming performance that is faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, but slightly slower than its GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. The two below screenshots show some performance of SPECViewPerf 12.1 and and the OpenGL test of Cinebench R15 compared to a Titan Xp.
 

They did test the Vega Frontier Edition and TITAN Xp in "Doom" with the Vulkan API, then "Prey" with DirectX 11, and also "Sniper Elite 4" with DirectX 12. These are all AMD titles btw.  Although they were allowed to play Doom, Prey and Sniper Elite 4 unfortunately no detailed performance numbers were revealed. 

 PCWorld states:

While AMD didn’t want to reveal any gaming performance, it agreed to give us a taste of how Radeon Vega Frontier Edition performs in gaming. So we switched out the 8K Dell panel for a pair of Acer 34-inch, wide-aspect 3440×1440 panels, and AMD let us play games on both the Titan Xp and the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

To show it wasn’t just an API advantage, AMD let us play Doom using Vulkan, Prey using DirectX 11, and Sniper Elite 4 using DirectX 12. All of the games were set to their highest game settings, and we played at the native resolution of the panels. Although the identical panels were FreeSync-based, FreeSync was switched off on the AMD GPU.

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From what we’ve seen, that concern may be misplaced. It appears to be plenty fast and, at least for the settings and the games we played, indistinguishable from the competition. Our original estimates after seeing Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with Sniper Elite 4 at Computex still hold: The cards appears to be faster than Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and close to that of a GTX 1080 Ti card.

Synthetic benchmarks did well and they are at 15 to 50% higher perf copmpared to the TITAN Xp:

In the given time we had to run the tests, we saw the Frontier Edition outscore the Titan Xp by 28 percent in Catia and Creo to 50 percent in SolidWorks. We also ran Maxon’s Cinebench, a popular OpenGL benchmark, in which the Frontier Edition was about 14 percent faster. The numbers echo what we already knew about the Frontier Edition, but this time we could see the performance demonstrations live.