MSI AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Air Boost OC Edition Review

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56 is a high-end desktop GPU that was first introduced in August of 2017. It is based on the Vega architecture (Vega 10) and equipped with fast HBM2 VRAM. When it was first introduced, it was the second fastest AMD GPU available, only bested by the RX Vega 64 that launched on the very same day. At the time of writing, both GPUs have been replaced by their respective Radeon VII successors.

The RX Vega 56 reference design features 56 CUs running at 1,138-1,474 MHz (Boost) and 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM running at 800 MHz connected via a 2,048-bit memory bus resulting in a memory bandwidth of 409.6 GB/s.

Features

Vega 10 is still produced in a 10-nm manufacturing process. The die consists of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and measures 495 mm2 in size. The newer Vega 20 chip, which AMD’s current Radeon VII is based on, features around 13.2 billion transistors. Applications have access to a total of 3,584 shaders, but the GPU lacks the dedicated Raytracing and Tensor cores that can be found on Nvidia’s latest RTX generation of GPUs.

Performance

Performance-wise, the RX Vega 56 is comparable to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, and thus best categorized as upper middle-class. Games released in 2018 and 2019 should run perfectly fine and smooth in high details on WQHD (2560 x 1440).

Power Consumption

According to AMD, the RX Vega 56’s maximum power consumption is 210 W. Given the GTX 1070’s power consumption of just 150 W, the Vega 56 cannot keep up with its direct competitor in regards to performance-per-watt ratio.