Although AMD has made a point over the preceding weeks about how the Frontier edition of its new Vega graphics card architecture isn't designed with gaming in mind and won't be quite as powerful as the RX series of Radeon graphics cards which are set for releas later this year, many people were hoping for more performance in the new card than we've seen so far.
Early benchmarks for the new, professionally-aligned GPU have started hitting the web and although it's certainly a powerful card, its specifications don't quite carry it through to victory in the real world. In fact, the performance is looking to be somewhere around a GTX 1080, not the 1080 Ti or Titan X beater than we originally hoped it would be.
AMD certainly seemed to suggest it would be capable of such a feat, with its raw specifications painting is as a world beater. But in actual testing, it didn't fair so well at all.
In results posted by Guru3D, testing it with 3Dmark: Firestrike on the Ultra preset, the Vega Frontier Edition scored 5,216 points, just a few more than the GTX 1080. It fell more than 1,500 points behind the Titan X and 1080 Ti.
Other synthetic tests published by ExtremeTech pit the card against Nvidia's professionally lined Quadro cards and though the Vega Frontier Edition does a little better there, it's still commonly outclassed by the older GPUs from Nvidia.
It may be that the more optimized Radeon RX Vega cards have improved hardware performance and better drivers when they're released, but this is not an ideal launch of a new-generation of hardware that is very, very expensive.
