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AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
The AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition was the first Radeon Vega card to arrive, and is somewhat of an oddity. Many publications reviewed it as a gaming card, because it has gaming modes and is partially aimed at that market. But despite not being called Radeon Pro, the Frontier Edition is part of that range and is aimed at the professional market first, with the gaming market secondary. It's intended for content producers who also need to test their content on a production system – say VR, or games design. The air-cooled version we have here is also priced very competitively compared to NVIDIA's Quadros.
The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers three DisplayPort and a single HDMI connection, although AMD doesn't state which levels either conform to.
One clear difference between the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and NVIDIA's competition this month is that it uses High Bandwidth Memory. It also sports a 16GB complement. This runs on a 2,048-bit bus at 945MHz, providing a whopping 483.8GB/sec of bandwidth.
The GPU is home to an equally huge 4,096 Stream Processors running at a typical 1,382MHz with a peak 1,600MHz. This gives it a potential 13.1TFLOPS of single-precision and 819GFLOPS of double-precision performance.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Xp
Armari's choice of NVIDIA's GeForce Titan Xp seems a little unusual for a workstation, where a Quadro might appear a more fitting choice. However, with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition's “halfway house” between professional and consumer applications, and its competitive price, NVIDIA has released drivers for the Titan Xp that significantly improve its performance with professional applications. This doesn't necessarily mean they are fully certified for professional software, but they certainly promise massive speed increases.
With the Titan Xp, NVIDIA has finally stopped bothering with DVI on its higher-end cards. Instead, you get three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and a single HDMI. The original Titan X did have a DVI connector.
The GeForce GTX Titan Xp boasts a huge 3,840 CUDA cores, running at a base 1,405MHz with a boost of 1,582MHz. As we mentioned earlier, this card has less memory than AMD's competitor – 12GB of GDDR5X. This runs on a 384-bit interface, but at a significantly higher 1,426GHz, so memory bandwidth actually beats the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition's at 547.6GB/sec. This is the highest consumer graphics card bandwidth we have ever seen, although it's still not as high as the NVIDIA Quadro GP100 with its HBM2 memory.
On paper, the Titan Xp has more GPU grunt and higher memory bandwidth, so should be the victor in most tests. However, despite NVIDIA releasing drivers with performance tweaks for professional applications, it's still a consumer-grade card, where the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is aimed at professionals. The one strange thing with the latter is that the warranty is just for a single year, rather than the three that is usual for professional graphics cards. The Titan Xp comes with a three-year warranty.
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