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Is my B Grade Vega 56 faulty or is it just my Ryzen 3 bottleneck?

ANDREW GREEN

ANDREW GREEN

ANDREW GREEN

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17 Sep 2018
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So my Pulse Vega 56 came yesterday and I was excited to test it out and benchmark it. I paired it with my Ryzen 2200g and 16gb dual channel so obviously there will be some bottleneck. I played the following @1080p with mixed results:

AC Odyssey/Origins - I didn't really get a boost over my RX 580 and the FPS drops into the 20s on the former at times. I know these games are bad on AMD Cards at the best of times. Although I noted changing settings from high to ultra high didn't have an effect on FPS in Origins and going from ultra to medium didn't change matters very much either

Hitman 2 - Usually in the 80s-100s but when a few people enter shot FPS did drop into the high 40s 50s. It ran much faster than the 580 though

Hitman - benchmark drops into the 40s at times

Rise of the Tomb Raider - seemed to only drop into the 70s and over 100 when playing but when setting the benchmark it averages 92 but drops as low as in the 20s (not that I could notice that as it ran). It did definitely outperform my 580 in this title and seemed to pretty much match youtube benchmarks with better CPUs

Kingdom Come Deliverance - I know from benchmarks this is quite CPU intensive, ie a 2600 performs much better than a 2200g but it didn't seem to perform better than my

Just Cause 3 - FPS seems to be mainly in the 100s in benchmarks, mine was only getting into the 70s with drops into the 40s

Watch Dogs 2 - this had pretty bad stuttering

Witcher 3 Ultra - averaging about 60fps but lows of about 30

Heaven benchmark - between 70-150 fps but a drop to 20 - it wasn't at full HD though as it ran in background

Now this video (using a Vega 56) makes me think it is the 4core CPU:


I also had a few games crash when undervolted and noted a slight buzzing under load which I assume is coil whine. Generally it's fairly quiet mild buzzing aside

Other than that the card came with all the original packaging, manual and had 3 of it's display ports still covered with plastic covers, ie it looked like it'd barely been used. GPU-x showed it has samsung memory and it only cost £180, so I only really want to send it back if it's genuinely faulty.

Buying 'B Grade' makes me concerned I could have got a dud so I'd welcome your opinions. Oh and the wonderful people at Overclockers even threw in a couple of packs of kids haribo, thanks guys.
 
Use the on-screen display feature of MSI Afterburner:
Display-2.png

https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner

Monitor CPU and GPU usage whilst in game to determine where the bottleneck is.

If it is the CPU being the bottleneck, you can try to overclock it to get a little extra performance.
 
What PSU have you got? Could be throttling due to power delivery.

As above though check gpu/CPU usage with afterburner.

Gpu-z may also show a reason if the card is throttling.

Another possibility maybe if the card has had a mining bios flashed, but not sure if this applies to Vega.
 
Could also run a GPU only benchmark to eliminate the CPU from the equation. Something like Unigine Valley/Heaven/Superposition etc and compare against other similar V56's
 
an0nym0us said:
Use the on-screen display feature of MSI Afterburner:

Monitor CPU and GPU usage whilst in game to determine where the bottleneck is.

If it is the CPU being the bottleneck, you can try to overclock it to get a little extra performance.
Click to expand...

I've tried this and yes not sure why I can't get it in game, it displays but I have to alt tab to see what's gone on in the graph and the CPU is recorded as running at 90-100% while the GPU is recorded at 60-90%. But that's just 1 game
 
It only has 4cores, yep it's your cpu in the games that make use of more threads.
The R5 2600 in that video is quite weak, especially at that clockspeed but still shows a big difference in fps and gpu utilisation, when the cpu utilisation is too high. The difference between the cpu's would grow if the vega was clocked and tweaked properly.

The gpu was probably returned for either the coil buzz, or poor clocker, but i'm sure it'll be fine when you upgrade to an R5 3600 ;)
 
Download Shadow of the Tomb Raider demo, and run that benchmark, then post a screenshot of the results. We will see 100% what the deal is, but yeah chances are it's very much a CPU bottleneck especially as you seem to be going >60 fps, which makes a lot of even new CPUs struggle.
 
ljt said:
Could also run a GPU only benchmark to eliminate the CPU from the equation. Something like Unigine Valley/Heaven/Superposition etc and compare against other similar V56's
Click to expand...

I've done this it's sort of hard to compare as the free version only runs at 1600x900 and I'm not sure if the scores are the same across different resolutions, but my score isn't too far off another vega 56 @1600x900, about 10% off after Oc/undervolt/power increase
 
ANDREW GREEN said:
I've done this it's sort of hard to compare as the free version only runs at 1600x900 and I'm not sure if the scores are the same across different resolutions, but my score isn't too far off another vega 56 @1600x900, about 10% off after Oc/undervolt/power increase
Click to expand...

It's best to stick to the presets anyway with those benchmarks as it will give you like for like. You don't need to pay for Valley/Heaven to change the setting though, just put it the preset on custom, but that's beside the point for this.

If it's scoring around other similar V56's at the 1600x900 preset, then it's proving the GPU is at least ok, and therefore as has been mentioned, the CPU is holding it back. Being just a 4 core/4 thread will limit frames, especially the 1% lows. Might be worth selling on the 2200g and getting something like a 1600/2600/3600 depending on budget
 
I'd say afterburner is more detailed and helpful when diagnosing as you can see each individual core temperature, clockspeed, and per thread utilisation.+ you can monitor and log /min max avg fps 0.1/1% low's as well as most of the common gpu sensors.
I don't game with any overlays, but for testing I also use hwinfo64 for logging temps and voltages it's very detailed.
If wattman had an update I'd like to see the same features as Afterburner for monitoring.
 
I play AC Odyssey all the time on my sig rig and never drop below 55fps on ultra at 1440p. My card is a smidgen more powerful than yours, but my CPU is a lot more powerful, so I’d definitely assume it’s your cpu bottlenecking.
 
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