AMD Radeon RX Vega matches GTX 1080 in 3DMark Fire Strike

We still have about a week before AMD lifts the curtain on its Radeon RX Vega lineup for gamers, at which point we will have much more to talk about. In the meantime, it appears that someone from AMD's marketing team has uploaded scores to 3DMark from a Radeon RX Vega card.

The keen-eyed folks at Guru3D noticed that the entries in 3DMark's database were uploaded by "TheGameTechnician." That is the handle for Jason Evangelho, a former Forbes contributor who last summer was hired to be AMD's senior technical marketing specialist. Unless someone is spoofing his online moniker, we can reasonable assume these scores are legit.

It's not clear if the Radeon RX Vega that made these benchmark runs was an air cooled model or came with an all-in-one liquid cooler. The sample is clocked at 1,630MHz with 8GB of HBM2 memory running at 945MHz. It was paired with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor.

The card was benchmarked three times in 3DMark's Fire Strike test. It returned graphics scores of 22,330 points, 22,291 points, and 20,949 points. The average of all three is around 21,857. That is faster than a GeForce GTX 1070 and comparable to a GeForce GTX 1080, but slower than a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

While nothing is yet official, this is further evidence that Radeon RX Vega will compete with the GeForce GTX 1080. It's the same card from Nvidia that AMD used to compare performance with its Radeon RX Vega in Budapest, where the company challenged gamers to tell the difference between the two while gaming.

If that's the case, it will be interesting to see how pricing shakes out. Earlier rumors suggested Vega will cost $650 to $700. That would be a tough sell if it can't hang with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

Latest in Graphics Cards
A close-up photo of an Nvidia RTX 4070, with its heatsink removed, showing the AD104 GPU die and the surrounding Micron GDDR6X VRAM chips
With Nvidia Ace taking up 1 GB of VRAM in Inzoi, Team Green will need to up its memory game if AI NPCs take off in PC gaming
A collage of Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, as shown in AMD's promotional video for the launch of RDNA 4 at CES 2025
AMD's CEO claims 9070 XT sales are 10x higher than all previous Radeon generations but that's just for the first week of availability
Colorful iGame RTX 5070 Ti Vulcan OC graphics card from various angles
The RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti are rumoured to be mere weeks away, with board partners reportedly required to ensure at least one MSRP model at launch
Nvidia headquarters
Nvidia CEO sets sights on making 'several hundred billion' dollars worth of electronics in the USA over the next four years, increasing the chance of your next GPU being made in America
The Asus ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 Dhahab Edition, a gold-plated graphics card on a sand dune background
A Jensen Huang-signed version of this golden Asus RTX 5090 will be auctioned off to support relief efforts for the California wildfires
An MSI Vanguard RTX 5080 launch edition next to a Dragon Lucky figurine
You can win an MSI RTX 5080 in Taiwan if you collect nine dragon figurines given away with *checks notes* MSI RTX 50-series GPUs
Latest in News
Dwarf Fortress adventure mode art
After 23 years of making Dwarf Fortress, even its creator is still 'terrified' of drowning all his dwarves with heavy aquifers: 'Part of the problem is we are just not good at videogames'
A unique aspect of Japanese architecture turned out to be a key reason the Like a Dragon games can reuse assets so effectively—and deliver more compact, memorable open worlds than western cities
Pacific Drive Endless Expeditions spring 2025 update trailer still - a sexy, tricked-out 1980s station wagon being blasted with magic healing electricity
Pacific Drive developers change their mind: A year after refusing to give it mid-run saves, it's getting mid-run saves
Starfield's companion robot giving a thumbs-up
Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it's 'much less stressful as an indie' without daily meetings or 'office politics': it's 'very refreshing to just care about the game'
Schedule I drug deal going down
Forget REPO, Monster Hunter Wilds and Assassin's Creed Shadows, Steam's current global top seller is an early access game about managing a drug empire
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 characters with their bodies replaced by skeletons, thanks to the KCD2 Skeleton mod.
Here's that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 mod that turns everyone into skeletons you asked for