Yep Fury was hit by rasterization performance as was Vega in addition to excelling at shader workloads plus a variety of features that were going to be supported but either were game-specific or didn’t work at all.
(Shaders are more of a thing now but Fury is pretty dated by this point.)
Polaris implementing improvements to texture compression and culling of geometry plus having 8 GB VRAM too once 4 GB was starting to be a limit has allowed it to scale past Fury despite the hardware difference.
Similarly Navi has much of this in addition to operating at a Wave32 set of instructions instead of Wave64 plus it can operate once every clock cycle instead of every fourth gives it a edge thus scaling almost to the level of the Radeon VII improving even under D3D12 or Vulkan API comparisons.
Though when Vega and particularly the less bottlenecked Radeon VII can scale these are still incredible high performing but you only really see it for a few Vulkan or D3D12 titles using the GPU’s strengths more fully.
(Wave64 is harder to optimize for and fully populate for efficient performance and full utilization though in cases where this can be done these cards are still really fast.)
Bit of the same for NVIDIA though, DOOM Eternal scales up really well but other engines and games are more varied though NVIDIA still seem to hit at least a 40% performance uplift even in more problematic games. Optimization and game engine issues might continue to be a hassle just overcome by brute forcing through it for a while yet unfortunately.
(Borderlands 3 I think it was for that particular game performance result.)
Driver improvements and regressions as a big thing for AMD also, Polaris, Vega and Fiji have regressed a bit in 2020 as Navi has improved (But it’s initial launch state was pretty rough.) though the amount varies and this decrease in performnace is most noticeable in what seems to be earlier Vulkan API implemented games.
(Upwards of a 30% performance decrease I think is what it amounted to comparing 20.8.1 and then also 20.8.3 against 19.12.1 I’ll have to re-check on that.)
RDNA also comes with it’s own benefits and AMD GPU Open effects but other than CAS and it’s sharpening added as a settings toggle in the driver control panel these are only utilized in a few AMD sponsored games most notable Horizon Zero Dawn where despite some initial problems with the port the Navi10 GPU’s close in on the 2080 performance level.
(Overall the gap between the 5700 / 5700 XT and the 2060 to 2070 Super has also closed with the 2080 a bit ahead and then the 2080Ti as the clear performance leader.)
Various AMD Vulkan extensions and such as well but NVIDIA has theirs too and these benefit AMD’s GPU lineup overall whereas Horizon sees the Navi GPU models perform really well and their other cards under perform with Vega in particular doing very poorly despite the game using D3D12 so it’s not the usual D3D11 API bottleneck and driver situation.
(Listed as a known issue but still not addressed by AMD.)
Can’t happen yet unless AMD plans to drop most every supported GPU but Navi but going fully RDNA for the drivers should help though GCN support is not going too well currently as is but is at least supported and AMD is fixing issues and regressions even if some of it takes time.
(Other than the 7000 series and GCN 1.0 / GCN Gen1 it’s been various additions and tweaks over time so dropping the earlier GCN GPU’s likely won’t change things too much either.)
Curious about RDNA2 too, might make RDNA1/GCN with Navi10 seem like a early test phase and the GPU’s lifetime and scalability might be a bit lower as a result as focus shifts fully on RDNA2 and newer from this first jump form GCN.
But that would happen anyway as Microsoft made D3D12_2 and it’s various features a hardware implementation so going forward it’s going to start seeing a new baseline of hardware as the minimum requirement although not immediately.
)
I put all my eggs in the OLED / HDR basket.
