The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.
With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost.
I don't think so. The article touched on the fact that the watercooled one is already seeing a disproportionate ramp-up of power in order to ramp up clocks. That says to me that it's beginning to eat in to the headroom of the card and will soon begin to run up against its voltage wall. That suggests to me that they're already pushing the card pretty hard to get the stock performance levels, which doesn't leave a lot on the table for overclockers.
The GTX 1080 is actually $500 MSRP. The Vega overclocking is surely inferior to the GTX OC. The OP is unfortunately right I think, trying to enter the Radeon ecosystem at this moment is foolhardy.
Vega is already drawing near 300W, and is so high up on the voltage/frequency curve that even a measly 5-10% gain in core clock can easily cost over 100W more.
Here, AMD is once again (see last year's Polaris) a victim of the inferior GlobalFoundries 14nm LPP process. TSMC 16nm would have been much better in perf/W, but sadly a very restrictive wafer supply agreement locks AMD to GloFo for the time being.
Too late, raven ridge with integrated vega taped out a long time ago.
One desktop gaming card line-up operating in the wrong region of the efficiency curve doesn't instantly turn an entire architecture into house fire material.
Whatever the initial price difference there is will be lost in power consumption over the course of the first year of heavy use or 2 years of moderate use.
And after the price parity, you're just stuck with a worse card.
The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.