RTX 2060 vs VEGA 56 In 2023 - Can Overclocking Close The Performance Gap? 

Damn, the Vega 56 did really well when tweaked.

If you have Samsung HBM you can flash with a Vega 64 bios, overclock the HBM, raise the power limit, then undervolt the core. You will get significant gains over standard overclocking. The 64 bios while it does not unlock any shaders it does significantly raise the power limit on the mem and core allowing you to get MUCH higher clocks. Mine was able to do 1720mhz core 1020mhz mem (with tightened timings).

The Vega 56 held up pretty well, especially considering that it's a bit older than the 2060. Although the 2060 seems to be a bit less power hungry judging by the game results that you showed. Great video as always!

I haven't got a Vega any more, but I've notice that other people's C2077 performance with the Vega 56 has fallen a lot in the last year. I wonder if Nimez drivers would help?

I have indeed overclocked and undervolted my Vega 56 I have had it for several years now the triple fan Powercolor Red Dragon model, as mine shipped with a BIOS Switch on the side I decided to find a compatible VBIOS on Techpowerup a long time ago and I flashed the BIOS to use a Vega 64 BIOS so it runs stock clocks of the 64 being 1630 on the core clock and 945 on the memory. Still runs really well despite its age now.

For me the best used cards rn are the 6600/XT. I have bought them from €90 to €140 and run on a 450w power supply. They are also quite energy-saving and not too hot.

I'd love to see what the 2060 can do with some tweaks too! cool comparison, love the content.

Very nice idea for a video, I hope to see similar comparisons in the future. The cyberpunk issue is worth investing. You can't go too wrong with a Vega GPU, especially if you spent a few minutes to at least undervolt the card, of not overclock it as well. My only real issue is power consumption as always because at ~200W it requires a good PSU for the Vega

I have my Vega56 Sapphire Pulse since 2019 and I'm still using it. I changed cooler fans for Noctua fans, set power limit to -50% and max Frequency/Voltage to 1312/1050, and it runs cool and quiet. It still handles games on 1080p/60Hz.

In the future when you do these comparisons - please show the stock clock speeds and other variables on screen for comparison sake - seems an easy fix and one that can better show what was and what is in the testing.

Have you thought about looking at the 2080 super? I managed to get one for 200 shipped. I noticed quite a few 2080 supers hitting 200 in the US.

Similar prices on the used GPU market certainly makes for some strange bedfellows. Even so, your comparison is totally valid from that perspective, and very interesting.

I had this exact version of the 56, modded with a Morpheus2 cooler, and used it for a couple years, until it started artifacting.

Did you try HBCC? May help with memory hungry games.

You should definitely try out the community drivers for the older AMD cards if you haven't. I think they're called nimez drivers? I heard they can help a lot with any newer games that don't get the best performance, or with new technologies that might not otherwise be supported.

I had the same vega card for a couple of years,it has since made its way to my girlfriends and very soon will be moving to my brother-in-law‘s computer. A couple of extra tips for keeping them cool in my experience is taking off the back plate using a high end thermal compound like IC diamond or thermal grizzly and ensuring that the card slot dividers on the back of the case aren’t obstructing the vents of the graphics cards exhaust especially if your case is not perforated for airflow in the back

I've always loved your overclocking videos. Not sure why, just satisfying!

What succulent is that @ 0:55 Looks like a scorpion or something. Looks cool.

Hello ! how can you obtain those free tweaks with the Vega 56 card, using the latest drivers? I have the same msi airboost model. I think you can export the overclock setting, is there a way you can share it? THanks !

What did you overclock with? What were the settings?

Got a vega 64 with a waterblock on it... It has been THE best overclocking experience i ever had after X58 cpu overclocking 😅 Highly rewarding to mess around with memory timings and stuff... Such a same that all recent GPUs are so locked...Never used it for gaming though... For that i'm sticking with nvidia, though for benchmarking i freaking love the vegas and i wish i could find a great deal on a Fury as it's basically the ancestor of vega cards...

You're one of the most consistent youtubers and i very much enjoy your content. Thanks for brightening up my mood.😁😁😁

very interesting all in all ..mayhaps drop voltage with a slightly less memory oc for higher core clock and lower temp ..just a tick lower voltage on vega does wonders

This is why I love this channel. Brand new cards I can't afford don't interest me much, I love digging into old tech.

Another thing that's more advanced that could perhaps be done with (some?) Vega 56 cards would be to flash a Vega 64 VBIOS onto it, similar to the HD 6950 being flashed to a HD 6970 or something?

i have a question, does that vega card crashes, and what is the driver version you used? I have got a Vega64 Ref and it was working fine for like 2weeks, and it started crashing. With the 2023 drivers it crashes when i start loading the card, but with 18.6.1driver, like it can do half a hour. I have some clue about gpu's and i will take a look in the hardware, im just interested that is yours crashing and on which driver verison. If you dont mind :D

Did you mention how loud the cards get? Maybe I missed it. The $50 might be worth it not sounding like a jet engine. Definitely get a dual fan if you can unless you have a good pair of headphones.

I am in the midst of a build for my girlfriend, and I was looking on the used market for a nice little budget GPU to throw in it. Seems like in Turkey people do not understand where the Vega GPUs sit in terms of value, and most of them are ridiculously cheap at around 60-70£. I'm definitely gonna cop one of the silver reference Vega 64s as the 56 and 64 listings are only around 5£ apart from each other. This card still has so much value in it, and it is an offer you can not refuse when it is that cheap!

2060 is pulling way less power for the same prf. Is electricity expensive in the UK?

I have a vega 56 and I flashed a vega 64 bios on it the original tdp was 165w and now it’s 220w that was a significant boost

I will always say it, you would get much more perf for your money by buying 2nd hand rx 5700 xt it's the budget king atm, 90fps on avr in RE4R at high settings/1080p (demo has about -6fps less and a bit worse graphics since it's missing few options)

You didn't tweak this one right. The Vega56 doesn't need +50% power limit. It needs the vega64 bios and to set the hbm to 1000+. Then you undervolt the cores so that they can maintain higher clocks for longer. With the right tweak you can get almost 40% more performance out of the Vega56 in some situations.

I will say this: I personally prefer the smoothest possible game play, not necessarily the absolute highest averages. That said, I am currently running a recently purchased, lightly used RTX 2080 Super, as an upgrade over my GTX 1070 I had. If I had not had access to this 2080 Super when I did upgrade, I would likely have been looking at buying a RTX 2060-2070 or an AMD equivalent. I just got really lucky with my roommate upgrading to his current RTX 4080, and I got his RTX 2080 Super after I replaced the AC compressor and condenser in his Chevy Cruze. Though, that GPU upgrade rabbit hole lead to me also buying a brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X to replace my Ryzen 5 1600X. And for anyone interested, if you have an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X or equivalent and wondered if something like a RTX 2080 Super, equivalent, or more powerful GPU would pair: I used Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor at 720p resolution as a test. RTX 2080 Super and Ryzen 5 1600X gave me a peak of 330 FPS, an average of about 150 FPS and lows of 98 FPS. When I upgraded to the Ryzen 5 5600X, I had a peak of 523 FPS, average of 315 FPS and a low of 110 FPS.

Find an MSI Vega 64 bios. I've got an XFX Vega56 with the blower same style. I flashed the XFX Vega64 bios onto it and was able to overclock the ram to 1100 (up from 800) and slightly undervolt it, the 56 bios stops at 950, the 64 goes much higher. I got similar GPU clocks though. Definitely worth considering for any memory sensitive games.

I was really hoping some company would make a half height, single slot RTX 2060 for μSFF builds.

On vega 56 and 64, 900 MHz memory speed sounds slow , but the memory is spdered directly to the graphic processor , right next to it , wich makes it to don't matter that much in comparation with a GDDR6 or GDDR5 where the memory modules are like 2 cm away from the cipset

Heh, just put a Vega 56 up for sale today. Spooky timing man.

I've been messing with a Vega 56 for the last week and I actually found that the pro drivers perform better than AMD's main ones for the Vega 56. Sure, they're a tad bit outdated, but I'd take performance and stability over immediately up-to-date drivers considering the age of the GPU.

Vegas go around 80-120€ here, i just wondering how long more will it still drives, i have had for years.

mine is undervolted and overclocked to 1620mhz on gpu and 925mhz on memory. it is prety stable and has lots of juice in it. and with the undervolt i manage to run below 250W of consumption vs +300w on stock values at lower speeds

Hello Can you make a video on RX 590 GME version. If you ever get your hands on that card.

You can enable Resizable Bar through a registry hack and that'll nail the RTX 2060 for sure.

love the content

Driver Maturation and Overclocking truly has proven to be a major gamechanger for Vega, regardless of the product that is used for this practice: Local testing during its opening months presented the astounding revelation that a properly tuned Radeon VII can get within striking distance of and even supersede a Stock 2080 Ti, this is especially true of units that were updated to run on Water Cooling but it truly showed how much that this card was not looked at by the upper entities in the community and thus it proved that Vega was an ideal budget option for the High End at a time where both Pascal and Turing's offerings were too expensive for their own good. Now, knowing that the Radeon VII can already discharge north of 0400 Watts at Stock when not given any tuning, you are heavily encouraged to Undervolt the card before doing any kind of OC'ing, it's already a beast in its own right today because of how well it has matured but it'll be nice to see more of what it can do at its peak; whether or not this'll also benefit Video Encoding, Model Rendering, and AI projects substantially is beyond me, Vega 020 already runs hot when doing renders of the latter and I can only imagine what an OC would do to it, it'll probably be more likely to reach Temperature Junction (0II0º Celsius) even on an Undervolt due to how underdeveloped its iteration of TSMC N07 is but it would be nice to see if it can be tamed better and give this generation of AMD's most important generation of the 20IX decade some more life incredibly deep into Generation IX of Gaming's run.

i like your content very good

@RandomGaminginHD The power consumption numbers provided by the V56 to RTSS and shown in this video are extremely misleading. At stock under full load, V56 is a 225W card, as physically measured at the PCIe power connectors and motherboard PCIe slot by TechPowerUp and noted in its V56 launch review. RTSS reports it at about 65W lower than its actual power consumption, for reasons explained by Igor's Lab in the article titled "Total Board Power (TBP) vs. real power consumption and the inadequacy of software tools vs. real measurements." If I may quote a section of the article: "The [Radeon] TGP is sometimes even more than 100 watts below the actual total power consumption of such a card in large graphics cards! Unfortunately, anyone who then takes this from the software at face value is deceiving themselves." The same misleading, inaccurate reporting does not apply to Geforce cards: "The good side of NVIDIA’s control and limitation mania is the fact that you can read the [...] monitoring values quite easily and accurately via software."

Aw man if I had the money for it I would prob go for one, wallet bent out of shape by picking up a grail of grails Russian watch last week lol Just added you as a saved seller so will check back from time to time when wallet comes off life support hehehe

can you do a 2024 updated version?

RTX 2060 could be also OC'ed and you get DLSS & RTX with that extra money that you pay, though 6GB vram is a bit iffy and if it was up to me i'd get 2060 Super instead.

but now i wanna know what you could of got out of the rtx 2060 with a boost

Nice to see this older gpu peak performance❤

I got this rx vega 56 for $60 in my country (secondhand - i think its used for mining), as an also 2060 user, that grapich card are really solid if you can get in cheap price

Flash a V64 bios and undervolt it. It doesn't use much more power then a stock 56 but memory/core has so much more to work with.

Quite good performance for both cards. Seems like, if you don't play on 1440p/4K and 120Hz, no need to buy new card, if have any of those.

It is curious how the cpu usage get lower than the RTX 2060 when tweaking the Vega 56 but still getting pretty close results. I think it only do that in RDR2, Forza and COD.

Please do some tests with hbcc on the vega card, apparently it gives some interesting results in specific games. You can do (emulated) ray tracing on the vega cards in linux though the performance won't be particularly good

One detail, your gpu model has a TDP limited to 165w, I have a Sapphire model that is 180w, and has better performance, there are bios that solve this and increase performance.

Isn't it more fair - considering they're both the same price now - to show the OC of both cards? Since if you're considering buying one, you're probably going to be overclocking them both.

Should have done the rtx 2060 vs rx 5600 xt

gotta admit I love this design style of Vega 56 looks great

Now can you use a rtx 2070 vs Vega 64 tweaked

I need more Radeon VII content

I can't believe you could get 2060 performance out of a card all the way back in 2017. I've had my 2060 since 2019, but I could have had a Vega 56 an extra two years! Madness.

They dont feel like they were released only a year apart for spme reason to me.

make a comparison video of RX 550 vs GT 1030 OVERCLOCKED

No experience with the 56, but I used a 64 for a long time, and I have a Radeon Instinct MI25 that's had the bios flash done so it outputs video on the single mini DP. I eventually ended up shelving it when my old 1080p high refresh rate monitor died and I made the switch to 1440p high refresh rate, the sum of my experience was more or less that it's starting to show its age in modern titles with a lot of detail it wasn't well suited to the higher resolution, but in 1080 it was fine being able to balance settings to get the refresh rate desired for the game. I forgot what my results were with the MI25, I gave it a test in 3DMark, but I never really used it as much more than an experiment to see what's possible if the bios flashing worked. It scored a bit less than a 64 and a bit more than a 56 right where Techpowerup basically said it should, and for the $85 price I paid it wasn't a bad idea (provided of course you can do the dual bios flash, and cool the thing since it doesn't have any active cooling by default. I've recently seen them as low as $70, plus about $10 for a cheap usb eeprom flash tool, and as far as cooling goes people make little 3D printed brackets for fans, I've seen one with a hole cut in it and a radial fan added, basically you can probably find a way to get airflow for little to nothing. If your budget is super tight and you're willing to dig in a little bit it's not the worst thing.

Who knows if AFOX Turbo Fan RTX 3090 is worth anything?

you can flash the bios of a vega 64 and it will perform like one.

apparently you will be spending money in terms of electricity bill when overclocking the vega 56 so there's that to count too.

all the vegas i've bought second hand here in the uk have issues, that's why they're being sold

The vega 56 has bottlenecked memory timings. You can flash the card with the Vega 64 bios to correct this and bump memory speed to 1100mHz. It will largely perform the same as the 64.

Flashed Vega 64 BIOS on my old Vega 56 and after overclocking the memory to 1100MHz and undervolting by 180mV, it outperformed a stock Vega 64 while drawing less power.

just upgraded from a vega 56 to a 2060 super (it was a very cheap swap) and ive noticed a pretty reasonable performance bump!

One begs to wonder if such a hard overclock is sustainable in the long run...

I'm finding these things for 40-70 Dollars on ebay right now. That's a darn good deal for a cheap build.

I have no idea why you compare a Vega 56 to a 1070 when my Vega 56 currently beats my gtx 1080. But the 2060

weird thing is in my state gtx 1080 is are cheaper than 1060 in the used market

And OLD PhysX games onna' AMD GPU?

I wonder if those Vega cards work better on Linux, because if they do, then you can find out if something is a driver problem.

even though vega cards heat, I always liked vega cards blower style more than fan style in terms of looks.

I just bought a full system for £285 ( Including monitor ) 170hz MBR montior Vega 56 Ryzen 2600 + 480gb + 1tb SSD + Windows 11 ( Even came with a gpu to sell or trade in ) Uk Tech is so affordable, if you know what you're buying you can basically get away with daylight robbery.

flasher avec un bios Vega 64 sur une 56 alors faite une prière car cela fonctionnera et puis un jour la carte est HS sans préavis ca peut arrivé au bout d une semaine de 6 mois 1 ans cela est aléatoire et dépend de bcp de facteurs de la qualité du GPU si oc si l augmentation de voltage ne lui convient pas etc. etc. bonne chances au kamikaze vous en aurez besoins

I first noticed this in another video, but it looks to me that AMD cards have higher contrast than nvidia ones.

The Vega56 should run in 4K... It's where it shines relatively to its age. I am still playing FFVII Intergrade on it in 4K and it's handling it so much better than i'd have thought.

Wait for Vega they said. Well, you have certainly waited! 🙃

It amuses me that the newer card looks older because of the legacy DVI port.

Unless I already have a pretty powerful psu, I would get the 2060.

Why not compare the 2060 to the RX 5700

I love my Vega 56, I often use it as an eGPU for my 2011 MacBook Pro using purge wrangler

The 2060supper is looking real prime at this point

Why does the RTX 2060 footage look washed out compared to the VEGA 56?

About 87% the performance (90% without CP2077), pushed to 95% the performance (99% without CP2077), truly a well aged card.

Buying a vega is a risky proposition. It's likely to have seen more mining than the seven dwarves and its driver support is unknown as its an ageing card

Were you able to overclock the 2060 at all?

i always enjoyed a good "gap".....

amazing results, but as a german i have to prefer to use a lower wattage card XD

the geforce got a blurry ass image, the vega looks more crisp.

Vega serie can easy do 1440p On the moment you go up the les hit on the memory.

To be contrarian: Grab another Vega56 model if used market prices are the same. You'll get almost the same tweaked performance out of the box and without the noise of a blower fan: #1: PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 OC / ASUS ROG STRIX RX Vega 56 GAMING OC #2: Sapphire NITRO+ RX Vega 56 I own a Sapphire Pulse RX Vega 56. Power limit and mem clock are left to factory defaults of 180W and 800 MHz, core clock is OC'd to 1640 MHz @ 1005 mV. That can still run into the power limit in synthetic load tests, but typically not in games at 1080p. Memory OC gets me like +1% perf for a 18% OC, so it wasn't worth stressing the components over it for me.

I own a pair of Vega 64 and according to the usage, I find More similar to a 2070-2080