Even if that exactly turns out to be the case, it still doesn't seem to account for what we know about Vega so far.
The most recent TImeSpy score basically shows Vega 64 tying the air-cooled Vega FE, and Gamer's Nexus already tested Vega FE vs a Fury X clock-for-clock and found that Vega FE performed pretty much dead tied with a Fury X clock-for-clock in 3DMark tests and in games. Since Fiji doesn't do any primitive culling at all and has nothing like TBR, that would mean that either the better AVFS in RX Vega plus the introduction of primitive culling and DSBR are worth a grand total of zero fps and every second RTG spent working on those features was set on fire (but then how did Polaris supposedly gain so much in perf/watt? I thought primitive culling was supposed to be a large part of that?), or is it that Vega is heavily bottlenecked somewhere such that it's theoretical clock-for-clock performance gains are not being realised?
Primitive culling, will only help Vega if polygon through put is the bottleneck. And in time spy its not.
DSBR is application specific so again probably not going to see much improvement there either. AMD showed bandwidth savings on a per application basis, so I'm guessing for now its not going to be that much of a performance improvement and there must be some negative side effects for the way AMD implemented it for not to be on all time.
As far as I understand--and again I admit to being a total novice at understanding GPUs--the fact that Tom's Hardware found that Vega FE air trades blows with a P6000 in 3D pro rendering applications like Creo 3.0, Solidworks 2015, and 3ds Max seems to suggest that the bottleneck isn't geometry performance, while the Beyond 3D Suite testing done by PC Games Hardware I posted earlier in the thread shows a ~20%-30% regressions vs. Fiji in raw memory bandwidth, effective texture bandwidth, and texel fill rates (as I already posted earlier in this thread). My inference from these pieces of evidence was that something was wrong with Vega's memory bandwidth, and that Vega would be DOA if the issue could not be remedied by RTG by RX Vega's launch. I also inferred from that, that RX Vega should get a decent benefit from DSBR since DSBR is directly supposed to reduce memory bandwidth requirements.
I would think the bandwidth issue (although we don't know much about it yet) if it was driver related it would have been fixed early on, cause that is a huge drop from its theoretical bandwidth amounts to be missed. Again DSBR won't be functioned in all applications. Don't really know what that is, but AMD slides never showed performance gains from it, at this point I'm pretty sure its not going to help much.
These TimeSpy results are thus pretty confusing to me, since they would seem to suggest that either DSBR still isn't working, or DSBR provides nearly zero memory bandwidth savings, or Vega isn't memory bound in 3DMark tests and gaming and is being held back by something else?
Well since its not bandwidth bound DSBR won't show any benefits, or not much benefits. Well if its not front end issues or back end issues, something in the the middle
Basically it continues to be the case that every snippet of information that trickles out is leaving me more confused rather than less.
This whole launch is that way and its never a good feeling. This is why people are starting to see the light about Vega.
For the record, if the extreme long-shot idea that RTG has been sandbagging by disabling an entire memory controller and that THIS is why Vega shows ~303 GB/s raw memory bandwidth at the moment (since a single Synopsys HBM2 memory controller maxes out at 307 GB/s), I may actually and literally die of laughter.
Pretty sure there is no sandbagging going on, why would they? Vega FE killed all the hype as it is, reality is setting in.