Radeon 7 (Vega 2, 7nm, 16GB) - $699 available Feb 7th with 3 games

So AMD now had a stable driver for the consumer. Really, they couldn't wait 3 days to avoid looking stupid???

I am still really happy that this card is 1/4 DP. This harkens back to the Tahiti days and gives this card a great chance of strong resale.
 
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I've made thst post before, people need to learn team whatever is not your friend they are here to separate you from your money. Both will gouge and let you blame the other side. Buy what you want support what you want but stop lying to yourself that its anything more then you voting with your wallet. I bought a 2080ti because it was the fastest availabl, it took a dump on me so I returned it and got a custom PCB 2080. Given the choice between the 2080 and the vii I would have picked probably the vii for the games included along with trying to help AMD's bottom line until the next generation of cards. If I'm not getting the best available I default to the next deal I see. I don't factor in tech that going to be delivered, it matches the lower price of 2080's that aren't on sale and gives me things I'll use now. I'm a consumer and thats it give me better tech to buy. By better I mean something that will give me the benefits out of the box no extra stuff needed from developers.
 
So, one thing that I have learned is that while you can undervolt fine the fan curves are a waste of time. No matter what points I graph, when the temp hits 67c the fans ramp to 3800rpm and spin up and down from there. If I leave the fans on automatic they don't go over about 2600rpm. Core temps are higher however, at 75c.

I blame wattman. Regardless, other than the undervolt at 950mv, I'm leaving everything else alone for now. 75c is pretty warm but apparently well within design limits.
 
I do find this hilarious since people have been touting AMD’s drivers aren’t shit anymore.

On the flip side everyday I have it in the back of my mind space invaders might pop up on my RTX card. :D

AMD usually fixes their problems in a week or two. They just like to maul every launch.
 
Lottery winner? Hardly.

924mv was not stable it's back up to 950mv now for more testing. TD2 beta was rebooting my system last night at 924. In furmark, 950mv core results in 75c peak core temperatures unless the fan is spun up to 2750rpm. So, the undervolts really aren't doing a heck of a lot for me. The fan still needs to spin up, just not quite as fast as it was. The benefit has been marginal. And no, my case does have decent air flow.

74 fahrenheit ambient.

I undervolted to 1053 (~50mv) with no other changes and it dropped 'temperature' and 'junction temperature' by about 5C each while running 3dMark Time Spy. Dropping to 1000 caused soft crashes but lowered the temperatures by an additional 10C each before crashing.

EDIT: Crashed in R6: Siege so reverting to stock.

And this is why AMD is not undervolting at the factory.

The above results show stability is compromises from just a little undervolt.

If AMD undervolted the cards 20% lower, you would have half the cards failing and even more occurring as the silicon ages and people begin testing more games as stability on one games does not guarantee stability in every title.

Basically this boils down, to NVidia hatred/AMD Fandom, because nearly everything else there is inconsequential.

Who cares about questionable value of Ray Tracing, the 2080 outperforms the Vega 7 in conventional games at the same price.

NVidia is price gouging but when AMD delivers worse performance for the same price it isn't price gouging?

The thing is AMD is being given a free ticket for marketshare when Nvidia raises their prices.

Why? It has to deal with substitute goods.

https://www.investopedia.com/video/play/what-are-substitute-goods/

When Nvidia increases prices for their cards, demand for AMD cards goes up if they offer better pricing.

If they simply match Nvidia's pricing, demand for AMD cards goes down, because they cannot command the same prices because they are an imperfect substitute which pushes demand for Nvidia cards up and thus will lead to an eventual price increase.

If AMD keeps the pricing of their card the same and doesn't increase their pricing to follow, demand for their cards goes up, which reduces demand on Nvidia cards which cause pricing to decrease. AMD gained the most marketshare vs Nvidia with the launch of the 5870/4870.

If the imperfect complement which is seen as inferior increases their price as seen with the 7870 and 7970 launch, the better brand demand will shoot up like crazy which will cause pricing to skyrocket. This is because at equal pricing the public already prefers one brand to the other, if the publicly perceived inferior substitutes value becomes worse than the preferred one, then the preferred brands demand/prices goes up naturally and if AMD continues to follow, prices reach stupid levels.

AMD has done just as much to damage consumer pricing as Nvidia because microeconomic principles dictate, the imperfect complement has to charge less than the preferred one. Charge equal pricing and your volume will shrink and your demand will fall which will negate the benefit of the increased pricing. Nvidia raising their pricing, with AMD pursuing similar pricing while having worse products simply raises gives pressure for Nvidia to raise their price even higher because they are the imperfect substitute.

In most markets where there is a strong brand preference over the other, one brand has cheaper pricing which creates a stable market equilibrium. If the cheaper brand raise their pricing up to the brand with an inferior product, it causes pricing to go up because this is a duopoly and there are no other substitutes.

That what AMD has been trying to do with the RX Vega, RX 590 and Vega VII. Trying to sell sell you a product that is not any better as far as value(actually worse) and hope you buy them out of hatred for Nvidia(which is really anti consumer/economics as well). If we want prices to go down, both companies need to fail at elevated pricing. Particularly AMD. If AMD pricing remains elevated while being the imperfect complement, demand and pricing for Nvidia will be higher with pressure to go upward. Buying AMD cards with elevated pricing isn't helping out consumers, it's helping AMD fatten their pockets while helping Nvidia justify their higher pricing. Neither company is your friend and AMD has done just as much if not more to harm pricing than Nvidia.

If Nvidia raises their prices, AMD needs to keep their better pricing which will naturally causes demand and volume to shift to them. Nvidia might outsell them still but if AMD is able to supply the market, we could see marketshare fall backdown to 60/40 which means double the volume for AMD rather than the 20/80 that we get when AMD raises their prices to keep up with Nvidia. Both AMD and Nvidia need to fail at elevated pricing to create a new market equilibrium price and demand. AMD guerrilla marketing campaign to get people to buy AMD products at the same pricing as Nvidia products is very anti consumer because it tries to fight a market correction by getting people to buy a product with worse perceived branding on top of having typically a worse product at launch which not only sustains AMD's high prices but Nvidia's as well.
 
AMD fans don't buy Nvidia because they don't want to reward bad behavior.
Then, they go and buy AMD to spite Nvidia but essentially are rewarding bad behavior on AMD's part.

Used 1080ti FTW? lol
 
And this is why AMD is not undervolting at the factory.

The above results show stability is compromises from just a little undervolt.

If AMD undervolted the cards 20% lower, you would have half the cards failing and even more occurring as the silicon ages and people begin testing more games as stability on one games does not guarantee stability in every title.



The thing is AMD is being given a free ticket for marketshare when Nvidia raises their prices.

Why? It has to deal with substitute goods.

https://www.investopedia.com/video/play/what-are-substitute-goods/

When Nvidia increases prices for their cards, demand for AMD cards goes up if they offer better pricing.

If they simply match Nvidia's pricing, demand for AMD cards goes down, because they cannot command the same prices because they are an imperfect substitute which pushes demand for Nvidia cards up and thus will lead to an eventual price increase.

If AMD keeps the pricing of their card the same and doesn't increase their pricing to follow, demand for their cards goes up, which reduces demand on Nvidia cards which cause pricing to decrease. AMD gained the most marketshare vs Nvidia with the launch of the 5870/4870.

If the imperfect complement which is seen as inferior increases their price as seen with the 7870 and 7970 launch, the better brand demand will shoot up like crazy which will cause pricing to skyrocket. This is because at equal pricing the public already prefers one brand to the other, if the publicly perceived inferior substitutes value becomes worse than the preferred one, then the preferred brands demand/prices goes up naturally and if AMD continues to follow, prices reach stupid levels.

AMD has done just as much to damage consumer pricing as Nvidia because microeconomic principles dictate, the imperfect complement has to charge less than the preferred one. Charge equal pricing and your volume will shrink and your demand will fall which will negate the benefit of the increased pricing. Nvidia raising their pricing, with AMD pursuing similar pricing while having worse products simply raises gives pressure for Nvidia to raise their price even higher because they are the imperfect substitute.

In most markets where there is a strong brand preference over the other, one brand has cheaper pricing which creates a stable market equilibrium. If the cheaper brand raise their pricing up to the brand with an inferior product, it causes pricing to go up because this is a duopoly and there are no other substitutes.

That what AMD has been trying to do with the RX Vega, RX 590 and Vega VII. Trying to sell sell you a product that is not any better as far as value(actually worse) and hope you buy them out of hatred for Nvidia(which is really anti consumer/economics as well). If we want prices to go down, both companies need to fail at elevated pricing. Particularly AMD. If AMD pricing remains elevated while being the imperfect complement, demand and pricing for Nvidia will be higher with pressure to go upward. Buying AMD cards with elevated pricing isn't helping out consumers, it's helping AMD fatten their pockets while helping Nvidia justify their higher pricing. Neither company is your friend and AMD has done just as much if not more to harm pricing than Nvidia.

If Nvidia raises their prices, AMD needs to keep their better pricing which will naturally causes demand and volume to shift to them. Nvidia might outsell them still but if AMD is able to supply the market, we could see marketshare fall backdown to 60/40 which means double the volume for AMD rather than the 20/80 that we get when AMD raises their prices to keep up with Nvidia. Both AMD and Nvidia need to fail at elevated pricing to create a new market equilibrium price and demand. AMD guerrilla marketing campaign to get people to buy AMD products at the same pricing as Nvidia products is very anti consumer because it tries to fight a market correction by getting people to buy a product with worse perceived branding on top of having typically a worse product at launch which not only sustains AMD's high prices but Nvidia's as well.

Well spoken. These notions were not lost on me when I purchased my Radeon VII. The only caveat I would add is AMD's margins on the Radeon VII are quite thin. Many different hardware reviewers have said given AMD's costs on the Radeon VII, they could not sell it for less than $700 without loosing money and or pissing off investors. So I don't think the Radeon VII as a "gouge" fits. A better description might be an overly expensive "niche" card that has a hard time justifying it's value (particularly in gaming only useage) against a RTX 2080. Strictly on the merits of performance as a gaming card, it "should" have been priced $600 and would have been much better received / recommended at this price point. If your a content creator first and a gamer second, it definitely justifies it's $700 price.

AMD only occasionally beats Nvidia to wear the performance crown with it's offerings. They do however have a long standing reputation of being the "bang for the buck" king traditionally offering competitive performance at a lower price. As we all well know, neither of these metrics applied this time around with AMD and the Radeon VII (in so far as it applies strictly to gaming).

For me personally, it came down to a couple of key factors.

* My son's RX480 is long in the tooth and is starting to show it's age (1440p monitor). As a RX590 is not enough of an upgrade to justify the cost and Navi is too far off to hold out, it made sense to pass down my 1070 and upgrade my video card.

* I really did not want a RTX 2080. As I have previously pointed out, I really detest Nvidia's business practices and as a rule will withhold my $upport of them whenever possible. The price gouging on Turing combined with widespread RTX 2070 / 2080 card failures only compounded my hesitation in grabbing a RTX 2080.

* I "could" have gone for a used 1080Ti. Pascal was (and still is) a GREAT Nvidia GPU. Used 1080 Ti averages around $500. Ultimately, the $200 saved did not offset the downsides of buying used (no warranty, uncertain history, questionable life remaining). The bonus of the game bundle with the Radeon VII was a factor as well.

* Open source drivers in Linux

* If mining makes a comeback and I strongly suspect it will during the next economic crash (which is not far off) either through mining or resale, should make a tidy profit.

If Navi had been here sooner, if Nvidia priced the RTX series inline with Pascal not gouging us for "questionable features" (RTX, DLSS), if the RTX 2070 / 2080 did not suffer from widespread quality control issues, I may very well have opted not to buy the Radeon VII.
 
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To follow up on my comment yesterday; I reverted to stock and still had CTD in R6:S, with some severe artifacting going on at the desktop. Warframe, Battlefield 4, The Division 2 Beta (when I wasn't getting disconnected), and Dota 2 all worked OK on those settings so I suspect it may be a driver related issue specific to R6:S.
 
AMD fans don't buy Nvidia because they don't want to reward bad behavior.
Then, they go and buy AMD to spite Nvidia but essentially are rewarding bad behavior on AMD's part.

Used 1080ti FTW? lol

The 7870 and 7970 launch was the single most harmful launch to consumers easily, particularly because there was no blow back when AMD initially did it.

These cards should have launched at 200-250 and 399 considering how cheap 28nm chips are and the size of the dies. The 7870 was particularly bad.

We complain about midranges like the RTX 2060 costing 350, but the 7870 was mega overpriced because unlike the RTX 2060, it had absolutely no reason for it. Not only was the die 213mm2(on cheap 28nm), Nvidia was launching very soon which meant from a strategic standpoint, it was a blunder as there was a good chance Nvidia could show up with slightly lower pricing and destroy any brand loyalty AMD had which they did. From what we know from the cost of finfet chips, the 7870 cost half as much to produce as a chip compared to the RX480 chip, yet the former costed $350 in 2012 while the later costed $200/240 in 2016. The RTX 2060 might be expensive at 350, but with the lack of competition from AMD, GDDR6(70% more expensive then GDDR5) and a 440mm2, it's certainly better priced than the 7870 which matched the performance of the GTX 570, using a die 40% the size of the GTX 570 but a cost 20 dollars higher than the starting price of the GTX 570.

Look at the performance per dollar of the RTX 2060 vs the 7870 at the time and it will become clear, if AMD was in the same position as Nvidia is, they would do the exact same thing or perhaps worse.
Well spoken. These notions were not lost on me when I purchased my Radeon VII. The only caveat I would add is AMD's margins on the Radeon VII are quite thin. Many different hardware reviewers have said given AMD's costs on the Radeon VII, they could not sell it for less than $700 without loosing money and or pissing off investors. So I don't think the Radeon VII as a "gouge" fits. A better description might be an overly expensive "niche" card that has a hard time justifying it's value (particularly in gaming only useage) against a RTX 2080. Strictly on the merits of performance as a gaming card, it "should" have been priced $600 and would have been much better received / recommended at this price point. If your a content creator first and a gamer second, it definitely justifies it's $700 price.

AMD only occasionally beats Nvidia to wear the performance crown with it's offerings. They do however have a long standing reputation of being the "bang for the buck" king traditionally offering competitive performance at a lower price. As we all well know, neither of these metrics applied this time around with AMD and the Radeon VII (in so far as it applies strictly to gaming).

For me personally, it came down to a couple of key factors.

* My son's RX480 is long in the tooth and is starting to show it's age (1440p monitor). As a RX590 is not enough of an upgrade to justify the cost and Navi is too far off to hold out, it made sense to pass down my 1070 and upgrade my video card.

* I really did not want a RTX 2080. As I have previously pointed out, I really detest Nvidia's business practices and as a rule will withhold my $upport of them whenever possible. The price gouging on Turing combined with widespread RTX 2070 / 2080 card failures only compounded my hesitation in grabbing a RTX 2080.

* I "could" have gone for a used 1080Ti. Pascal was (and still is) a GREAT Nvidia GPU. Used 1080 Ti averages around $500. Ultimately, the $200 saved did not offset the downsides of buying used (no warranty, uncertain history, questionable life remaining). The bonus of the game bundle with the Radeon VII was a factor as well.

* Open source drivers in Linux

* If mining makes a comeback and I strongly suspect it will during the next economic crash (which is not far off) either through mining or resale, should make a tidy profit.

If Navi had been here sooner, if Nvidia priced the RTX series inline with Pascal not gouging us for "questionable features" (RTX, DLSS), if the RTX 2070 / 2080 did not suffer from widespread quality control issues, I may very well have opted not to buy the Radeon VII.

Vega's BOM is likely being overstated at this point.

These BOM reports always come out for Vega at very convenient points in time.

Vega BOM materials happened to be released just after it was reported that the 399/499 were temporary intro pricing and the bundled with game price was the real price. Looking at how AMD bundles games + cards today, it should be clear the true pricing of Vega 56/64 was 499 and 599.

Same thing happened here. The price of Vega was releasing an RTX 2080 card at RTX 2080 pricing and people thought it was a disppointing rip off card. Now all of a sudden, the optics of everything changes and everyone changes their perspective on Vega.

Looking at the current pricing of Vega 64/56, we have cards with half the memory, half the stacks selling at nearly half the price. Radeon VII might be using 7nm but it is using a modest die size. For example wafer pricing for 7nm might be double the cost, but yields exponentially decrease with increases in die size. As a result, the die found on the Radeon VII is probably similar in cost to RTX 2080. In addition considering the amount of cards using HBM, the presence of two suppliers at the moment and the ramp up of production, the price of HBM2 has to have fallen at this point.

Since Vega 56 has been seen being sold at 350, lets assume this is(it's actually been down to 329) near cost for AMD at 280 with 50 dollars being in there for partner and retailers as profit with another 20 dollars to cover the game bundle. I would say for that price to be possible compared to launch, the price of HBM2 has to have fallen down atleast 33% so lets say 150 now down to 100.

So $200 for 4 stacks of HBM + interposer(25) + (board components + PCB) ($50) + 20 for cooler = $295 + price of GPU(120) = $415 + game bundle $20. This is alot more realistic bill of material compared fudzilla because it agree's with current pricing Vega 56/64.

If we subtract, 2 stack of HBM and reduce the price of the die down to Vega 56, 80 dollars, the cost to produce a Vega VII is 275 + 20 dollars for game bundle = 295 + retailer and partner margin in the rest.

Taking all of this into consideration, Radeon VII could be sold at Radeon VII Vega 56 pricing + 140 which is = $490(or 470 if we consider 329 the floor cost of Vega) if AMD wanted to make similar margins to Vega 56.

As a result, there is a tonne of margin still left in Radeon VII and considering how much less AMD spends on R and D on their GPU products, their margins don't need to be nearly as fat as Nvidia to make a profit.

The 650 dollar being thrown around does not make sense because because Vega 56 would be selling at 150-200 dollar loss at 350 dollar pricing which does not make sense.

And this is why I don't like AMD's viral marketing today. They plant these little rumors and hints to change peoples optics to get people to switch to their side. This is anti-consumer because it lets them get away with bad pricing.
 
tajoh111 So how many people do you know that have switched sides because of the cunning AMD marketing strategies?
 
if they truly missed that on all the retail cards then someone needs to be fired lol


No UEFI support on mine. Not updating mine though. I am having zero issues with the card and my PC boots just fine. I recently bricked an RX 580 flashing back to a normal bios from a mining bios. Took me 3 hours to get it fixed since it didn't have a bios switch.
 
Heads up. Big flaw in the Radeon VII bios. Updated bios issued by Asrock, but should work with all Radeon VII cards seeing as they are all the same reference cards.

Read /download fix here....

https://www.techpowerup.com/252476/amd-radeon-vii-has-no-uefi-support

That's laughable. If my team released code with a massive, obvious gap like that, we'd be out jobs (even if it didnt cause any revenue losses). From experience, that's either top-to-bottom buffoonery from dev and QA, or possibly a very bad decision to release anyways by product manangement. Either way, insert Picard palms-in-face meme.
 
So those of us with UEIF secure boot type windows install's would have a slight issue just swapping one card for the other? How much of a pain would it be?
 
They keep on sending me stuff lol


This time I received a note with my name on it.
 

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Is that a Radeon t shirt that came with your card? :) Did they end the correct size lol
It didn't come with the card. They next day air AM'd it yesterday alone. I provided no feedback to them at all. They facebook creeped me perhaps? lol
 
It didn't come with the card. They next day air AM'd it yesterday alone. I provided no feedback to them at all. They facebook creeped me perhaps? lol
well its a good color to use as work wear or going out to some kind of geek events....i would be happy with it lol:) They must be getting info from whoever you purchase it from...didnt you buy yours from amd.com?
 
well its a good color to use as work wear or going out to some kind of geek events....i would be happy with it lol:) They must be getting info from whoever you purchase it from...didnt you buy yours from amd.com?
Yes, direct
 
So who's gonna be the first person to try and flash the Instinct MI50 BIOS to it to get the 1:2 FP64 of 6.7 TFLOPS lol
 
So who's gonna be the first person to try and flash the Instinct MI50 BIOS to it to get the 1:2 FP64 of 6.7 TFLOPS lol

No way would I risk bricking a new $700 graphics card. If the FP64 performance can be enabled in the bios, it will be because someone modified the Radeon VII bios to unlock the extra performance. I strongly suspect the MI50 bios is far too different to work on the Radeon VII (without a ton of work).
 
No way would I risk bricking a new $700 graphics card. If the FP64 performance can be enabled in the bios, it will be because someone modified the Radeon VII bios to unlock the extra performance. I strongly suspect the MI50 bios is far too different to work on the Radeon VII (without a ton of work).
if you use it as secondary adapter the chance of bricking is low. You can easily recover a botched vbios flash.
 
Boooooooo. I loaded 19.2.2 and wattman is still soft locking on me. Submitted a bug report this time. Oh well.
 
I have mine undervolted a bit and with fans kept on auto, has maintained lower speeds generally around 2500rpm. When I had fans running up to ridiculous 3800rpm speeds I was using custom fan curves in wattman. None of my fan points were set to ramp that high but it did it anyway. I gave up on it and just left them on auto.
 
So was the excess fan noise related to glitched wattman and not working as intended?

Just watched the AdoredTV review and his review was making it sound like nobody in the press tried to undervolt/use the fan controls - but if they were broken to begin with I don't know how they would've been able to do anything with them anyway. With that said, if the sound profile is not actually an issue, I might have to pick one up now.

Curious to know if [H] delayed the review for AMD to fix their drivers and/or it was requested by AMD to wait.
 
Just watched the AdoredTV review and his review was making it sound like nobody in the press tried to undervolt/use the fan controls - but if they were broken to begin with I don't know how they would've been able to do anything with them anyway.
Certainly, the reviews that I've read from sources that I trust reported that undervolting and fan control were not supported by the software available at the time.
 
Certainly, the reviews that I've read from sources that I trust reported that undervolting and fan control were not supported by the software available at the time.

as far as the drivers they were sent with the review cards i believe it didn't work, it's completely possible he was able to get an early version of the drivers that came out today that had the wattman fixes implemented. i didn't watch the video though since i've seen enough canned benchmark reviews at this point, just waiting for Brent's review which will have actual gameplay tested.
 
as far as the drivers they were sent with the review cards i believe it didn't work, it's completely possible he was able to get an early version of the drivers that came out today that had the wattman fixes implemented. i didn't watch the video though since i've seen enough canned benchmark reviews at this point, just waiting for Brent's review which will have actual gameplay tested.


The fact is that the Valentines Day driver release has so improved Radeon 7 ability to reduce fan noise and overclock the GPU core with stability to 2000 mhz and upwards and memory to 1150 mhz. These are significant improvements that merit that all reviewers of Radeon 7 retest their benchmarks and gaming performance in light of the new reality.
Sources: Not an Apple Fan and Adored TV both on YouTube.
 
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If you want to play with the big boys you need to bring your A-Game. Expecting other people to do extra work because you couldn't get your shit together is not a reasonable expectation.
 
You are a another mindless Nvidia fan boy. Tell me how ray tracing is doing in all those dozens of games that support it. RTX failed from launch. The hardware can't handle the demands of ray tracing. The price is outrageous for very small performance gains if RT is turned off. A b.s. technology called DLSS that degrades image quality with shimmering artifacts in order to create an AI faked-resolution and FPS scores. DLSS is only good for competitive gamers who care little about image quality and only about frame rates. Driver updates in the first week of availability of a video card that are significant are fairly common even for Nvidia. Are you afraid of a retest because perhaps your blessed RTX 2080 may be shown not to be so overpowering after all? I also hope when the review is repeated with the new drivers that they also test Star Control Origins from Stardock. I would like to see how the RTX 2080 stacks up against Radeon VII with that game.
 
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The fact is that the Valentines Day driver release has so improved Radeon 7 ability to reduce fan noise and overclock the GPU core with stability to 2000 mhz and upwards and memory to 1150 mhz. These are significant improvements that merit that all reviewers of Radeon 7 retest their benchmarks and gaming performance in light of the new reality.

Where are you finding this information? The amd release notes read like they improved stability of the overclocking software, not of overclocking itself. A single user on the amd subreddit reported good OC results in the new driver discussion thread but there's no quantitative before/after info that I've been able to find.
 
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