Vega Rumors

[Phelptwan]

Dang, hoping this comes in closer to $400 than $500 at this point.

 

[razor1]

I just can't see this card selling at the same price as a gtx 1080.... but they don't have price flexibility on Vega......

 

[Dayaks]

It'd be hilarious if nVidia dropped the 2170 an hour before AMD at $350.

Didn't they do that recently? To the 480 launch IIRC?

Imagine it'd be cheaper, 1/3 the power, quieter, ect. I love watching train wrecks.

On the flip side I am tempted to upgrade to that 16 core Ryzen if the next iteration gets clocks to at least 4.5Ghz.... not sure if I'd keep RTG around unless it helps the APUs enough. APUs at least for us enthusiast don't make sense since it's far cheaper to do discrete + low end CPU historically.

 

[Ocellaris]

Here you go everyone, the first public acknowledgement of RX Vega is basically two cheap desks and some grumpy looking booth babes:


And as previously noted, no specs or FPS counters. But keep hope alive, AMD is clearly doing this so they can sneak up on Nvidia. AMD has two weeks to fix those Vega drivers...

 

[Elios]

It'd be hilarious if nVidia dropped the 2170 an hour before AMD at $350.

Didn't they do that recently? To the 480 launch IIRC?

Imagine it'd be cheaper, 1/3 the power, quieter, ect. I love watching train wrecks.

On the flip side I am tempted to upgrade to that 16 core Ryzen if the next iteration gets clocks to at least 4.5Ghz.... not sure if I'd keep RTG around unless it helps the APUs enough. APUs at least for us enthusiast don't make sense since it's far cheaper to do discrete + low end CPU historically.

all nV would really have to do is announce a 50 buck price drop on the 1080ti, 1080, 1070 and 1060

 

[Deleted whining member 223597]

When you don’t show FPS counters, you know you’re product is worse than the competition. At that point you just hope the public won’t notice the differences between the two. AMD marketing strikes again!

 

[Algrim]

When you don’t show FPS counters, you know you’re product is worse than the competition. At that point you just hope the public won’t notice the differences between the two. AMD marketing strikes again!

Naw, RTG is fucked either way.

No FPS numbers = 'They don't want us to see how bad they are'
FPS numbers = 'No one knows under what circumstances those numbers were derived at so they're invalid'

 

[tacos4me]

This thread has been fun to read past couple weeks. Marketing on the FE cards told the whole story, nobody should be surprised at this point. AMD basically has FreeSync to market and attempt to sell these cards with, lol.

With Volta ready to go, Vega is in a real bad place.

 

[_mockingbird]

Here you go everyone, the first public acknowledgement of RX Vega is basically two cheap desks and some grumpy looking booth babes:


And as previously noted, no specs or FPS counters. But keep hope alive, AMD is clearly doing this so they can sneak up on Nvidia. AMD has two weeks to fix those Vega drivers...

Haven't you read on Anandtech forums?

Radeon Vega FE is not for gaming! The drivers aren't optimize for games!

When the real Radeon RX Vega shows up, it will smoke the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti !

 

[_mockingbird]

When you don’t show FPS counters, you know you’re product is worse than the competition. At that point you just hope the public won’t notice the differences between the two. AMD marketing strikes again!

It's all smoke and mirrors.

 

[_mockingbird]

This thread has been fun to read past couple weeks. Marketing on the FE cards told the whole story, nobody should be surprised at this point. AMD basically has FreeSync to market and attempt to sell these cards with, lol.

With Volta ready to go, Vega is in a real bad place.

Even Polaris is in a bad place.

I don't know how AMD expects the Radeon RX 580 to compete with the Geforce GTX 1160.

 

[Dayaks]

Naw, RTG is fucked either way.

No FPS numbers = 'They don't want us to see how bad they are'
FPS numbers = 'No one knows under what circumstances those numbers were derived at so they're invalid'

I was actually going to say even if it showed numbers I wouldn't trust them. Haha! AMD has a bad history with numbers they give after all.

 

[Michaelius]

Naw, RTG is fucked either way.

No FPS numbers = 'They don't want us to see how bad they are'
FPS numbers = 'No one knows under what circumstances those numbers were derived at so they're invalid'

That's because they have history of showing numbers that were insulting to IQ of any hardware enthusiast and their PR is targeted at people who like to visit r/AMD.



Hmm I start to think that Vega indeed might be new architecture (I used to think it's GCN with 2xFP16 few months ago) and as we remember from 290X, Fermi or Geforce 5800 those can be huge misfires in their first unrefined iteration.

 

[_mockingbird]

I can tell you right now that Vega is not going to be able to undercut Pascal in prices and the only card that AMD has left to play is the prices of FreeSync vs G-Sync.

You can expect AMD to trout FreeSync a lot more now than in the past.

 

[gigaxtreme1]

Yeah, I've been saying they should cut all the current generation Vega down for ryzen mobile and get those out there. Process improvement is their best bet. Beating a dead horse with the current generation.

 

[bildad]

Yeah, I've been saying they should cut all the current generation Vega down for ryzen mobile and get those out there. Process improvement is their best bet. Beating a dead horse with the current generation.

It would seem to me that Vega is too power hungry to make a mobile version viable. It would need to be cut so much it would be pointless. A 1060 would be cheaper, faster, and still use less power.

 

[Schmave]

If you look at pcgh test using the beyond3d suite, there are obvious bottlenecks because although the computational output is doubled, some thing are only better by 16 percent compared to Polaris. For the most part there is about a 40% increase in output vs polaris besides ALU's. This is why we are not seeing remotely linear scaling with clocks.

This makes it a very unbalanced architecture. The bandwidth of the architecture is the biggest right now. It's alot worse then fury x.

Compared this to the gtx 1080 ti which leads every metric almost and even the gtx 1080. What you see with Pascal is relatively linear scaling between the gtx 1080 and gtx 1080 ti part in raw performance in most categories. The gtx 1080 ti performs where you expect it to from the step up from a gtx 1080.

Compare the scaling in raw performance to polaris to Vega and you will see why Vega at best is trading blows with the gtx 1080 and not close to the gtx 1080 ti. GCN is reaching it's limit and bottlenecks are become more and more difficult to skirt around.

I guess that's why they are marketing this more as a compute type card (Vega FE, Instinct). It seems to have the raw compute power, but things like memory bandwidth, geometry throughput, etc. are holding it back for other applications.

 

[Brackle]

Welp since RTG is comparing an RX vega with a 1080 GTX, Well this is telling. The card has horrible performance for high-end, and also horrible power consumption. Looks like a big flop for sure. And how the fuck do you not have FPS counters showing.

RTG knows this card sucks. With Polaris and Vega both being very underwhelming video cards. They have to nail Navi perfectly. Pascal is over a year old now......

 

[zerogg]

Its a shame that it looks like its going to be a flop, now there will be no pricing pressure when Nvidia drop Volta. Lack of real competition hurts everyone. I wish there were more than two companies in the space.

 

[Chimpee]

Welp since RTG is comparing an RX vega with a 1080 GTX, Well this is telling. The card has horrible performance for high-end, and also horrible power consumption. Looks like a big flop for sure. And how the fuck do you not have FPS counters showing.

RTG knows this card sucks. With Polaris and Vega both being very underwhelming video cards. They have to nail Navi perfectly. Pascal is over a year old now......

I worried about the next iteration of Polaris, since in my opinion GCN has hit a wall. I am really concern if AMD/RTG can compete in the midrange level since it seems to be bread and butter in GPU when Nvidia release their Volta midrange lineup before they have Navi ready to go

 

[Shogon]

Poor Volta indeed. lol.

GCN needs to move on.

 

[Chimpee]

Poor Volta indeed. lol.

GCN needs to move on.

They will with Navi which is rumor to be a MCM design, but we know that Nvidia is planning their own MCM design post Volta though the question will be who is leading the way between AMD and Nvidia when it comes to MCM.

 

[NKD]

They will with Navi which is rumor to be a MCM design, but we know that Nvidia is planning their own MCM design post Volta though the question will be who is leading the way between AMD and Nvidia when it comes to MCM.

Well when it comes to mcm. I got no doubt amd has their shit figured out. Ryzen is a true example scalability and infinity fabric is just pretty damn impressive. I mean it shows CPU division took the cake when it comes to R&D and GPU division is doing what it can to pass by until navi.

 

[razor1]

seriously guys they will not use MCM designs for GPU's for gaming in the near future lol. There is a reason why Vega20 was on the books, they aren't going to be doing MCM designs for gaming if they aren't going to be using MCM's for heavy compute tasks, where the budget actually makes sense for such a design and the pit falls will be limited too.

 

[WorldExclusive]

Dang, hoping this comes in closer to $400 than $500 at this point.

If you pay more than $350, it's a waste. TBH, the power consumption and sketchy driver development is enough to leave this on the shelf no matter what the price is.
People that want an AMD card for misplaced brand loyalty reasons will buy Vega. They believe Nvidia pissed on their couch in the middle of the night.

 

[NKD]

If you pay more than $350, it's a waste. TBH, the power consumption and sketchy driver development is enough to leave this on the shelf no matter what the price is.
People that want an AMD card for misplaced brand loyalty reasons will buy Vega. They believe Nvidia pissed on their couch in the middle of the night.

Idk. I would happily pay $400 for vega. If anything AMD drivers usually improve over time.

 

[Phelptwan]

If you pay more than $350, it's a waste. TBH, the power consumption and sketchy driver development is enough to leave this on the shelf no matter what the price is.
People that want an AMD card for misplaced brand loyalty reasons will buy Vega. They believe Nvidia pissed on their couch in the middle of the night.

Also, us poor fools who got great deals on freesync monitors. Sadly, my wife would probably kill me if I tried to dump the monitor and get a gsync one.

 

[Nirad9er]

Vega looks to be pretty pathetic to be able to only match a 1080 which has already been out a year. What the F has AMD been doing. They are way too late to drop a 1080 competitor unless they have given up on having the fastest card. This thing better be no more than $400 or it's a flop. AMD always seems to come up short on everything! Their products are always good but not great. They only scream value and never enthusiast. I always feel like I'd rather pay just a little more for Nvidia or Intel.

 

[Briguyatx]

I find it absolutely amusing that everyone thinks AMD is in such a bad place, when quite literally, you can't buy a 470, 480, 570, or 580 card without a 200.00 markup, and anyone who purchased their stock basically printed money.

Ryzen/Threadripper has Intel tossing out new CPU's with as many cores as they can after being stagnant for years, simply due to reasonable pricing for the core count and performance. Even if Vega FE isn't a 1080ti competitor, all they have to do is price them well and they will sell every one they make to people with Freesync montiors. People will bleat about power all day long, but if the price is right, it wont matter.

Not everyone has a stick up their ass about a GPU or CPU having the right logo on it, but given how the 1070/980ti performance levels played out, I'll likely be waiting for a Volta xx70 card regardless.

Though I probably shouldn't be surprised if a Founders Volta xx70 card costs as much as a 1080.

 

[Bandalo]

I find it absolutely amusing that everyone thinks AMD is in such a bad place, when quite literally, you can't buy a 470, 480, 570, or 580 card without a 200.00 markup, and anyone who purchased their stock basically printed money.

Ryzen/Threadripper has Intel tossing out new CPU's with as many cores as they can after being stagnant for years, simply due to reasonable pricing for the core count and performance. Even if Vega FE isn't a 1080ti competitor, all they have to do is price them well and they will sell every one they make to people with Freesync montiors. People will bleat about power all day long, but if the price is right, it wont matter.

Not everyone has a stick up their ass about a GPU or CPU having the right logo on it, but given how the 1070/980ti performance levels played out, I'll likely be waiting for a Volta xx70 card regardless.

Though I probably shouldn't be surprised if a Founders Volta xx70 card costs as much as a 1080.

All of the 470-580 cards are out of stock due to miners, not gamers.

 

[Briguyatx]

All of the 470-580 cards are out of stock due to miners, not gamers.

That changes nothing about AMD's current position. A sold card is still a sold card. The problem is if/when they don't progress in the future. I'm sure Nvidia is quite happy about the mining situation as well.

 

[Dayaks]

Also, us poor fools who got great deals on freesync monitors. Sadly, my wife would probably kill me if I tried to dump the monitor and get a gsync one.

My wife didn't notice for a month when I went from a 24" 16:10 to 34" 21:9 curved. She even booked disney on it. Then one day, "what the **** is this?" And my normal "it's the one we've had" ... she bends and looks at the profile "it's ****** curved!!"


So you could try that. Get something somewhat close and maybe she won't notice.

 

[razor1]

I find it absolutely amusing that everyone thinks AMD is in such a bad place, when quite literally, you can't buy a 470, 480, 570, or 580 card without a 200.00 markup, and anyone who purchased their stock basically printed money.

Ryzen/Threadripper has Intel tossing out new CPU's with as many cores as they can after being stagnant for years, simply due to reasonable pricing for the core count and performance. Even if Vega FE isn't a 1080ti competitor, all they have to do is price them well and they will sell every one they make to people with Freesync montiors. People will bleat about power all day long, but if the price is right, it wont matter.

Not everyone has a stick up their ass about a GPU or CPU having the right logo on it, but given how the 1070/980ti performance levels played out, I'll likely be waiting for a Volta xx70 card regardless.

Though I probably shouldn't be surprised if a Founders Volta xx70 card costs as much as a 1080.

nV probably won't do another FE at higher cost, it backfired on them.

Having said that. AMD makes a certain amount of cards based on their marketshare figures and projected sales figures. Having them sold out is good but the problem is if its hard to get an AMD card, people jump over to what they can buy, the 1060. People that want the 1070, well can't get those either. but there is no AMD alternative yet, Vega might be that alternative, but at a much higher power consumption, looking at double or more than double the power consumption, that is something that is hard to ignore, also going up to the 1080 is not as much of a stretch either.

Back to being sold out by mining, that hurts AMD in the long run because nV has better retention rate currently. AMD can't open the flood gates on cards just for miners either cause it can hurt them badly if the mining market crashes. Its a tough place to be in man.

Then ya start looking at what has happened in the last three gens of graphics card releases, AMD has been falling behind, first it was the 290x which was good but just power hungry and came out around the same time as its competitor, then you had Fiji and the r3xx series, both 6 months late and even more power hungry than its competitor (top end Fury could not match top end competitor card either, Titan), then we have Vega and Polaris, even further behind in power draw, and Vega is 1 year behind in release with ungodly power draw.

With Navi not scheduled till end of next year, and Volta coming out early next year, its not looking good, its most likely another blood bath.

 

[razor1]

My wife didn't notice for a month went I went from a 24" 16:10 to 34" 21:9 curved. She even booked disney on it. Then one day, "what the **** is this?" And my normal "it's the one we've had" ... she bends and looks at the profile "it's ****** curved!!"


So you could try that. Get something somewhat close and maybe she won't notice.

That's funny,!

 

[Bandalo]

That changes nothing about AMD's current position. A sold card is still a sold card. The problem is if/when they don't progress in the future. I'm sure Nvidia is quite happy about the mining situation as well.

It does have a huge impact on AMD in the future...They market themselves as a graphics card company, not a mining equipment company. If they decide to change business models and just sell mining cards, they'd be a huge success until the mining craze dies. However, right now more and more gamers that WOULD have bought an AMD card are instead buying Nvidia because that's all that's available. So the gaming market swings to Nvidia even more.

And all that extra profit for the overpriced cards is NOT reaching AMD's pockets. It's in the pockets of the resellers and the AIB partners.

 

[Briguyatx]

nV probably won't do another FE at higher cost, it backfired on them.

Having said that. AMD makes a certain amount of cards based on their marketshare figures and projected sales figures. Having them sold out is good but the problem is if its hard to get an AMD card, people jump over to what they can buy, the 1060. People that want the 1070, well can't get those either. but there is no AMD alternative yet, Vega might be that alternative, but at a much higher power consumption, looking at double or more than double the power consumption, that is something that is hard to ignore, also going up to the 1080 is not as much of a stretch either.

Back to being sold out by mining, that hurts AMD in the long run because nV has better retention rate currently. AMD can't open the flood gates on cards just for miners either cause it can hurt them badly if the mining market crashes. Its a tough place to be in man.

But everyone keeps missing on the fact that the entire reason that this current potential "Vega" problem exists is that AMD has been focusing on Ryzen, and not its video cards. And that has been a very good thing overall for the CPU market and consumers as a whole. If the gamble pays off for them, CPU profits can then be funneled into improving their GPU stack.

I've been waiting a very long time to really upgrade my desktop, because quite honestly, everything runs pretty well on my Alienware laptop with a Skylake 6700HQ and a 980ti in a graphics amplifier running at 4k.

With the way things were going, there would be no reason to upgrade the 4770k. In a couple of weeks, I can quadruple my core count and still have the same or better IPC performance than the 4770k, which is already faster than the 6700HQ in single threaded applications (cough gaming).

Now i'm just waiting to see how much ram they can stuff on an MATX threadripper motherboard

 

[razor1]

But everyone keeps missing on the fact that the entire reason that this current potential "Vega" problem exists is that AMD has been focusing on Ryzen, and not its video cards. And that has been a very good thing overall for the CPU market and consumers as a whole. If the gamble pays off for them, CPU profits can then be funneled into improving their GPU stack.

I've been waiting a very long time to really upgrade my desktop, because quite honestly, everything runs pretty well on my Alienware laptop with a Skylake 6700HQ and a 980ti in a graphics amplifier running at 4k.

With the way things were going, there would be no reason to upgrade the 4770k. In a couple of weeks, I can quadruple my core count and still have the same or better IPC performance than the 4770k, which is already faster than the 6700HQ in single threaded applications (cough gaming).

Now i'm just waiting to see how much ram they can stuff on an MATX threadripper motherboard

The CPU market we don't know if Ryzen is a success yet or not, it looks to be (next Q's results will tell us more about this cause current Q results didn't show us anything other then AMD still in the red and the next Q will be the first Q with a full Q of Ryzen), but if Coffee Lake is as good as Kaby lake with 6 cores, AMD will not gain much ground, since Coffee lake will be able to offer lower end 4 core chips to boot. Epyc has some serious problems when it comes to NUMA aware programs that require data localization, which is pretty much the entire web infrastructure and large scale commerce platforms. Also with Intel being a total monopoly in that server segment is something they have faced before and they know how hard it is carve up anything there.

Discussed this earlier, AMD can't just shift CPU funding to GPU funding, they still need the CPU funding (R&D) for future CPU products like Zen 2 and 3. They need to get into the black first and take care more of their debt to ensure they are on solid ground before they push money to the GPU side of things. As it is right now, Navi's R&D budget has been set in stone, so Navi is under financed compared to Volta.

 

[ChosenUno]

AMD can't afford to shift CPU to GPU funding. Intel can just out research them by next gen and we'll be back to last year. They need to hold on to the momentum and carry on executing on the CPU side. CPU is much more lucrative than GPU. Make a 12B transistors part that sells at $500 or you make a 5B transistors part that sells for $500?

GPU wise I don't think there's much they can do. Maybe if Navi is a completely new architecture, maybe.

 

[WorldExclusive]

AMD can't afford to shift CPU to GPU funding. Intel can just out research them by next gen and we'll be back to last year. They need to hold on to the momentum and carry on executing on the CPU side. CPU is much more lucrative than GPU. Make a 12B transistors part that sells at $500 or you make a 5B transistors part that sells for $500?

GPU wise I don't think there's much they can do. Maybe if Navi is a completely new architecture, maybe.

Instead of AMD making a chip that is fast for today's games, that want to include features that may matter five years from now.
All that extra crap slows down development and complicates driver support. Dump HBM, GCN, infinity fabric, whatever other complicated nonsense Koduri is thinking of and just make a video card for right now.
Introduce features when they matter. The DX12 optimization on AMD didn't matter because DX12 sucks as a whole. They thought making cheap-ass cards with DX12 optimization was going to save them.

Or just dump Koduri, sell mobile/console/mid-range chips until you can find the right leader. He can't stand in Jensen Huang's shadow.

 

[razor1]

Can't dump Koduri,

He is a very capable engineer, he got locked into a situation that was done by people before him.

But any case yeah the rest of what ya stated was right.

AMD needs to focus on today, and not tomorrow, features don't matter when there is no adoption rate because the product doesn't sell well.

Funny thing about it is, when ya see marketing talking about "new features" before they start talking about performance, well shit hit the fan already. When ya start seeing, this features gives this much amount of performance over an unknown generation lol, Shit hit the fan already. That's why I said that word cloud back a year ago wasn't anything special cause I thought they were talking about pre Polaris architecture, and they were.