News AMD claims major Ryzen OEM wins, dates Vega's unveiling

Insert "Vega is turning into debacle of Bulldozer proportions joke" here.

Good to see OEMs are picking up Ryzen for laptops though, finally some choice

 

The Vega demo running at 4k looked great, but I got a weird, why do they need to Dual GPU it? vibe floating over me.

I get the feeling Vega is not as strong on the gaming front as it should be. Maybe too targeted to machine learning etc?

 

With the reveal being at SIGGRAPH rather than a gaming-focused event, that's not a bad bet. Vega Frontier Edition looks like a Fury with double-FP16 compute capability crammed in, but otherwise scaling with the increased clock speed, so if consumer Vega is the same it could be very popular with the render & cryptocurrency mining markets, but not as big a hit for gaming (unless it is priced down to razor thin margins to match the 1080s it would likely trade blows with). AMD might go with the tactic of releasing it as a 'halo' card (Titan equivalent) for those who will only buy AMD regardless of sticker price, but otherwise leaving the consumer market to Polaris for now.

 

Wasn't vega's designing made at the time of the Nvidia 9xx series? the 10xx series has been out for not too long and even those have issues with 4K rendering so it's no wonder two vega GPUs are necessary for 4K.

 

Vega has 3 metrics where it can beat Pascal; performance, efficiency and price.

If it launched around the same time as the 1080 and 1070 it could afford to tick one of those boxes.

If it launched 6 months after (and allowed Nvidia to take the quick money), it would need to tick 2 of those boxes.

With Volta due later in the year and prices of 1080/1070's falling (especially 2nd hand!), Vega NEEDS to tick all three to be taken seriously after arriving so late to the party!

 

Not only that, but at the high end of the market the goalpost of what constitutes good performance is about to shift very significantly as 4K monitors will start to move beyond 60hz and there is the upcoming beast of Ultrawides demanding all the GPU power as well...
Couple that with a lacklustre Vega and I don't really want to find out what Nvidia will adjust the price of Volta to.

 

There is no magical hardware required to run at UHD (beyond the physical outputs capable of 3840x2160, which you'd be hard-pressed not to find with the prevalence of DisplayPort). As rendered detail goes down, framerate goes up, and vice versa. Something like HL2 will render at UHD well above 60FPS on even a barebones card, while the latest OMGWTTFBBQ shades-of-brown 2017 edition shooter will run like molasses no matter how many GPUs you throw at it if you turn all the options all the way up to Maximum Compensating Level.

If your benchmark for a GPU to be 'good' is for it to run the latest games, at maximum settings, at the maximum resolution you can get a monitor in, then you will always discover that no card will ever achieve this. Resolutons will continue to increase, and every time GPUs get faster, game developers will add more visual bling to use up that performance.

 

Vega or whatever they label it as, is close to dead on Arrival. Early August for limited quantities is not the news anyone wanted really. 1 year ago ( yeah 1 whole year ) the 1080 launched, Vega is going to arrive for its own funeral party. Volta will surely arrive before the entire Vega line up is launched at this rate.

The 1070 is good enough now and cheap enough now for 99%. Leaves the high end most of who went 1080 or 1080ti. Leaves you the tiny % who buy AMD only gpu cards. As someone said earlier may as well whack on a titan price level and be milk them for cash.

 

The web have analysed the video. In short it's doing about 81fps with dual vega in 4k at very high settings in prey. A single 1080Ti does about 63-64fps.

How do we know, well some 60hz youtube video's have shown the projector is 30hz (if you skip through the 60hz video single frame then the projectors picture changes every other frame hence it's 30hz). Then taking a static shot you can see the screen tearing, each tear is a frame start/end. Working that out gives about 2.7 strips per frame. 30*2.7=81.

 

Considering pray offers near 100% scaling on crossfire that's not really good.

 

I remember a long time ago some one doing some maths and said that Vega will perform around 1070 levels. Since then the internet has been alive with hype, and all of a sudden people were claiming it would beat the 1080Ti.

It's madness. It's almost like an illness that gets out of control.

Vega, IMO, will not touch the 1080Ti. Not by a mile. Maybe *maybe* it will worry the 1080 and if the wind is blowing in the right direction it may sit between the 1080 and Ti but I doubt even that.

AMD's persistence of using silly expensive memory that is not needed* will be their downfall. Supply issues, too expensive etc etc.

*Nvidia has proved that you don't need HBM2 to make a quick GPU. AMD should have done what they should have done with Fury X. Made a cheap GPU with cheaper memory that undercut Nvidia by quite a chunk. Had they gone by that logic my 8gb Fury X would still be more than capable of anything I want it to do, and wouldn't be getting its ass served to it on a plate by a 580 when it runs out of VRAM.

But no. So what do they do? repeat exactly the same mistake.

It does not matter when Vega launches. It also does not matter how fast it is. As long as it is a good chunk faster than the 580 it would still sell very well. But AMD have completely hindered how it will sell because of the HBM2. They are going to have to charge too much to make it viable, meaning no one will buy it.

The 480 came along at the wrong time. It also had the wrong performance. However, it had the right price. It sold, and is still being sold. So dates, performance ETC didn't really come into it all that did was what it costs.

That is what they should have done with Vega. Not make another Fury X which cost the same as the 980ti yet lost in pretty much everything and now doesn't have enough ram to comfortably run every game.

How could they get Polaris so right, yet get Vega so horribly wrong? WTF is the matter with them?

 

Where is this video? Are we sure both Vega's are actually running?

Seems fishy given Bit-Tech's own AMD sponsored 580 Crossfire test had the game running at 93FPS average... Why would they promote that if they were about to drop a spangly new GPU that offers no performance increase?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Digv4mJi8

 

93 FPS at 3440x1440, not 4K.
4K is 1.67 times the pixel count of 3440x1440.
So at 4K the two 580s should get around 55 FPS.
To go from the 55 FPS with two 580 cards to the 80 FPS of two Vega cards we need to add 46%.

So Vega is 46% faster than the 580 in Prey.
Problem is of course that performance in one game is a really poor indication of overall performance plus you need a hefty margin of error for other differences in setup and driver versions.

 

Whoops, mah bad!

See, on paper 46% faster than an RX 580 sounds pretty good (as well all know, that 'aint a slow GPU by itself), and on a stream processor basis that sounds about right. If only it was still 2016...

On the bright side, we don't know what version of Vega this is. If it is the entry level version that is priced around 1070 levels, then panic over. If it's top Vega in the best optimised game they could find, brown pants for Lisa.

 

Vega is too late to matter is the reality of it all, assuming this is the top end which seems the way most are looking at it, it performs just above the 1080. AMD are 1 year too late on this one, Volta might even beat out All Vega cards been launched.

 

That sort of performance is not to be sniffed at, though. It will all depend on price, which AMD have already screwed themselves with due to the costs of HBM2. That is the bone of contention for me and one that will not be resolved unless they have some GDDR efforts waiting in the wings.

If they don't? all the same problems they had with Fury X.

Imagine if Fury X had come to market for £100 less than the 980Ti. Didn't have a stupid cooler, had 8gb of GDDR and so on. It would have been a success. Instead we got 4gb HBM, manufacturing issues, stock issues, price issues.

 

Imo AMD just spent all their time on Ryzen and consoles (new PS and Xbox chips). Vega got put on the back burner. Hence the small Vega (Polaris replacement) hasn't happened and they just rebranded the 4XX series of cards, and the high end gaming Vega (which I guess should be Vega+DDR5X to keep costs down) hasn't happened either.

It was the right call for AMD as Ryzen and the consoles will make more money then Vega, but means they have lost further ground to Nvidia.

 

I've just been reading up the benchmark details on where Vega claims to beat Tesla. I've heard of DeepBench, but never SPECViewPerf? Interesting -

http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-unveils-expanding-2017may16.aspx