Saving up for the release of this and stopping my self from sniping a ebay GTX 1070 for £300ish. I see it looks to be aiming to be between the GTX 1080 and 1080ti in performance but with quiet a difference in the price tag. With it been HMB2 im guessing it wont have the 11/12GB VRAM like nvidias top offering but more like 8GB, but again, its HMB2 so will be blistering fast. ETA is somewhere in Q2, some rumors saying between May 30th and June 3nd.
Hopefully Ryzen is a good sign that AMD might have their mojo back with GPUs too. I don't care if you're the biggest diehard Nvidia fan boy: Competition is good for sides and Nvidia have had it too easy for too long.
I think a computex launch is fairly likely now! My prediction, which I seriously hope is true, is that they are doing the equivalent of fury with a vega, vega x and nano and I'm hoping that the better than gtx 1080 card they have been showing is just the standard vega. Then that gives them room to have a vega x priced at around the gtx1080 but performing far closer to the ti (I can dream) and a sff card that will perform between the two.
Pricing will be the biggest talking point. With the RX480 slightly cheaper than the 1060, I hope there is a vega card to do the same to the 1070. Ideally about $300 to $350USD for a slightly cut down vega card and $400 to $450USD for the full vega. Hopefully the full vega card does not need a closed loop water cooler like the fury x did.
Dream land on prices, if AMD make a card the size of the TI then it will be similar prices, anandtech commented as much. They are expecting 3 cards for the 3 nvidia cards. Otherwise AMD will be missing out on a price market. I also heard a June announcement date with late June launch. Problem AMD has everyone who wants a expensive GPU has brought one. Unless your Massive AMD fan and wont have anything else. Very few buyers at that level care which brand they use just about performance figures.
RX480 is 232mm2 with 2304 cores. Doubling that will give a die in the range of ~500, assuming increases in internal caches also. HBM bandwidth could mitigate the need for extra cache but I don't think so: the trip to main memory is it's still WAY more power intensive and local caches are necessary for latency sensitive tasks. Plus, AMD were cache-lite on the last generation as buffing out the shaders was where Nvidia won extra performance. 12Bn transistors in GP102 are 471mm2, and TSMC is typically better at density and larger dies than GlobalFoundries, so I'd expect it to be in this kind of range, if not 500+ Whether just two chips of HBM2 equate to the price of a dozen GDDR5X chips, I don't know. I'd expect the interposer packaging cost will also increase the price above GDDR5X too, although the raw cost will certainly be cheaper than Fury. I'd expect Vega to be at $499 price. Possibly binned models $549. That leaves a huge gap for AMD at 349~399, which I'm not sure what they're going to do there. Probably recycled cores? Leaked raw performance on SiSoft show 9422.16MB/s single float GPU compute, and I did find a GTX 1080 in the list (SiSioft ranking site is super ****) and it was lower, but I can't remember how much nor can I find the entry again It's just one metric, and we're missing the GTX 1080 Ti/Titan XP results too.
Considering all their talk about the High bandwidth cache controller for Vega they are unlikely to go cache-lite again.
AMDs raw performance in gpus is always high it's why they are good for coin farming. The reality when it comes to games usually differs per title a lot more than most would like. The 480 for example blitz the 1060 on raw performance in reality they are very similar level across a range of titles with doom been the biggest exception. I hope AMD are not betting the farm on Vulcan and offer acceptable dx11 / dx12 performance as we are still 2 years off dx12 been full main stream, Vulcan probably never will be. Hope it forces Nvidia Into some price reductions still won't buy one but paying less would be nice.
I desperately hope that they keep pushing Vulkan - I'm sick of being trapped in the steaming pile of garbage that is Windows 10. Gimme a *NIX system any day!
I think this would suggest AMD should be going after APIs and software support more so than hardware as superior raw performance is pointless if they can't leverage it in practice due to software being better optimised for Nvidia architecture.
Nvidia has 75% of the dgpu market these days, so software manufactures optimise for the masses. It's a similar thing for cpus with Intel. AMD have done the whole title sponsorship with the likes of Doom and battlefield back in the day. It's a costly exercise though and nothing has come from it either. Developers are not going out of there way to offer Vulcan support. Game engines are finally adding it but it's still up to each individual Software company to use. Currently it's the talos principle, Doom, Dota2. Battlefield 1 was the big expectation to get Vulcan but it didn't. Just don't see it happening with Vulcan.
