Graphics Pascal and Polaris Discussion Thread

This whole HBM foray seems to have totally bitten AMD in the ass. They should have taken stock at Fury, which was too expensive for its performance. This is the same and worse. They know the costs!! It's total insanity. Dr Su should roll heads.

 

It's almost like AMD's R&D department is filled with kids wanting to make toys and not businessmen and women. Who would use HBM on a card that can't cut it at 4k? AMD.... Twice.....

They're clearly idiots. They could have made a few cut down cards using GDDR. It didn't even need to be DDRX. Then slotted those in above Polaris, then went stupid.

 

AMD don't have enough money to develop tons of products, even though Nvidia doesn't exactly make much more at least they are profitable, so maaaaaaaaaybe VEGA is a 'recycle' core that is ideal for HPC/AI/Workstation and that needs HBM bandwidth? VEGA arch clearly isn't that powerful and needs low cost platform as possible.

 

I've got a feeling Vega is just a shrunken Fury tbh. I uploaded a video a while back into a thread titled "Vega Fail" and basically they clocked Vega FE at the same speed as the Fury X. It was almost dead even, with the Fury X even winning in some games and tests. highly embarrassing for AMD tbh.

However, they should have learned from Fury that we don't need HBM as gamers. It was good at 4k (all 4gb of it...) but the Fury X could not do 4k. I was getting lows of 13 FPS playing Fallout 4 for example and yes, I know FO4 is garbage but it's still the game I play the most and thus I want it to run well (had this discussion the other day about my Titan XP see, guy said I was an idiot to buy it to improve FO4 I argued the other side of the coin..)

So yeah, you see that basically Fury becomes a shelf filler. OCUK had 9 of each brand (so like Sapphire, XFX, they were all the bloody same) for months. Nobody touched them. Fury itself (non X) was rare but not extinct like Fury X was. I mean, how many users on Bit bought a Fury X compared to those who have bought a 980Ti?

Surely AMD could have made it run on regular memory somehow. Surely they realised that Fury X was nothing but an experiment, and they should stop f*****g around experimenting on the public and just make gaming cards? But no. HBM was to become HBM2 and Vega was going to have another truly massive die. So no matter how good or poor it was it was going to *have* to have a set price that AMD must charge for it in order to get all of their dev money back. And people just won't pay it. As I type this (well, yesterday afternoon) OCUK had a 1080 on a plastic blower cooler for £449, and a top end water cooled card was £509.

How in the heck are AMD going to beat that? because remember, when your GPU is hot, loud, guzzles down an extra 100W etc it needs to be far cheaper to offset all of the crap that people are going to have to live with. Kinda like the boat anchor (AIO) on the Fury X.

Realistically big Vega (the one that goes toe to toe with the 1080) needs to cost £400 or less. AMD would probably shoot me for saying such a thing, but hey, money talks BS runs marathons etc. And there is no way they can do that. So this is going to be Fury X 2, and another resounding flop.

When they could have done a Polaris, make something people actually want and need. Not what they think people want and need (like HBM2 etc). I just don't think AMD get that. Also with them pulling some truly sh***y tricks that are blatantly lies hasn't helped them either. The way they are going I will hate them just as much as I hate Nvidia. I mean at least with Nvidia they have down your pants and ream out your backside but at least they deliver.