AMD - Zen chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

PCPER have the full test up:

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...-Cooled-Review

[scaryjim]

PCPER have the full test up: ...

Hmmm, that rather seems to confirm that the driver's poorly optimised for gaming but well optimised for professional workloads (although not as good in some tests as the certified Quadro drivers). Which is kind of what I said earlier, and very much how AMD have marketed and targeted the card....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Hmmm, that rather seems to confirm that the driver's poorly optimised for gaming but well optimised for professional workloads (although not as good in some tests as the certified Quadro drivers). Which is kind of what I said earlier, and very much how AMD have marketed and targeted the card....

They have marketed it as a gaming card too - this is not a professional card as it has no certified drivers at all. Even AMD admitted there was a Pro version out in a few months.

AMD has talked about gaming with this card and most of the tests they showed were games,and they allowed PCWorld to test it against the Nvidia equivalent the Titan Xp.

So AMD must be in some stupid reality distortion sphere to think that anybody would be foolish to believe a blue card,with loads of LEDs,clearly made for someone to put it in a gaming rig,and then compared it to the equivalent Nvidia card,would not test it also in gaming.

The Titan series is the same type of prosumer cards - no certified drivers.

The GPU is 564MM2,which is huge and that is why power consumption is horrible.

AMD has been working on this GPU for years and they still can't get the features to work. LOL.

Its called a Frontier Edition FFS,which is basically more or less a word play on Founders Edition.

Its bigger than the GP102 and yet AMD thought it was wise to allow gaming drivers to be installed on this,especially most of the demos they showed were about gaming.

Plus Gamersnexus also got a card and it keeps crashing when running Blender,so the drivers are also unstable in non-gaming usage too.

This is another half arsed launch by AMD,they rushed the R9 290/290X with a crap cooler,the R9 285 was half baked,the Fury X had QC problems,the RX480 had a rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe stock cooler even though AMD said it would be premium,and it had the PCI-E issue,the RX570/RX580 performance/watt went south,etc.

We have a soft spot for AMD,but sadly for them all of this is not really working out in the real world as well.

They can't seem to launch any card in the last few years without a problem - this is why they only have had between 17% to 30% marketshare in the last few years - not even ATI went that low with the fail which was the 2900XT.

On multiple forums,there are loyal AMD fans who are just fed up of waiting for a proper successor to their R9 290X/390X and Fury cards for like two to four years,who have invested in the AMD ecosystem with decent FreeSync screens,etc. All they have gotten after two years,is a half baked card,priced at £1000,with terrible power consumption,terrible performance and vague promises of performance will be better.

AMD does not launch cards with its best foot forward and Nvidia do,and not all of that is down to money,its down to competence.

AMD should just stick to sub £300 small die gaming cards - its what they do best historically. They should do what Nvidia does and make dedicated large die cards for commercial usage instead,since unless AMD magically can get performance massively up,Nvidia will be sell a significantly smaller die graphics card for gaming,which will be faster for more money,consume less power and just be better.

Even if they added 20% to 25% extra performance for the RX Vega gaming cards it will still be competing with aftermarket GTX1080 cards with nearly half the die size and have been out for a year. How can they make decent margins if they need to sell if for so little??

Give another couple of months,its quite possible we might even start seeing glimpses of the smaller die Volta cards too.

Edit!!

You should have seen Ryan Shrout's face on the livestream,he look perplexed.

He told AMD beforehand he was testing the card and he talked to AMD during the testing regarding the performance.

Nvidia must be laughing.

They even dropped the GTX1080 down to £499.99 now - AMD need to think of performance in the present,instead of trying to always think of the future.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Actually the more I think about this,the more an utter disaster this looks like - looking at the PCPER tests,its between a GTX1070 and a GTX1080,so even another 25% improvement on top would still yield around aftermarket GTX1080 level performance.

At least Fiji was very close in die size to the GM200. Vega is massive - nearly 20% larger than the GM200 and 78% larger than the GP104.

AMD cannot fight any kind of price war with this GPU,unless they can find a way to get performance closer to a Titan Xp,and even then they will be at a cost disadvantage I suspect.

I really,really hope Volta for gamers is not out this year.

Edit!!

This is how far AMD has fallen - look at Hawaii,it handled both gaming and non-gaming with equal aplomb,and even had a performance per mm2 advantage over Nvidia at launch.

Then look at the tweaked Hawaii based cards - despite having all that extra functionality they got close to GTX980 level performance in the end too.

Now they launch a half arsed consumer card,which is apparently not for consumers,with half the driver support missing and keep demoing games on it even though its not a gaming card.

Yes,because that whole "AMD drivers suck" standard line won't be reinforced by this.

But,but don't worry it will get better in the future.

How about making it better now??

The 9700 PRO and HD5870 didn't need the future to perform better at launch.

[scaryjim]

*shrug*

I get the feeling that you and I have picked up very different impressions of this product, CAT - maybe it's a difference in the websites and news outlets we read. All the stories I've read about it have left me strongly with the impression that it's a creative's card first and foremost, targeting good performance in productivity applications, with gaming performance of lesser importance.

From my perspective, PCPer's testing pretty much vindicates AMD's product positioning - compare it to the comparably priced Quadro P4000 and it has a significant lead in most productivity applications. Considering that the P4000 is based on the GTX 1070, the Vega card should also have a reasonable lead in gaming (it's faster than the gaming-optimsed GTX 1070), so it offers better productivity *and* gaming performance than a similarly priced Quadro card. That's - from everything I've read - exactly where AMD were positioning it.

I understand that its gaming performance doesn't look amazing compared to nvidia's more gaming focused cards, but it strikes a really good balance and has predictable performance across a range of workloads (seriously, look at the Titan Xp performance in those productivity tests - its all over the place). If you're mostly reading gaming focused news sites you're going to pick up a lot of negativity about its gaming performance without getting the other side of the story. What I see when I look at those performance figures is a card that strikes a fantastic balance between productivity and gaming (in much the same way that Ryzen does, in fact), and that can only be good for AMD in the creative markets.


EDIT: reading around it looks like the current driver that PCPer used doesn't support tile-based rasterisation - or at least didn't enable it for their tests. If the issue is that the driver isn't ready (and will be for RX Vega launch) that could make a huge difference to power draw, and therefore potentially target clock speed and overall performance. It's another wait-and-see case....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

*shrug*

I get the feeling that you and I have picked up very different impressions of this product, CAT - maybe it's a difference in the websites and news outlets we read. All the stories I've read about it have left me strongly with the impression that it's a creative's card first and foremost, targeting good performance in productivity applications, with gaming performance of lesser importance.

From my perspective, PCPer's testing pretty much vindicates AMD's product positioning - compare it to the comparably priced Quadro P4000 and it has a significant lead in most productivity applications. Considering that the P4000 is based on the GTX 1070, the Vega card should also have a reasonable lead in gaming (it's faster than the gaming-optimsed GTX 1070), so it offers better productivity *and* gaming performance than a similarly priced Quadro card. That's - from everything I've read - exactly where AMD were positioning it.

I understand that its gaming performance doesn't look amazing compared to nvidia's more gaming focused cards, but it strikes a really good balance and has predictable performance across a range of workloads (seriously, look at the Titan Xp performance in those productivity tests - its all over the place). If you're mostly reading gaming focused news sites you're going to pick up a lot of negativity about its gaming performance without getting the other side of the story. What I see when I look at those performance figures is a card that strikes a fantastic balance between productivity and gaming (in much the same way that Ryzen does, in fact), and that can only be good for AMD in the creative markets.

AMD has been showing mostly gaming performance with the card,and its painted and blinged out with LEDs which hints its a gaming product.

Frontier Edition - you mean AMD Founders Edition??

Its a huge 564MM2 GPU which is close to 20% larger than the totally gaming orientated GP102 which does not even use exotic HBM2 - HBM2 does not integrate the memory controller on the die,so shows you how relatively poor performance is.

The performance figures are horrendous and entirely rubbish- its not massively faster than a Fury X whilst drawing more power.

Trying to even compare this to Ryzen is an insult. Ryzen is a small compact chip,with great power characteristics and great non-gaming and even reasonable decent gaming performance.

Vega can't even beat a GTX1080 which has a die half the size - sorry SJ,I have a GTX1080 and that can be taxed by newer games at qHD,so below GTX1080 with MASSIVELY higher power draw is an utter failure.

Its basically slower ATM than three Nvidia cards,one of which was released LAST MAY. and what you need to get is that PCPER compared it to a GTX1070 at reference clockspeeds.

The AIB GTX1070 cards have higher clockspeeds,so how can you say an overpriced £1000 card is barely better than a GTX1070 that has been selling for as low as £300 to £340?? FFS,an overclocked GTX980TI might get close to this card.

Its one of the worst launches AMD has EVER done for a graphics card - look at the Witcher 3 figures for example. Its 16% faster than a Fury X whilst drawing close to 300 watts. The Fury X is drawing between 200W to 240W.

This means gaming performance/watt has hardly improved.

This is going from 28NM to 14NM,with TWO MORE GENERATIONS of tessellation improvements,colour compression,etc.

Even winning over a P4000 is a fail,since it is only a 317MM2 chip and this is a 564MM2 chip using state of the art HBM2.

This is not a professional card - its a Titan class prosumer card for enthusiasts. Proper pro cards would have certified drivers,so you need to stop 100% believing AMD PR.

The whole internet is laughing at this card,and even if it wins a few non-gaming tests against a Geforce Titan X,remember this has been on the market for quite a while is significantly smaller GPU too.

This is what waiting two years for the Fury X successor has brought??

If the gaming RX Vega can't get convincingly beat a GTX1080 aftermarket card this is pretty much is the end of AMD having any realistic expectations of gaining higher profit margin gaming markets,since at this rate especially with expensive HBM2 and a near 600MM2 die they are using brute force to try and compete with what Nvidia is doing.

You might not think so but looking at the people who would buy these cards,I think people are just going WTF??

You don't seem to get how many people running higher end AMD cards like the R9 290X/390X and Fury X are fed up with this two year wait and rubbish launch.

If it does not deliver,this will be the last time anyone is going to bother waiting for a high end AMD card.

Nvidia delivers it seems,and goodwill can only go so far.

Edit!!!

This is the very reason why AMD has such poor marketshare which has dropped to 17% and even now can barely break 30% - most non-techy people look at AMD cards as being hot,drinking power and having driver issues.

Sadly this is not breaking that mould.

Nvidia knows how to launch products and they do deliver on what they say more often that not - AMD has consistently not on the graphics side and I really hope AMD can salvage this with "magic drivers" by the time the RX Vega is released.

But when have we heard that excuse for AMD products?? Its a dangerous game to play and I suspect its why many will go with a known quantity.

They need to be thinking of now and not the future and stop treating their customers like beta testers.

ATI delivered or outdelivered several times,and this is why they even had over 50% sales share with the X800 series,and people gave them benefit of the doubt despite the HD2000 and HD3000 series,where their share was still higher than today. AMD graphics is lurching from one PR disaster to another.

Every launch of a new generation graphics chip seems to have some blasted issue,or wait,wait it will get better in a month or two.

[scaryjim]

I'm not going to argue with you over this CAT - we have different perspectives on this launch which means we simply won't agree about it. I've read and understand the argument you're putting up - which are basically the ones PCPer put up, incidentally - I just flat don't agree with your premise.

You've read a lot of stuff from AMD about gaming on the Frontier Edition. That's great. I haven't. That means that the stuff you've read is only being reported by some of the tech news outlets. Perhaps that ones that are most concerned with game performance? The ones who might be a bit biased?

Seriously, I understand those arguments. I understand that this is the only Vega silicon we have to judge. I udnerstand that AMD have said that part of the point of this card is to offer the capability to both create and consume. I get all that.

And yet - I also understand that AMD have clearly stated that this is not the gaming optmised card. PCPer understand that too - they say as much in their review, before justifying their decision to review it like a gaming card anyway.

But PCPer are at least honest enough to accept that its productivity chops are exactly where they need to be - to quote: "For professional users that are okay not having certified drivers, performance there is more likely to raise some impressed eyebrows."

The launch is all about perspective. You've focused on its gaming performance. You've obviously read a lot of tech sites that have focused on its gaming performance. And the FE gaming performance is below where you'd expect - it should be beating a Fury X by at least 40%, and it isn't doing that reliably. So if you insist on thinking about the Frontier Edition as a gaming card, it's a disappointment.

But, as I said, that's not been my experience of the launch, or of the information AMD's put out. And please note - your experience being different doesn't make my experience wrong. It just means we've experienced different things. If I was an AMD shareholder (and how I wish I'd bought AMD at < $2 back in 2009) I'd be pretty damn happy with what I've seen in that review. The card comfortably meets my expectations. It leaves questions about the launch of RX Vega and just how much more performance AMD can squeeze from the architecture in a gaming-optimised card, but those questions won't be answered for another month.

In the meantime, Vega Frontier Edition is a good productivity card, with some questions over the optimisation of its gaming performance. I'll settle for that while we wait for RX Vega.

EDIT:

Just noticed one line from your post that NEEDS a reply:

"The whole internet is laughing at this card"

I'm not laughing. Am I not on the internet? Or do you just assume that you can speak for "the whole internet"?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'm not going to argue with you over this CAT - we have different perspectives on this launch which means we simply won't agree about it. I've read and understand the argument you're putting up - which are basically the ones PCPer put up, incidentally - I just flat don't agree with your premise.

You've read a lot of stuff from AMD about gaming on the Frontier Edition. That's great. I haven't. That means that the stuff you've read is only being reported by some of the tech news outlets. Perhaps that ones that are most concerned with game performance? The ones who might be a bit biased?

Seriously, I understand those arguments. I understand that this is the only Vega silicon we have to judge. I udnerstand that AMD have said that part of the point of this card is to offer the capability to both create and consume. I get all that.

And yet - I also understand that AMD have clearly stated that this is not the gaming optmised card. PCPer understand that too - they say as much in their review, before justifying their decision to review it like a gaming card anyway.

But PCPer are at least honest enough to accept that its productivity chops are exactly where they need to be - to quote: "For professional users that are okay not having certified drivers, performance there is more likely to raise some impressed eyebrows."

The launch is all about perspective. You've focused on its gaming performance. You've obviously read a lot of tech sites that have focused on its gaming performance. And the FE gaming performance is below where you'd expect - it should be beating a Fury X by at least 40%, and it isn't doing that reliably. So if you insist on thinking about the Frontier Edition as a gaming card, it's a disappointment.

But, as I said, that's not been my experience of the launch, or of the information AMD's put out. And please note - your experience being different doesn't make my experience wrong. It just means we've experienced different things. If I was an AMD shareholder (and how I [b]wish[/i] I'd bought AMD at < $2 back in 2009) I'd be pretty damn happy with what I've seen in that review. The card comfortably meets my expectations. It leaves questions about the launch of RX Vega and just how much more performance AMD can squeeze from the architecture in a gaming-optimised card, but those questions won't be answered for another month.

In the meantime, Vega Frontier Edition is a good productivity card, with some questions over the optmisation of its gaming performance. I'll settle for that while we wait for RX Vega.

EDIT:

Just noticed one line from your post that NEEDS a reply:

"The whole internet is laughing at this card"

I'm not laughing. Am I not on the internet? Or do you just assume that you can speak for "the whole internet"?

Well you can defend it all you want dude,but the fact is AMD emphasised gaming performance on this card for months and not a single workstation card I have seen is blinged out with LEDs,etc - its almost like they needed to push this out and panicked and said lets try to make an excuse for the crap performance. Trying to sweep the months and months of AMD showing only gaming performance,is really not working.

Yes,the internet is laughing at this card - every forum,and even some of the more technical sites are going WTF??
Just because AMD PR says its a productivity card means diddly squat - it has no certification for software,so its basically a tarted up gaming card.

Imagine if Nvidia launched the Pascal Titan X and it was barely faster than the Maxwell Titan in games,drew more power and was faster in non-gaming scenarios. Do you think Nvidia would not get mocked??

Would you be saying that's fine Nvidia??

In the end ignoring the repeated poor AMD launches is not helping AMD - look at their marketshare?? Its terrible,and ATI managed to do far better. If people really care about AMD as a company they need to fix this,as Nvidia is running away from AMD at a massive rate.

You need to start talking to non-techy gamers and most still think Nvidia is better and these kind of half arsed launches are negative halo products and hurts AMD.

Edit!!

Thats the other thing Nvidia still has the most marketshare in non-gaming scenarios too.

How can you say this is a good productivity card when it has repeated crashes with something like Blender? Gamersnexus also has bought a card.

AMD uses Blender as a demo for its products,yet its launch drivers for this card have problems.

So do you honestly think people are going to buy this card in droves when gaming performance is sub-par and when it actually is crashing in stuff like Blender.

They basically panicked to launch this card in Q2 2017 without properly testing the drivers out it seems.

Nobody doing productivity stuff wants to be be beta testing a card.

Even the Fury X was better than this.


So its yet another AMD graphics card launch - something has to be off or wrong,so whilst enthusiasts like us will wait on a wing and prayer that "fixes" will come to improve the situation,and roll out the standard line "wait a bit longer it should work out" ,the rest of the market will just buy an Nvidia card instead.

AMD needs to launch stuff with their best foot forward,but this is like a hop,skip and a jump with AMD hoping to find a magical four leaf clover that will make everything slot into place.

Spend months showing off gaming performance,and when they can't even get gaming drivers working to a decent degree after the 7 to 8 month delay,proclaim its "not really a gaming card" and its for "creators"despite all the bling and LED lights on it,but we will have the PRO version for "other creators" in a few months.

Then instead of comparing it to a "creators" card they use a Titan Xp but apparently don't compare that for gaming performance even though we spent 6+ months talking mostly about games anyway. Oh and also lets not forget all the hype too.



But don't worry we will fix everything soon.

If they can't even get Vega to work properly after so many months,how the heck are they going to manage with Navi if that is going to be something potentially revolutionary???

If they knew this they should have just locked down gaming performance entirely like with some pro cards and sold a limited number of cards through their websites to selected partners.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It gets better!!

https://videocardz.com/70655/amd-ann...-about-rx-vega

AMD announces Capsaicin Siggraph with no word about RX Vega

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/amd-caps...ts-35520337285

Experience the art of the impossible in person at AMD Capsaicin SIGGRAPH 2017.

On July 30, learn about our newest additions to the Radeon™ Pro family featuring the cutting-edge Radeon™ “Vega” architecture. Hear from our partners on how AMD’s product lineup – Radeon Pro, Ryzen™ Threadripper™, EPYC™ and Radeon Instinct™ – is revolutionizing the creative pipeline, leading industries from entertainment to engineering into a new era of precision and performance.

Register by July 25th, as seats are extremely limited for this exclusive presentation and make sure to show up early to secure a good seat.

6:30PM PST - Doors open

7:30PM - 8:45PM PST - Formal presentation

8:45PM - Midnight PST - Demos and reception

AMD will have a booth located at #301 on the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor, where visitors will be able to see professional workflows powered by Radeon Pro graphics products.

So no mention of the Vega Frontier Edition despite it being for creators and OFC no mention of the RX Vega despite it supposedly launching at the event:

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/...siggraph-july/

Honestly if AMD needs to delay this to get some decent gaming performance improvements its worth it TBH!!

Also they used Vega with Blender before so Gamers Nexus having crashes with it,really seems like Vega probably needs a bit more time!

01/07/2017 Update

Now they have had to edit the press release to be more generic and actually gone on twitter,to say basically "its not for gaming" and not to judge performance.

Yet on their own website:
http://i.imgur.com/XDsphU2.png



I just want to game and then release subpar gaming drivers at launch and then panic backtrack saying don't judge gaming performance.

Apparently Gaming Mode only changes the UI a bit.

[Biscuit]

I guess I'll be waiting around for another generation.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I guess I'll be waiting around for another generation.

Despite me going on a mega tangent,I suspect the top RX Vega SKU will have a water cooler and probably they will gain extra performance from newer drivers when it is launched.

But I am just frustrated(and so many on forums),who just see a similar pattern of AMD card launches,where first impressions count,and even if AMD does bump up performance a good amount,it will be another case of AMD having to "fix" their drivers,and sadly amongst the less techy I tend to see AMD considered as having subpar drivers,being hot,etc.

This launch does nothing to help that meme,ie,AMD cards are hot,consume a lot of power and have driver issues.

AMD needs to look to Nvidia on how to launch stuff and manage the expectations of the brand - they seem to let things run away from them,and its why Nvidia is selling so many cards,and even JHH said that many of them are mainstream cards too IIRC.

Its an EPIC PR fail,when for the last 7 months AMD has been showing mostly gaming benchmarks on this card in public,and having cards in rigs people can play around with,then talking a lot about gaming features,and then released a blinged out card which only gamers would care for,as content creators would not give a damn about how it looks in their PC,and then talk about the fact you can game on the card.

Then they release it at £1000,and the gaming drivers are so terrible,it looks like an overclocked Fury X and with power consumption to match on a new node,and the card runs hot and starts potentially power throttling,and losses to a £500 GTX1080 launched last May. It also starts crashing in Blender too,and AMD did demo it running Blender recently IIRC.

Edit!!

The sad thing is the card looks very well built too,so the engineering people have done a reasonable job.

Second Edit!!

AMD could have released it in this state and seeded it to content creators directly as a limited release,and got them to run it in content creation roles(as a form of free PR) and avoided the world+dog being able to buy the card in a shop and test it when they knew certain aspects of the driver performance were not ready for showtime. Its not like there are loads of these cards in the first place anyway.

[The Hand]

The sad thing is the card looks very well built too,so the engineering people have done a reasonable job.

Gamers Nexus have done a good tear down of Vega. It's at least aesthetically pleasing with the brushed aluminium effect and fallout 4 boy colour scheme!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Gamers Nexus have done a good tear down of Vega. It's at least aesthetically pleasing with the brushed aluminium effect and fallout 4 boy colour scheme!

Also look at the PCB - there is room for a Vega Nano. So hopefully in 4 weeks time they make sure the RX Vega launches with proper drivers,and some of the other issues they saw can be worked around.

Edit!!

Yeah,I actually do like the look of the card.

Second Edit!!

It looks like some features like tiled rasterization are not working so it might explain the power consumption not being great as the driver probably is also not supporting some key features which help regarding power draw,etc.

Awesome way to launch a product.

[watercooled]

Watercooled's brief speculation: This is one of those instances where something just doesn't seem quite right, to the point that it makes me question the gaming results. Like many people, I wasn't really expecting a 1080Ti killer, but based on shader count and clock speed alone, it's barely performing where it should be even for the same architecture as Fury. All that extra die space and the amount of work put into the NCU surely isn't for nothing (this is one BIG GPU); however it does kinda seem like it's performing in some sort of legacy mode for games at the moment.

I'm thinking, like I've heard elsewhere, that RX Vega is being held off until the last minute until they get drivers right, but if the silicon itself is performing as expected e.g. in professional workloads, then why not start shipping smaller volumes of those GPUs while production ramps.

OTOH I'm fairly surprised that they stuck with GloFo for production - I doubt they're struggling to meet capacity targets there now with Ryzen and Polaris, and they really needed to get clock speeds up - something which, time and time again, seems not to be one of GF 14nm's main strengths. That, and I imagine they've had to go through all of the HBM packaging/interposer setup again, whereas TSMC already had experience with it.

AMD have really pushed for HBM(2) for one reason or another, so there must be something in it. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise them for not just sticking with GDDR5X for cost and timescale reasons, but they must surely have their reasons for sticking it out. While it's not really a huge concern for gaming workloads, I understand GDDR5X has some fairly high latencies for certain operations which is apparent in e.g. mining where the 1070's GDDR5 apparently performs better than the 1080's GDDR5X. As time goes by though, Nvidia's direction of separating their gaming and compute cards seems to make more and more sense.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Watercooled's brief speculation: This is one of those instances where something just doesn't seem quite right, to the point that it makes me question the gaming results. Like many people, I wasn't really expecting a 1080Ti killer, but based on shader count and clock speed alone, it's barely performing where it should be even for the same architecture as Fury. All that extra die space and the amount of work put into the NCU surely isn't for nothing (this is one BIG GPU); however it does kinda seem like it's performing in some sort of legacy mode for games at the moment.

I'm thinking, like I've heard elsewhere, that RX Vega is being held off until the last minute until they get drivers right, but if the silicon itself is performing as expected e.g. in professional workloads, then why not start shipping smaller volumes of those GPUs while production ramps.

OTOH I'm fairly surprised that they stuck with GloFo for production - I doubt they're struggling to meet capacity targets there now with Ryzen and Polaris, and they really needed to get clock speeds up - something which, time and time again, seems not to be one of GF 14nm's main strengths. That, and I imagine they've had to go through all of the HBM packaging/interposer setup again, whereas TSMC already had experience with it.

AMD have really pushed for HBM(2) for one reason or another, so there must be something in it. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise them for not just sticking with GDDR5X for cost and timescale reasons, but they must surely have their reasons for sticking it out. While it's not really a huge concern for gaming workloads, I understand GDDR5X has some fairly high latencies for certain operations which is apparent in e.g. mining where the 1070's GDDR5 apparently performs better than the 1080's GDDR5X. As time goes by though, Nvidia's direction of separating their gaming and compute cards seems to make more and more sense.

The main issue is AMD states gaming on the page for the card and even provides a link,and then they showed gaming performance of the card repeatedly. Even the gaming mode is basically the same driver with a different UI. Almost all the bumpf about Vega has been about gaming.

This is a prosumer card -its why it has LED lighting,and a fancy looking shroud on it,and AMD are selling as it an all-rounder for gaming and content creation like the Titan was originally targeted towards.

It lacks proper certified drivers and Gamers Nexus had crashes when trying to run Blender,which AMD demoed on the cards last month.

In the end instead of trying to work around the issue,that it obviously has major driver problems with games,they should have just been honest and said it lacks full support for gaming features or simply just blocked gaming drivers.

AMD launched it in this state and even though we tend to be more softer on AMD here on Hexus,this is their fault.

Remember when Nvidia tried the same trick with the Titan Z - its an all round creation and gamers card crap??

They also did not send out any review samples either,until some people did review it and showed the issues it had and Nvidia rightly got berated for it.

The fact of the matter its yet another AMD sub-par launch with some drama,and they don't use any commonsense - with Nvidia so far ahead OFC they are going to get scrutinised since they are the only other company which provides performance graphics out there.

People elsewhere are now trying to criticise PCPER elsewhere for reviewing games on it,but what is mentioned on the product page??

"I just want to game".

AMD can't expect to change the narrative when they themselves tested the prosumer Vega FE against the prosumer Titan Xp in non-gaming scenarios,but if they advertise it can run games,they should fully expect the gaming comparisons too.

They only have themselves for even talking about gaming on a card which apparently is not for gaming since it has Alpha drivers.

[watercooled]

Oh I don't disagree - if, as I suspect, something is broken in the current drivers as far as gaming goes, they should have made that quite clear to avoid the PR mess they've found themselves in yet again.

As others have pointed out around the web, Quadro cards often perform quite poorly in games despite using the same piece of silicon as their gaming counterparts - drivers are critically important!

IMO they're going to have to do *something* about the current situation - it would be pretty poor to let everyone assume that this is representative of gaming performance if that is not actually the case, while they all give up waiting and pick up something from Nvidia instead.