AMD lifts lid on the Radeon RX Vega experience

[sykobee]

Well performance per mm^2 or real world performance per theoretical tflops is lacking. But the price at least reflects that.

If they can increase minimum FPS reliable across lots of games, even if average FPS doesn't increase a lot, that will be a noticeable improvement in game quality for gamers.

That Freesync monitor in the deal is an £800 (eBuyer £745) beast, so getting the pack is pretty much tying you into a further £600 purchase. You might have wanted to get a different monitor, as it's only a 1440p display, albeit 21:9.

Ditto the CPU + MB aspect - that's an 1800X and X370 motherboard. Of course, if you're buying a high end system, that's probably what you'd be getting, but ...

The $399 Vega 56 feels quite compelling on paper, especially if AMD can pull off their typical driver improvements over the next 6 months.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I saw that on TH.

Also from the AT article on the launch:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11680/...ng-in-august/3

Talking to AMD’s engineers, what especially surprised me is where the bulk of those transistors went; the single largest consumer of the additional 3.9B transistors was spent on designing the chip to clock much higher than Fiji. Vega 10 can reach 1.7GHz, whereas Fiji couldn’t do much more than 1.05GHz. Additional transistors are needed to add pipeline stages at various points or build in latency hiding mechanisms, as electrons can only move so far on a single clock cycle; this is something we’ve seen in NVIDIA’s Pascal, not to mention countless CPU designs. Still, what it means is that those 3.9B transistors are serving a very important performance purpose: allowing AMD to clock the card high enough to see significant performance gains over Fiji.

Speaking of Fiji, there’s been some question over whether the already shipping Vega FE cards had AMD’s Draw Steam Binning Rasterizer enabled, which is one of the Vega architecture’s new features. The short answer is that no, the DSBR is not enabled in Vega FE’s current drivers. Whereas we have been told to expect it with the RX Vega launch. AMD is being careful not to make too many promises here – the performance and power impact of the DSBR vary wildly with the software used – but it means that the RX Vega will have a bit more going on than the Vega FE at launch.

So nearly 4 billion transistors were used to make the design clock better.

[Xlucine]

A 64% increase from Vega 56 to Vega 64 for only a 30% increase in FLOPs??

Chips lose efficiency at higher clockspeeds, this is widely known by now

Even at direct conversion the prices are approximately £305 / £380 / £460, before price gauging and VAT.

Let's assume it'll be around £320, £400 and £490 before VAT (I'm being optimistic), UK prices might be around £385, ££480 and £590 inc. VAT ....so probably £399, £499 and £599 RRP

If that's true they're overpriced unfortunately, based on expected performance and power consumption.

Looks about right to me. The liquid cooled one is poor value, granted, and charging extra for it surprised me after fury X, but a 1070 is £400 these days and a 1080 goes for a bit more than £500. If V56 beats a 1070 and V64 beats a 1080 (which they ought to), then pricing is just where you'd expect them. Power consumption is a non-issue for gaming anyway, after all everyone will compare them to factory overclocked nvidia GPU's which get through significantly more power than the TDP suggests

[Spud1]

"focus on the user experience". I.e. AMD continuing their long tradition of being late to the party and then not quite being able to match their single competitor on performance, so they will happily sit in 2nd place again.

Thats not necessarily a bad thing - its likely that they will retain the pure value crown and for many people thats important..but 2nd place in a 2 horse race is also last.

How far ATI has fallen since they were swallowed up by AMD Its a shame really.

[Ozaron]

How far ATI has fallen since they were swallowed up by AMD Its a shame really.

Eh, AMD has allowed them to not just be competitive but also try out experimental ideas in their arch designs. Clearly ideas don't always work and something went wrong here, not to mention with lacking HBM2 performance & supply. But the other benefit is that now, AMD can keep them afloat when things don't work and aren't really competitive, so we don't suddenly end up with just NVidia.

[anselhelm]

AMD/RTG is missing an opportunity to take away mindshare from Nvidia on several accounts:

(1) No RX Vega 56 Nano.
(2) Overpricing its cards by $50-$100 at each tier.
(3) Put blower fans on its reference cards.

I fully expect to see $399 magically become no less than £399, but even then I don't imagine we'll see one for less than £450-500 once miners inflate the prices.

No offence to miners, but if I could snap my fingers and shut down all the cryptocurrencies, I would. Current prices are just nonsense.

[kalniel]

AMD/RTG is missing an opportunity to take away mindshare from Nvidia on several accounts:

(1) No RX Vega 56 Nano.
(2) Overpricing its cards by $50-$100 at each tier.
(3) Put blower fans on its reference cards.

[Xlucine]

Have they announced if that's V56 or V64? Or both, preferably?

[Millennium]

I am thinking of selling off my r9 390 and investing in a Vega card. Good idea?

[Corky34]

Have they announced if that's V56 or V64? Or both, preferably?

I think they said V56.

[Biscuit]

I am thinking of selling off my r9 390 and investing in a Vega card. Good idea?

We dont know yet, but if I was to guess, I would say that Vega prices are unlikely to be appealing for a while. Miners are making sure of that.