AMD says that RX Vega is "just around the corner"

[HEXUS]

And, at the AMD Tech Summit in Beijing, revealed Vega GPUs are on the way to laptops.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

Heh, read this, and my brain immediately did a newsthump take on it...

"AMD Say RX Vega is Just Behind the Sofa ...."

And they'll release it as soon as they find it.

[Iota]

I'll wait as long as June for a hard launch date, if it isn't here by then, chances are I'll go Nvidia.

[abychristy]

Been waiting a long time for this one but Ryzen came first from the AMD side, now that a CPU is ready waiting for the GPU.

[Ozaron]

Heh, read this, and my brain immediately did a newsthump take on it...

I'm hoping that unlike most things, they will find it *before* people stop looking for it....

[GinoLatino]

I'm waiting...

[anselhelm]

Heh, read this, and my brain immediately did a newsthump take on it...

I'm hoping that unlike most things, they will find it *before* people stop looking for it....

Indeed. If someone's card suddenly dies on them, AMD currently has no competition for the 1070, 1080, 1080 Ti or Titan XP. In fact, based on a sample of AMD Reddit users' flairs, many Ryzen adopters pair their CPU with an Nvidia GPU, mostly a 1070 or 1080.

[thrasir66]

Only 8GB is really disappointing.

[Ozaron]

Indeed. If someone's card suddenly dies on them, AMD currently has no competition for the 1070, 1080, 1080 Ti or Titan XP. In fact, based on a sample of AMD Reddit users' flairs, many Ryzen adopters pair their CPU with an Nvidia GPU, mostly a 1070 or 1080.

Not sure that's entirely fair. R9 Fury X keeps up with 1070 for some games. True that AMD is nonexistent above this tier though.

Only 8GB is really disappointing.

Depends entirely on how efficiently it is used. AMD seems to believe they can reduce memory usage for games by up to 50%, which would mean this hardware equates to 16GB of effective space on NVidia. Yet to gain any evidence but Fury X ran very well up to 4K resolutions on only 4GB....

Edit (context):
Raja Koduri – Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group, AMD
"With regards to the High Bandwidth Cache from a gaming perspective. We looked at all the modern games, the big games that push memory hard, and one of the things we noticed is the VRAM – graphics memory – utilization. We look at how much of the VRAM that the game allocates. So if the game say needs 4GB of memory when we looked at actually how much of that memory is actually used to render pixels we found that many games, actually most games, don’t use more than 50% of what they allocate."

[Biscuit]

Only 8GB is really disappointing.

Cuz bigga numberz iz alwezz bettaz!!1one!

[shaithis]

Cuz bigga numberz iz alwezz bettaz!!1one!

8 >8

[scaryjim]

Besides, 8GB matches every other card in the consumer enthusiast space outside of the 1080 Ti. Plus with 2 stacks of HBM2 they can actually go up to 16GB if a demand for cards with more memory suddenly appears (as long as the 8-Hi HBM2 stacks starts appearing, that is ).

Anyone know if 6-Hi HBM2 is a theoretical possibility, or is it powers-of-two only? It'd be hillarious if they could bring out a 12GB* Vega based card to 1-up the 1080 Ti...

* I guess they might be able to do an assymetric 8-Hi + 4-Hi, but I'd worry about the performance impact of having 2/3 of the memory on 1/2 of the bandwidth...

[Biscuit]

Besides, 8GB matches every other card in the consumer enthusiast space outside of the 1080 Ti. Plus with 2 stacks of HBM2 they can actually go up to 16GB if a demand for cards with more memory suddenly appears (as long as the 8-Hi HBM2 stacks starts appearing, that is ).

Anyone know if 6-Hi HBM2 is a theoretical possibility, or is it powers-of-two only? It'd be hillarious if they could bring out a 12GB* Vega based card to 1-up the 1080 Ti...

* I guess they might be able to do an assymetric 8-Hi + 4-Hi, but I'd worry about the performance impact of having 2/3 of the memory on 1/2 of the bandwidth...

Isn't the bandwidth available likely to be completely underutilised anyway?

[aidanjt]

Only 8GB is really disappointing.

'Only'? Hard to imagine a scene that needs more than 8GB for any given sequence of frames, even at 4K. Especially when coupled with the way AMD makes use of system RAM to cache less frequently used objects.

[flearider]

ffs pls take my money ... ryzen is great vega should be better ...

[scaryjim]

Isn't the bandwidth available likely to be completely underutilised anyway?

Not sure, tbh - a 2 stack HBM2 configuration is no more bandwidth than the 4 stack HBM1 that Fury X had, and possibly less (some of the rumours tagged the HBM2 speed at somewhat less than the target 2GT/s). If Vega 10 has the same 4096 shaders but they're tuned for both higher IPC and higher clock speeds (as AMD claim) then they might need plenty of memory bandwidth to feed the shaders...

Of course, if they've continued to improve the delta colour compression and other technologies that make more efficient use of the bandwidth, then it's quite possible that the extra bandwidth is completely unnecessary (after all, the GTX 1080 makes do with "only" 320GB/s), but you'd think they'd want to keep the numbers high if at all possible; for marketing purposes if nothing else...