Poll: ** The AMD VEGA Thread **

[N19h7m4r3]

AMD have clearly aimed Vega FE at Nvidia professional line as it massively undercuts the P5000 while providing a lot of the performance in most task so in that regard it's being pitched to how Ryzen is being sold:
Sure the gaming results are terrible but we should cut AMD some slack as they said time and time again the FE edition wasn't a gaming card and early analysis shows the FE edition appears to have tiled rasterization disabled.

The main issue with Frontier Edition compared to Quadros is that it's not going to be Application Certified, and doesn't appear to have ECC enabled either.

PcPer, PcWorld, and Exxactcorp have all stated if you need those; which are essentially for a workstation/enterprise card you need to wait for Radeon Pro Vegas coming Q3 2017.


https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics...r-and-Liquid-Cooled-GPUs-Now-Available-Pre-Or

Before you pre-order, however, there’s one big caveat. Although AMD touts the card as ideal for “innovators, creators, and pioneers of the world,” the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will lack application certification, a factor that is crucial to many who work with content creation software and something typically found in high-end professional GPUs like the Quadro and FirePro lines.

For those hoping for Vega-based professional cards sporting certification, the Vega Frontier Edition product page teases the launch of the Vega-powered Radeon Pro WX in Q3 2017.

 

[JediFragger]

I woke up today seems to be bad news all around.......... severely severely SEVERELY disappointing.

Even nvidia fan boys should be very annoyed by this. Less competition is just bad all around for everyone.... AMD WHY U DO DIZ?

We def don't know the full story yet, we should wait a little I feel.

 

[akarypid]

The main issue with Frontier Edition compared to Quadros is that it's not going to be Application Certified, and doesn't appear to have ECC enabled either.

PcPer, PcWorld, and Exxactcorp have all stated if you need those; which are essentially for a workstation/enterprise card you need to wait for Radeon Pro Vegas coming Q3 2017.


https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics...r-and-Liquid-Cooled-GPUs-Now-Available-Pre-Or

We really should put this to bed. It's not a PRO card nor a consumer card. It's that grey in-between.

Let me put it like this:

Suppose you do job X and at work you use (courtesy of your employer) a Quadro X or RadeonPro X that costs $4000 on a 6900K.

Want to do some stuff at home but can't afford that setup? You can buy a Threadripper + Vega FE.

It's a niche, but it exists...

 

[N19h7m4r3]

We really should put this to bed. It's not a PRO card nor a consumer card. It's that grey in-between.

Let me put it like this:

Suppose you do job X and at work you use (courtesy of your employer) a Quadro X or RadeonPro X that costs $4000 on a 6900K.

Want to do some stuff at home but can't afford that setup? You can buy a Threadripper + Vega FE.

It's a niche, but it exists...

Yeah it's the type of card that my old man will like for his Solidworks station. Use to do engineering, but now retired and does plenty for ballistics designs as a hobby still.

He doesn't need ECC or application certification since it's hobbiest stuff, and small enough builds and designs to not worry about errors. He's never had one running on normal DDR3/4 or a Fermi card flashed to make solidworks think it's a quadro.

FE is a little expensive for his needs, but the performance is nice. Will see how RX Vega does in those workloads and probably get him that.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

We really should put this to bed. It's not a PRO card nor a consumer card. It's that grey in-between.

Let me put it like this:

Suppose you do job X and at work you use (courtesy of your employer) a Quadro X or RadeonPro X that costs $4000 on a 6900K.

Want to do some stuff at home but can't afford that setup? You can buy a Threadripper + Vega FE.

It's a niche, but it exists...

It's basically the AMD Titan Founders Edition,a halo prosumer card which is made for gaming and a bit overspecced in other areas for people on a budget,who can't afford proper pro cards(probably mostly one man bands I expect) to do other stuff,and also to add "value" to the brand.

However,as with the FX9590 and to a lesser degree the Fury X, AMD fail to understand you need they need the performance in place for both sets of software,not just one otherwise what is the point??

Its not a FirePro and AMD already have a budget FirePro range call the "Pro" series which has more limited software certification.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yeah it's the type of card that my old man will like for his Solidworks station. Use to do engineering, but now retired and does plenty for ballistics designs as a hobby still.

He doesn't need ECC or application certification since it's hobbiest stuff, and small enough builds and designs to not worry about errors. He's never had one running on normal DDR3/4 or a Fermi card flashed to make solidworks think it's a quadro.

FE is a little expensive for his needs, but the performance is nice. Will see how RX Vega does in those workloads and probably get him that.

But AMD unlike Nvidia have the "Pro" series cards like the Radeon Pro Duo which have more limited certification and are much cheaper than the FirePro cards.

This is AMD trying to do another halo and failing since they have not got the drivers in place for the gaming part.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

But AMD unlike Nvidia have the "Pro" series cards like the Radeon Pro Duo which have more limited certification and are much cheaper than the FirePro cards.

This is AMD trying to do another halo and failing since they have not got the drivers in place for the gaming part.

The old Radeon Pro Duo was like that, the Fiji one. The new Polaris dual GPU one is fully certified Radeon Pro.

Yeah, this "halo" card is massive fail. I mean really now; barely able to beat an overclocked Fury X, and worse than the old Vega engineering sample running debugging PCB and drivers in DOOM? WTF.

 

[CREATIVE!11]

This thread is better than any soap opera, amd you deliver again. Last year rx480 hype people were expecting much more than 980 performance and got a shock.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

This thread is better than any soap opera, amd you deliver again. Last year rx480 hype people were expecting much more than 980 performance and got a shock.

Man wccft rumors and hype does funky things to people.

 

[martynpd]

Man wccft rumors and hype does funky things to people.

This time it will be different I Swear!

 

[Erik13]

As a noob gonna ask isn't cpu business much more profitable ? I mean if you have a choice to have great cpu or great gpu which one would you choose ? Especially when you haven't got any money. Imho Amds new strategy will be more cpu concentrated from now on. They simply don't have enough resources to compete with both giants so they must pick one and Intel is much easier target right now.

With gpu business you have drivers that must constantly be updated, other components like memory etc supplement is out of your control, you must keep relationship with developers cozy if you don't want to get screwed. Now with cpu most of this efforts are gone so it makes total sense to prioritize cpu side

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This thread is better than any soap opera, amd you deliver again. Last year rx480 hype people were expecting much more than 980 performance and got a shock.

The main issue is the chip is around 500MM2 on 14NM,which is basically double that of Polaris 10,and HBM/HBM2 means less of the die is taken up with a memory controller,and even if we say due to its dual nature it losses some gaming efficiency,it should at least be able to generally faster than a GTX1080 which is closer to 300MM2. To put this in context Fiji is closer to 600MM2 on 28NM,and Vega has two more generations of improved tessellation performance and colour compression,etc and a 30% to 40% higher clockspeed too.

Regarding the RX480 a few of us(me included) thought it would be around ballpark R9 390/390X level performance with improved power consumption - after all Polaris 10 is nearly half the size of Hawaii.

Even if AMD had to launch this by the end of Q2,the fact of the matter is they could have done in it a way which doesn't mean the next month or so showing inconsistent gaming performance.

Edit!!

This is the other issue - if you are going to launch a prosumer card when your main competitor has had their own version out for over six months you need to make sure the gaming drivers are up to scratch too.

Nvidia could make the same excuse,the Titan X is a prosumer card for content creators,games devs,etc and not bother with the gaming drivers too until the gaming version,ie,the 80TI comes out.

But they don't since they want to put the best foot forward as much as possible.

AMD has a tendency to not do this and yes eventually the cards are solid,but by then most buyers will only remember the first impressions and are not going to be trawling the internet for the latest reviews three months later.

 

[Chrisc]

i

This thread is better than any soap opera, amd you deliver again. Last year rx480 hype people were expecting much more than 980 performance and got a shock.

its people that create the hype, and again people expect this card to be a great gaming card, yet AMD have said this is NOT! A gaming card.

They're going up against intel and nvidia with half the R&D budget, yet still producing great product. Personally i can wait, and if it is around 1080 performance then ill be happy with that. Progress is progress imo

 

[Rroff]

As a noob gonna ask isn't cpu business much more profitable ? I mean if you have a choice to have great cpu or great gpu which one would you choose ? Especially when you haven't got any money. Imho Amds new strategy will be more cpu concentrated from now on. They simply don't have enough resources to compete with both giants so they must pick one and Intel is much easier target right now.

With gpu business you have drivers that must constantly be updated, other components like memory etc supplement is out of your control, you must keep relationship with developers cozy if you don't want to get screwed. Now with cpu most of this efforts are gone so it makes total sense to prioritize cpu side

Honestly I think they are hamstringing themselves with some bad decisions that otherwise would have given them a much easier path to compete with nVidia - HBM(2) has done absolutely nothing for them - yet again they've tried to jump on a future tech for their consumer cards way before its needed or properly ready*. Globalfoundries hasn't produced in 14nm a process that is particularly suited to GPUs at the best of times, it seems to be more intended for low voltage, low power parts, meaning that in high performance applications they are struggling for both frequency and power efficiency.


* That isn't to say it was a bad thing for them to get involved with development of it and could have been pushing it on certain market segments.

 

[zornyan]

i


its people that create the hype, and again people expect this card to be a great gaming card, yet AMD have said this is NOT! A gaming card.

They're going up against intel and nvidia with half the R&D budget, yet still producing great product. Personally i can wait, and if it is around 1080 performance then ill be happy with that. Progress is progress imo

at this point amd should sell Radeon off, literially buying ATI was one of the worst decisions the company ever had, it basically nearly bankrupt amd, they havnt gotten out of it what they needed.

clearly they can't R&D for both divisions at once, even with much bigger budgets than they currently have.

if they release a good gpu, the cpus are ****, if they release a good cpu, the gpus are ****.

I can't actually think of a time that they've ever had Radeon you + amd cpu being top of the market at any time, they've had individual products get close to being the best, but never both at once.

they should sell Radeon off, let another company focus on gpus, and focus on cpus.

so have amd focus on Intel as compeition, and Radeon focus on Nvidia as competition (- or whatever Radeon would be renamed)

 

[V F]

Was ATi a small company with small resources compared to NVIDIA?

I wonder what today would be like if AMD never bought ATi...

 

[chroniclard]

its people that create the hype, and again people expect this card to be a great gaming card, yet AMD have said this is NOT! A gaming card.

They're going up against intel and nvidia with half the R&D budget, yet still producing great product. Personally i can wait, and if it is around 1080 performance then ill be happy with that. Progress is progress imo

Where is the progress?

 

[Killer7xx]

at this point amd should sell Radeon off, literially buying ATI was one of the worst decisions the company ever had, it basically nearly bankrupt amd, they havnt gotten out of it what they needed.

clearly they can't R&D for both divisions at once, even with much bigger budgets than they currently have.

if they release a good gpu, the cpus are ****, if they release a good cpu, the gpus are ****.

I can't actually think of a time that they've ever had Radeon you + amd cpu being top of the market at any time, they've had individual products get close to being the best, but never both at once.

they should sell Radeon off, let another company focus on gpus, and focus on cpus.

so have amd focus on Intel as compeition, and Radeon focus on Nvidia as competition (- or whatever Radeon would be renamed)

Seriously, just quit with the doomsaying, it had it's place in 2014 but now its just getting old. Both CPU and GPU departments at AMD have had their independent problems over the years. Making a good GPU and a good CPU at AMD were mutually exclusive in the past but now both departments are working together more closely, e.g. with infinity fabric, and it's much more likely that they will again produce a good CPU + GPU combo in the near future. They've made it through the rough years and now they are looking to complete what will be a remarkable comeback from near bankruptcy.

Was ATi a small company with small resources compared to NVIDIA?

I wonder what today would be like if AMD never bought ATi...

Yes it was still a much smaller company back then than Nvidia.

 

[zornyan]

Was ATi a small company with small resources compared to NVIDIA?

my fond memories are back in the days of my ATI RAGE you, think I moved onto a voodoo 2 or 3 after that?

 

[D.P.]

I wonder what went wrong since the old Doom demo on Vega.
Back then it was matching a 2Ghz GTX 1080 in 4K Doom in Vulkan, while running as an engineering sample on Fiji drivers, with a debugging layer and usb debugging on the PCB.

Now it's apparently even slower than that. In some games barely above Fury X, in other like GTA V 10fps slower than GTX 1070; and even in games like DIRT rally that AMD does well in loses to Titan Xp by over 50FPS on average.

Funky card and launch is funky.

Bring on Siggraph and a proper explanation from Raja. I'll also be listening to the Q2 Investor call and Q&A; I'm sure some investors will have questions regarding this "Vega launch".

You don't know what settting AMD used.

Remember when the Fury X was released AMD's benchmarks had it beating the 980ti by a decent margin in every game. If you then looked in the settings used and they had weird texture filtering and AA settings and various game options turned on and off.

AMD's earlir demos are nto at all representative. THE results that PCPer have achieved are representative, and have used drivers newer than the latest public crimson