Poll: ** The AMD VEGA Thread **

[nashathedog]

Just my little nod to one of the greatest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod's ever.

 

[zornyan]

Are you seriously sinking so low as to joke about suicide?

calm your **** dude, I don't think anyone's that insane to actually attempt suicide over a bloody gpu release .


although i do think we'll start seeing raja put up adverts that he's looking for work

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So this is a catastrophe then.

Its another confused AMD card launch where they talk about gaming for 6+ months,released a blinged out card,which only gamers would care for, and talk about gaming on the product page. Then they launch the card with drivers which are obviously sub-par and with higher power consumption than a Fury X and then also make it look hot on top of this.

OFC,no doubt drivers will improve once the RX Vega is launched and it probably will have a version with a water cooler meaning it can boost higher,but again its another future fix AMD launch where there will be a lot of initial negative PR.

 

[r7slayer]

Because that's a good thing? You want higher prices and no innovation?

Yea ofc i would absolutely love that. It's why nvidia should take note of AMD and not innovate and bring out a GPU that performs just as well as a 2 year old architecture.

Spoiler

I aint being serious

 

[zornyan]

Yea ofc i would absolutely love that. It's why nvidia should take note of AMD and not innovate and bring out a GPU that performs just as well as a 2 year old architecture.

Spoiler

I aint being serious

to be honest Nvidia is happy competing with itself, even with amd absent for the last couple years (not having competitive offerings) Nvidia are happy to cut prices, release newer and faster gpus.

take the 1080ti, people speculated £800 cut down titan.

we got a full titan (original) for £670 (often cheaper thanks to offers) and they slashed the prices on 1080s /70s.

Nvidia has literially been competing with itself yet still acts as if they have competition from amd, so it's not like they've stopped releasing good gpus or inflated prices massively.

 

[Killer7xx]

Some of us(like me) are annoyed since we want AMD to do well,and we as enthusiasts will give them more leeway as we understand what situation they are financially,etc but they are fighting Nvidia who are very clued up when it comes to selling and marketing their products,and have a massive mindshare as a result. Remember this is the very same PR who immediately realised the R9 290X stock cooler in quiet mode would throttle so started sending out cards to reviews THEY PAID FOR,saying they found this issue.

AMD can't afford to give Nvidia any leeway - ATI could since even though they had missteps too,they also had some awesome releases from day one.

Nvidia will always have more market share as long as they produce a card that is the least bit competitive. They have a large amount of loyalists who upgrade their card once every 2-4 years and will simply not consider AMD. I used to think that PC gamers were a relatively clued up bunch and they would carefully consider their choices before they purchase but history has shown that is not always the case. Even when AMD had cards that were clearly ahead in perf/£ and perf/W, people went with Nvidia.

Even if RX Vega outperforms the 1080Ti we won't see much movement from Nvidia to AMD. Until AMD starts beating Nvidia for multiple generations in a row will we finally see a shift. The advantage Nvidia has is their mindshare and their amount of resources compared to AMD, allowing them to make multiple designs just focused on gaming and a specific design for professional use. It probably won't happen for a few years but I think the best AMD can do right now is to make a competitive GPU in one way or another and then focus mainly on the CPU side to be able to invest and rebuild RTG back to the ATI days. Also focus heavily on APUs to reduce Nvidia's advantage on the gaming laptop side of things and the low end GT 1030s.

 

[Killer7xx]

to be honest Nvidia is happy competing with itself, even with amd absent for the last couple years (not having competitive offerings) Nvidia are happy to cut prices, release newer and faster gpus.

take the 1080ti, people speculated £800 cut down titan.

we got a full titan (original) for £670 (often cheaper thanks to offers) and they slashed the prices on 1080s /70s.

Nvidia has literially been competing with itself yet still acts as if they have competition from amd, so it's not like they've stopped releasing good gpus or inflated prices massively.

Is that why the 1080 launched at over £100 more than the 980? Also the 980Ti was £550 at launch. Nvidia obviously bumped up the prices this generation.

 

[Bazzards]

The gbp to dollar has tanked since the 980ti, that may have something to do with the increased prices.

 

[Besty]

So this is a catastrophe then.

not in historical context, no.

the 7970 was hot, powerful and i ran on beta drivers for 9 months.

if there is one thing AMD has proven is that they will eventually get the drivers correct but it will take time.

i think the catastrophe here is that AMD continues to inflict self harm and does not appear to be able to learn from past mistakes.

i think people would have been far more understanding if they had communicated a delay and conducted a soft launch with more details about what was actually ready i.e disable gaming mode and let anandtech and techreport work with the card to provide previews.

 

[akarypid]

I'm really very skeptical about RX Vega and supposed 'driver improvements'. In reality this sort of thing would give 5-10% and that's usually over some time (analysing specific games and making gradual improvements)...

Now, people are saying that it's not using the draw-stream binning rasteriser or any of the other new features. That may actually be true, and it may actually provide what I would call a 'considerable boost' (as in more than 20%) if a the 'real' driver turns them on. In that case, Vega for me would land exactly where I expected: something between 1080 and 1080ti but at a 1080's price would hit the sweet spot for me.

So I'm still hopeful, but still as skeptical as months ago.

I must say though: the HBM and HBCC really are just ahead of their time. The should've been avoided, but I guess if you're using one architecture for both gaming and professional cards (and your priority is professional/cloud) then the gaming card will just have to carry that luggage...

OR, hopefully some of this stuff aligns with gradual steps being taken towards Navi...

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nvidia will always have more market share as long as they produce a card that is the least bit competitive. They have a large amount of loyalists who upgrade their card once every 2-4 years and will simply not consider AMD. I used to think that PC gamers were a relatively clued up bunch and they would carefully consider their choices before they purchase but history has shown that is not always the case. Even when AMD had cards that were clearly ahead in perf/£ and perf/W, people went with Nvidia.

Even if RX Vega outperforms the 1080Ti we won't see much movement from Nvidia to AMD. Until AMD starts beating Nvidia for multiple generations in a row will we finally see a shift. The advantage Nvidia has is their mindshare and their amount of resources compared to AMD, allowing them to make multiple designs just focused on gaming and a specific design for professional use. It probably won't happen for a few years but I think the best AMD can do right now is to make a competitive GPU in one way or another and then focus mainly on the CPU side to be able to invest and rebuild RTG back to the ATI days. Also focus heavily on APUs to reduce Nvidia's advantage on the gaming laptop side of things and the low end GT 1030s.

Yes,but despite this ATI had between 35% to 50% of the dGPU sales each quarter for a very long time and that is despite the 2000 series,and even when they had the HD3870 which was slower than any Nvidia card over £175. The problem is that has fallen to between 17% to 29% in the last few years and that is even been happening when AMD has had reasonable products even at the high end.

The problem is that indicates even people who would have bought ATI in the past have probably bought Nvidia too,so that means something is going wrong in how they sell their products for them to lose mindshare,and I think AMD really needs to try and do things more coherently and not give Nvidia these little chances they can exploit,and remember Nvidia realised the importance of the internet to shape the narrative well over a decade ago.

 

[Killer7xx]

The gbp to dollar has tanked since the 980ti, that may have something to do with the increased prices.

Not so much to warrant an over £100 increase, the 1080 was launched pre-brexit as well.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

not in historical context, no.

the 7970 was hot, powerful and i ran on beta drivers for 9 months.

if there is one thing AMD has proven is that they will eventually get the drivers correct but it will take time.

i think the catastrophe here is that AMD continues to inflict self harm and does not appear to be able to learn from past mistakes.

i think people would have been far more understanding if they had communicated a delay and conducted a soft launch with more details about what was actually ready i.e disable gaming mode and let anandtech and techreport work with the card to provide previews.

The thing is the HD7970 was still the fastest card in the world for two to three months when released despite the drivers not being quite there,but the card was massively underclocked which didn't help. But once they clocked it higher it looked more competitive.

 

[nashathedog]

Bad sign. I give up. *hugs RX 480*

Me too
Dreams of a 580 while pushing away the 1060 with a barge pole.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'm really very skeptical about RX Vega and supposed 'driver improvements'. In reality this sort of thing would give 5-10% and that's usually over some time (analysing specific games and making gradual improvements)...

Now, people are saying that it's not using the draw-stream binning rasteriser or any of the other new features. That may actually be true, and it may actually provide what I would call a 'considerable boost' (as in more than 20%) if a the 'real' driver turns them on. In that case, Vega for me would land exactly where I expected: something between 1080 and 1080ti but at a 1080's price would hit the sweet spot for me.

So I'm still hopeful, but still as skeptical as months ago.

I must say though: the HBM and HBCC really are just ahead of their time. The should've been avoided, but I guess if you're using one architecture for both gaming and professional cards (and your priority is professional/cloud) then the gaming card will just have to carry that luggage...

OR, hopefully some of this stuff aligns with gradual steps being taken towards Navi...

I expect the top RX Vega SKU will have a water cooler. It will only have 8GB of HBM2,meaning more of the power and TDP budget can be use for the core,so it should clock higher. I can easily see 10% to 15% extra performance,maybe even more especially if the card can hit close to 1600MHZ and not power throttle instead of the 1382MHZ average which AMD says the FE will run at.

Now Ryan Shrout says he thinks the drivers will add nearly another 10% to performance,so you could see another 20% to 25% extra performance which should place it above a GTX1080 FE.

OTH,maybe AMD is sandbagging and RX Vega will be Titan Xp level,but I think until we see that happen,we should not speed up the hype tram yet!!

 

[CREATIVE!11]

Is that why the 1080 launched at over £100 more than the 980? Also the 980Ti was £550 at launch. Nvidia obviously bumped up the prices this generation.

When people say nvidia haven't inflated prices i'm like lol.

And that is why competition from AMD is needed....

 

[nashathedog]

I expect the top RX Vega SKU will have a water cooler. It will only have 8GB of HBM2,meaning more of the power and TDP budget can be use for the core,so it should clock higher. I can easily see 10% to 15% extra performance,maybe even more especially if the card can hit close to 1600MHZ and not power throttle instead of the 1382MHZ average which AMD says the FE will run at.

Now Ryan Shrout says he thinks the drivers will add nearly another 10% to performance,so you could see another 20% to 25% extra performance which should place it above a GTX1080 FE.

OTH,maybe AMD is sandbagging and RX Vega will be Titan Xp level,but I think until we see that happen,we should not speed up the hype tram yet!!

If we saw a 15% increase it wouldn't be a total loss, The problem we have is it's not consistent enough across all games. In Pcper's testing it was sometimes butting heads with a 1070 which in turn means a 980ti, That could mean seeing a loss once they're all overclocked. I'm sure most people here would have been hoping for 1080 to 1080ti in best case and maybe losing to the 1080 in some but not by a lot, Certainly not losing to the 1070. But hopefully the RX version will be that much better so it stay's ahead of the 1070 all the time and much closer to the 1080 when it does perform poorly. The guessing game now is the price, I'm concerned that the price we'll have to pay will be more than it's performance justifies.

Yesterday I noticed not having Freesync when I needed it for the first time since selling my Fury. So, I put the last 580 Devil Golden sample in my basket and even got as far as being diverted to Paypal before I stopped myself and cancelled the purchase, I hope that doesn't come back to bite me next month.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If we saw a 15% increase it wouldn't be a total loss, The problem we have is it's not consistent enough across all games. In Pcper's testing it was sometimes butting heads with a 1070 which in turn means a 980ti, That could mean seeing a loss once they're all overclocked. I'm sure most people here would have been hoping for 1080 to 1080ti in best case and maybe losing to the 1080 in some but not by a lot, Certainly not losing to the 1070. But hopefully the RX version will be that much better so it stay's ahead of the 1070 all the time and much closer to the 1080 when it does perform poorly. The guessing game now is the price, I'm concerned that the price we'll have to pay will be more than it's performance justifies.

Yesterday I noticed not having Freesync when I needed it for the first time since selling my Fury. So, I put the last 580 Devil Golden sample in my basket and even got as far as being diverted to Paypal before I stopped myself and cancelled the purchase, I hope that doesn't come back to bite me next month.

I mean I understand AMD might have had to hit some internal goalpost as they might have promised to release Vega in Q2 2017,but seriously this could have been handled much better!!

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.

 

[DragonQ]

to be honest Nvidia is happy competing with itself, even with amd absent for the last couple years (not having competitive offerings) Nvidia are happy to cut prices, release newer and faster gpus.

take the 1080ti, people speculated £800 cut down titan.

we got a full titan (original) for £670 (often cheaper thanks to offers) and they slashed the prices on 1080s /70s.

Nvidia has literially been competing with itself yet still acts as if they have competition from amd, so it's not like they've stopped releasing good gpus or inflated prices massively.

You do realise that essentially every high end card went up by $50 between the 9xx and 10xx series, right? That's not including the extra cost of the "founders edition" cards. Then you have the Titan branded cards which are basically a way of saying "**** our cards are now too fast to just sell at the prices we normally sell them at, let's whack on a few hundred dollars and flog the cut-down ones in our normal price bracket". The Titan series would not exist if AMD was competitive in that arena, at least not at anywhere near their current prices. nVidia are kind of at the point Intel were back in 2011 when they released Sandy Bridge. They're not entirely sure they have no competition yet so are just "testing the waters". I have no doubt that soon nVidia will become like Intel and push marginal improvements each year if they no longer see any threat from AMD. If Vega fails as hard as the FE card indicates it might, that point will have been reached.

 

[MichaelM]

I blame Ryzen.