Poll: ** The AMD VEGA Thread **

[Brazo]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

You're only thinking in terms of an enthusiast though. Most people don't have the 1080 or higher. Vulkan allows people with 1050's and 470's to get a fantastic experience with great visuals.

It just opens up the industry to more average gamers.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Just occurred to me. Everyone has been saying that RX vega can't be sold for cheap because HBM is expensive. But i think that HBM is not the most expensive part but the GPU die itself. Raja said that vega uses infinity fabric. Considering that with IF rumors are saying that AMD has 80% yield of full fat Ryzen 7s and 99% utilisation of ryzen die's. I think that AMD could sell Vega for cheaper than we think. If they decide to.

 

[Panos]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

Vulcan allows better quality graphics, at much less powerful systems. Both GPU & CPU.
I am currently using Unity 5 to make my own game with Vulcan, and you can even have superb real time rendering on something like the ancient R9 290X or RX480 level of GPU.

 

[AllBodies]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

Also important for long term context, is that Vulkan and DX12 bring most of the advantages that consoles have/had in terms of low-level and optimisations.

If PC stuck with DX11 and below, and OpenGL, for another generation of consoles it would actually fall behind. You can only throw so many teraflops at the problem before the unoptimised code path screws you over.

The 'proper' next gen consoles should be something like 8+ Zen3 cores (so properly powerful CPU cores, vs their current crap netbook cores), and 5000 Navi cores at 1500+ MHz (so 15 Tflops ish). If PC didn't get low-level APIs, PC games would likely end up worse looking than on such a console.

 

[nashathedog]

Just occurred to me. Everyone has been saying that RX vega can't be sold for cheap because HBM is expensive. But i think that HBM is not the most expensive part but the GPU die itself. Raja said that vega uses infinity fabric. Considering that with IF rumors are saying that AMD has 80% yield of full fat Ryzen 7s and 99% utilisation of ryzen die's. I think that AMD could sell Vega for cheaper than we think. If they decide to.

That'll be nice. Where did you read that Vega uses Infinity fabric?

 

[shankly1985]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

You tell me what one you would choose out of these Results Them Frame Time Though!!! Smooth
Vulkan

Spoiler: Vulkan

OpenGL

Spoiler: OpenGL

Vulkan 2

Spoiler: Vulkan2

OpenGL2

Spoiler: OpenGL2

 

[andybird123]

Just occurred to me. Everyone has been saying that RX vega can't be sold for cheap because HBM is expensive. But i think that HBM is not the most expensive part but the GPU die itself. Raja said that vega uses infinity fabric. Considering that with IF rumors are saying that AMD has 80% yield of full fat Ryzen 7s and 99% utilisation of ryzen die's. I think that AMD could sell Vega for cheaper than we think. If they decide to.

CPU yield figures will have no bearing on GPU's

 

[AllBodies]

CPU yield figures will have no bearing on GPU's

Yeah, infinity fabric only makes GPUs/CPUs cheaper if they use it to make the GPU/CPU modular. And stick lots of small dies together with it (and only manufacture tons of small dies)

Vega is not a small modular die. Rumour is that's what Navi is going to be, but Vega is still big-monolithic style.

 

[V F]

@shankly1985 Doom is so icky! Looks like some of the scenes from Event Horizon.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

That'll be nice. Where did you read that Vega uses Infinity fabric?

Raja confirmed/said this in the AMA on reddit.

CPU yield figures will have no bearing on GPU's

Yes but it my example shows that IF has allowed ryzen to be very cheap to manfucature. If that advantage transfers over to the GPU market we potentially can see cheap GPUs.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

@shankly1985 Doom is so icky! Looks like some of the scenes from Event Horizon.

Fantastic Warhammer 40K movie though; it's about the first warp travel by mankind.

 

[silversurfer]

Ive heard Infinity Fabric mentioned but I'm not sure when or if any advantage will be proven for a lot of the features.

Just occurred to me. Everyone has been saying that RX vega can't be sold for cheap because HBM is expensive.

I presume AMD has a formal agreement with Hynix to be their biggest customer and is fixing a price long term based on that demand and their own determination to make it a success.
Anytime a customer dominates demand in a market they can possibly set pricing outside of apparent market price and it sounds like the two companies are working for a mutual advantage. Vega will eventually be a mainstream product for AMD seems like, not sure if HBM might also

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuFG7pw_k50
Old vid, he seems to seriously struggle with cooling. I think the entire room a Vega machine is in needs aircon to ensure its not going to throttle. Or wait for better fan solutions or some will watercool?

Is there a test for Frontier on Arma 3, its an old engine I think

 

[Lokken86]

Problem with Vulcan and specifically Doom, is that Doom ran really, really well on OpenGL and whilst it may have run better on Vulcan if you've already got 117fps then there's little incentive to 'improve' that to 130fps.

At 4k I was getting low 30fps in OpenGL and with Vulkan on it went to mid 50s.

 

[Brazo]

You're only thinking in terms of an enthusiast though. Most people don't have the 1080 or higher. Vulkan allows people with 1050's and 470's to get a fantastic experience with great visuals.

It just opens up the industry to more average gamers.

Seems to have less fps in Vulcan on the 1050 in this bench. http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-geforce-gtx-1050-and-1050-ti-gaming-x-review,19.html

Now I'm sure you can post a bench where's Vulcan is slightly better but you'll only be reinforcing the point that I'm trying to make which is yes Vulcan was better but only just and certainly not worth worrying about.

 

[Brazo]

At 4k I was getting low 30fps in OpenGL and with Vulkan on it went to mid 50s.

Was this recently or upon release? I know OpenGL has made up a lot of ground since launch day.

 

[Brazo]

You tell me what one you would choose out of these Results Them Frame Time Though!!! Smooth
Vulkan

Spoiler: Vulkan

OpenGL

Spoiler: OpenGL

Vulkan 2

Spoiler: Vulkan2

OpenGL2

Spoiler: OpenGL2

Again. How recent are these?

 

[andybird123]

Raja confirmed/said this in the AMA on reddit.


Yes but it my example shows that IF has allowed ryzen to be very cheap to manfucature. If that advantage transfers over to the GPU market we potentially can see cheap GPUs.

You've completely misunderstood why the cpu yields are good and wrongly extrapolated it to a completely unrelated GPU product

 

[AllBodies]

Seems to have less fps in Vulcan on the 1050 in this bench. http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-geforce-gtx-1050-and-1050-ti-gaming-x-review,19.html

Now I'm sure you can post a bench where's Vulcan is slightly better but you'll only be reinforcing the point that I'm trying to make which is yes Vulcan was better but only just and certainly not worth worrying about.

Yeah but Nvidia are a bit weird with the new APIs and Pascal.

The RX 460 jumps from 47 to 62 fps meanwhile.

 

[Rroff]

Yeah but Nvidia are a bit weird with the new APIs and Pascal.

The RX 460 jumps from 47 to 62 fps meanwhile.

I've had some really weird results with Doom and my cards - my 780GHz had all kinds of issues with it in Open GL never mind Vulkan and my 1070 gets pretty much identical performance IIRC between Open GL and Vulkan but slightly different as in one will do better in some scenes than the other and vice versa.

My 780 was all over the place - 1080p performance was great and handled everything from low to ultra settings fine - turn it upto 1440p and performance took an utter dump regardless of low or ultra settings it was exactly the same poor framerate with no signs of being fillrate or VRAM limited and in Vulkan it would adhere to strange multipliers of the refresh rate like some kind of crazy V-Sync effect and only jump between like 30, 45, 60 and 120 fps :s (I think that was solved in later drivers but I was on the 1070 by then and haven't revisited it on the 780).

EDIT: Oh and some people saw a ~30% framerate increase on Kepler cards going to Vulkan for some reason but most didn't for no apparently reproducible reason either.