THE REAL REASON VEGA FAILED & RAJA QUIT AMD!

[Gerard]

Yes now, but i bet they lost a load of sales on the Ryzen release day, with those reviews saying that they couldn't recommend them for gaming, and that 5yr old i5s were even beating em etc...

People who wanted them were going to buy them regardless, i doubt in the long run it cost them much. Look at how hard vega was to keep in stock despite it being a year behind the competition.

I twice ordered an LC card, first order went through but the site messed up and there was none left despite it showing in stock, second one similar situation with the site, just gave up after that.

 

[JediFragger]

and that 5yr old i5s were even beating em etc...

Yup, that was the worst thing with the Ryzen launch. Made them look like years behind Intel ,whereas in fact they weren't that far once the issues were sorted!

 

[Freddie1980]

GCN got into its stride with the 2nd Gen 290X. The problem is it just didn't scale well beyond that. The rigid 4 shader engines and geometry processor ratio just didn't help. The shader engines got deeper but the front end can't keep the compute units loaded. nvidia have been much better at adapting their architectures to scale better. nvidia sacrafice much mroe die area to keeping everythign working at high efficiency than simply throwing more brute force compute

That's the thing if they went with more geometry processing it would mean less shader cores which would mean their cards would have less throughput making them less effective in HPC loads or a larger die size leading higher costs and lower yields. When you look at it AMD's GPU strategy is all over place they lack the resources of its competitors but rather then concentrating on one market they have spread themselves to thin, given how small and efficient Nvidia gpu's are I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft switched suppliers for the next Xbox.

 

[D.P.]

That's the thing if they went with more geometry processing it would mean less shader cores which would mean their cards would have less throughput making them less effective in HPC loads or a larger die size leading higher costs and lower yields. When you look at it AMD's GPU strategy is all over place they lack the resources of its competitors but rather then concentrating on one market they have spread themselves to thin, given how small and efficient Nvidia gpu's are I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft switched suppliers for the next Xbox.

The question is, can Microsoft get an Intel or AMD CPU + Nvidia GPU at a price point of a custom APU from AMD. There are also issues of yields, power, heat. Also marketing difference,s if MS goes with AMD they will basically get the same APU as Sony gets, if they want to differentiate themselves then they may be going for a more powerful GPU form Nvidia with potentially some unique architectural differences and features..

 

[D.P.]

Made me chuckle when Vega finally landed and everybody was slamming it, Raja went on holiday for 3 months...then never returned to RTC.

And some people were defending Raja and saying Navi is when he will really shine

 

[D.P.]

In performance terms I think they just topped out what it was more or less capable of, it was a chip that already had ridiculous power requirements so it was a trade-off between either trying to crank the clocks higher and having a card that needed water-cooling or settling for a middle ground.

Vega probably should have been another furyx and been fitted with an aio and anything not using that cooler could be Vega 56 cards. But they pushed ahead with the air and liquid options regardless. Probably didn't want to risk another batch of whiney aio units so production of them seemed limited.

It just had all the hallmarks of a chip (much like Polaris) that didn't meet expectations for performance so they ended up having to ratchet on the voltage to get performance up via clockspeeds. Amd made the best of what they could with Polaris and priced it accordingly but didn't want to go that route for Vega even though internally I bet they were disappointed with how it turned out.

Had it been priced under 1080 it could have been ok but they went with the premium price bs and those ridiculous "free" games that were anything but. Availability didn't help matters either though that was more down to the mining mob.

I vaguely remember the Bollywood thing, think I seen it the day after.

The problem is Vega is very expensive to produce. HBM2, interposer, and a very large chip, plus higher HSF requirements and power delivery.

AMD didn't have much choice to set lower prices without making a loss. Luckily for AMD the mining boom occurred and they could sell at very high prices ignoring the gamers. Production costs are likely a little lower now but I epxect any profit margins are still very narrow. Financially Vega will be a success financially all thanks to mining.

 

[TNA]

Yup, that was the worst thing with the Ryzen launch. Made them look like years behind Intel ,whereas in fact they weren't that far once the issues were sorted!

I am hoping Zen 2 will at the very least match Intel in gaming drivers, but hopefully even beat them. They will have had 2 years to sort out any issues with Ryzen so when 7nm Zen 2 comes out next year it will hopefully be great on launch

 

[LambChop]

So AMD brought out Vega promising incredible gaming performance and experience, only for them to know its utter ******* yet sell you it as though its amazing.

Yet people castrate nVidia for a simple NDA ? lol

 

[TNA]

So AMD brought out Vega promising incredible gaming performance and experience, only for them to know its utter ******* yet sell you it as though its amazing.

Yet people castrate nVidia for a simple NDA ? lol

You must have a short memory if you think it is just because of this NDA. Lol.

That said, I somewhat agree with what you said about Vega too, poor Volta comes to mind

 

[nashathedog]

^ Ryzen and bios was more down to motherboard manufacturers being sceptical about it following the bulldozer\piledriver failure. It took them a while to get on board with it.

Then AMD should have held off, until the maufacturers had them all sorted, its why they get bad reviews all the time they release anything, and why everyone just buys Intel/Nvidia, on the day that they release, as its on that release day, that people want to buy, they read the reviews on that day, and put their orders in, on that day, so its no good AMD sorting, months and months later, when they've already lost the sales.

First impressions are vital but as said Ryzen's in a good place now.

 

[nashathedog]

given how small and efficient Nvidia gpu's are I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft switched suppliers for the next Xbox.

That's gotta have been a big worry, especially considering how under powered the consoles are, In the beginning there were games that couldn't even hit 30 fps,
I'm sure we all remember how some game developers said they were targeting 30fps because it's cinematic.
That said I'd bet on the consoles sticking with AMD for the next range of consoles,
AMD has a unique position today due to having the graphics & processor business but how about Intel in the future?

Could we see future generations of console running custom Intel APU's?

 

[Gerard]

That's the thing if they went with more geometry processing it would mean less shader cores which would mean their cards would have less throughput making them less effective in HPC loads or a larger die size leading higher costs and lower yields. When you look at it AMD's GPU strategy is all over place they lack the resources of its competitors but rather then concentrating on one market they have spread themselves to thin, given how small and efficient Nvidia gpu's are I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft switched suppliers for the next Xbox.

Hard to see them switch to Nvidia, they had a falling out over the GPU in the original Xbox amd theyve been and ever since.

 

[LambChop]

You must have a short memory if you think it is just because of this NDA. Lol.

That said, I somewhat agree with what you said about Vega too, poor Volta comes to mind

Ok, somewhat facetious of me but they still took flack for the NDA alone. It really doesnt matter what nVidia does, but AMD generally gets a free pass.

On a side note, I'm quite taken back that a company would willingly put out a product knowing its way below standard.

 

[LePhuronn]

On a side note, I'm quite taken back that a company would willingly put out a product knowing its way below standard.

I wouldn't say it was "below standard" but arguably RTG set the standard quite low. Objectively, Vega did exactly what it was intended to do: Vega 56 beat the GTX 1070, Vega 64 beat the 1080, and Nvidia responded; would we have seen the 1080 Ti if they hadn't caught wind that Vega 64 could take the performance crown? Was the 1070 Ti released to beat Vega 56, or just use up the 1080 dies lying around because GDDR5 was scarce?.

The problem though comes from the overall package and what was ultimately released:

• Vega was a year late so after all the hype it was disappointing (and Nvidia stole more thunder by releasing the 1080 Ti, so automatically Vega was no longer competing at the top end)
• RTG weren't discerning enough with their yields, so set a stupidly high reference power requirement just to get every functioning die working
• MSRP was totally wrong, essentially charging the next performance bracket up for each card (1080 money for the 1070 competitor, 1080 Ti money for the 1080 competitor). HBM's cost couldn't have helped in that regard either.
• Launch prices were a total lie.

Bundle everything together and that's what makes it below standard, the cards themselves are really good once tuned to where they should really have been in the first place.

 

[melmac]

Ok, somewhat facetious of me but they still took flack for the NDA alone. It really doesnt matter what nVidia does, but AMD generally gets a free pass.

On a side note, I'm quite taken back that a company would willingly put out a product knowing its way below standard.

What are you talking about? AMD got a ton of flack on these forums for Vega. Stop posting whataboutism nonsense.

And of course you would be taken back by something AMD done. Your history of hating anything AMD is well known on these forums.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Forgot about the FuryX, the supposed 980 Ti competitor, that when released, only competed with the 980, the Ti smashed the thing, until months later, when they'd sorted the drivers, as per.

Still don't know how they weren't done for false advertising either, as its was marketed as a 4k card, for Extreme 4k Gaming!, as that was a complete lie, as it was crippled by only having 4GB vram, yeah, it could run games at 4k fine, if you whacked all the details down, or only played something like Tetris, Pong etc..., hardly extreme that is it, and then the the 480s jumped above them in the product stack, as they could run games at higher settings, due to having double the vram.

 

[TNA]

Ok, somewhat facetious of me but they still took flack for the NDA alone. It really doesnt matter what nVidia does, but AMD generally gets a free pass.

On a side note, I'm quite taken back that a company would willingly put out a product knowing its way below standard.

I was going to say it, but melmec beat me to it. Lol.

I don’t think any company gets a free pass here to be honest. It may seem that way if you look at it from a non neutral perspective, but if you are neutral like me and swing both ways then you see it a bit differently

I swing both ways baby! Used to love that sig Gregsters had

 

[Gerard]

What are you talking about? AMD got a ton of flack on these forums for Vega. Stop posting whataboutism nonsense.

And of course you would be taken back by something AMD done. Your history of hating anything AMD is well known on these forums.

If you put him on the ignore list it makes this subsection a lot more bearable.

 

[nashathedog]

There is a sub section of members for who AMD*** can do no wrong but there's always plenty of us who'll rip into AMD or Nvidia when it's deserved.

Neither deserve a free pass cause if you do it once they'll attempt to dine on it for ever as we saw Raja trying to do in the year or so before he left RTG.


***Nvidia has one too.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

I love how they do a big song and dance about a new mega performance driver they are going to release, zomg! 200+ more frames with this driver, incredible increase in performance!!!, and how it gets reported across the board, its that time of the year again, and AMD are going to release yet another massive performance increase driver blah blah blah............

Its compared to an ancient driver they released over a year ago, so theres bound to be a good increase in performance since then, trouble is, no ones running that ancient driver, everyones on the one that got released a few weeks before this zomg! mega performance increase one, so they hardly see a difference at all, if any!.

Always makes me laugh that