Radeon VII

[aoaaron]

Lol. So true.

PS5 will get a lot of PC gamers attention I think (I know I am getting one for sure). With 120Hz VRR OLED TVs with proper HDR it will be an easy choice. Nvidia better price their 3000 series much more competitively or they will see number of sales plummet.

Yeah for sure. I think any Sony console is a no brained tbh because they offer some of the best gaming experiences of every generation (GOW/Horizon/RDR2/KH3/TLOU2, RE7Vr/AstrobotVR).

I'm more interested in what Microsoft do next as they seem to be all about the hardware.

 

[bigmike20vt]

Yeah for sure. I think any Sony console is a no brained tbh because they offer some of the best gaming experiences of every generation (GOW/Horizon/RDR2/KH3/TLOU2, RE7Vr/AstrobotVR).

I'm more interested in what Microsoft do next as they seem to be all about the hardware.

I have a PS4 pro and you are right, they have some fantastic exclusive titles..... and i am not entrenched on the PC side of things.... PSVR2 will have to be a significant upgrade in tracking however if i am to move back fully to console gaming... not to mention having to pay to play online.

 

[aoaaron]

I have a PS4 pro and you are right, they have some fantastic exclusive titles..... and i am not entrenched on the PC side of things.... PSVR2 will have to be a significant upgrade in tracking however if i am to move back fully to console gaming... not to mention having to pay to play online.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I'm not moving away from PC gaming. I honestly think the next gen of consoles will probably match a 2080/1080ti by the time they release.

And PC's backwards compatibility of 99% of titles and the VR scene makes it very hard to step away from.

 

[TNA]

Yeah for sure. I think any Sony console is a no brained tbh because they offer some of the best gaming experiences of every generation (GOW/Horizon/RDR2/KH3/TLOU2, RE7Vr/AstrobotVR).

I'm more interested in what Microsoft do next as they seem to be all about the hardware.

I have skipped the PS3 & 4 and made do with borrowing from friends and family to play a few exclusives. But this time I am going for it. There are at least 3-4 games now on PS4 I have not played which I want to, will play them on PS5. They will probably offer a version with better image quality/fps for those big titles anyways. So happy to wait as at the start there are not many games when a console comes out.

 

[aoaaron]

I have skipped the PS3 & 4 and made do with borrowing from friends and family to play a few exclusives. But this time I am going for it. There are at least 3-4 games now on PS4 I have not played which I want to, will play them on PS5. They will probably offer a version with better image quality/fps for those big titles anyways. So happy to wait as at the start there are not many games when a console comes out.

I can wait for a lot of games.

But I can't wait for KH3.
GOW sets the bar too for third person games.


The PS4 and Switch for me are almost necessary gaming purchases at this point.

 

[JCLDJB]

because the nvidia card has Ray Tracing and DLSS.

now you may argue that ray tracing is not quite there yet... BUT surely given a choice of having it or not you would have it .
and DLSS is an unknown entity right now but, IF it takes off that will be huge, so again, better to have it than not.

and finally, the nvidia card uses a lot less power, and therefore can get away with a lesser psu.

now maybe none of the above is a show stopper for you, but surely you can see that they are advantages and therefore as the AMD card does not have them then imo the price needs to reflect it.

When nvidia launched at the prices they did their defence was that RTX is a new expensive tech but they took a LOT of flak for it. Are you really saying that AMD have released st those prices, and without DLSS or Ray Tracing it is now ok?

Note i am only talking about from a gaming perspective, there may be other non gaming reasons to get an AMD gpu.

Thank you.

For me personally, I would hardly call Raytracing an 'advantage' at this stage...would you?
And I'll go out on a limb to say that for most part of 2019, it will still be a very hard sell (I am hoping I am wrong though, because we got to move to RT eventually!)

DLSS, though, is AMAZING, and I've really been impressed with this specifically.

Raytracing...meh..I dunno..if there were many more titles which had this implemented now, would still be a hard pill to swallow due to the performance differences, taking into consideration the price you'd pay for such a card..just a liiittle bit too early.

Raytracing + DLSS = Absolutely makes sense and this is where I can start to understand the remarks about Radeon VII pricing vs RTX 2080.

As for the power consumption, sure, no doubt Nvidia has a clear advantage in the efficiency departement and +1 to them for leading here, energy is a finite resource afterall.

---

For comparison: Radeon VII with 16Gb of HBM & a huge Memory Bandwidth increase, and all the 'Vega' additions.

Power efficiency out the window...
===
TBH, I am having deja vu when comparing Radeon VII vs RTX 2080.

RTX 2080 is for gamers.
Radeon VII is for gamers who also do pro work.

(Sound familiar?)
Skylake/Coffee Lake VS Ryzen


So..at what price would you deem it acceptable, for the Radeon VII?
Or do you think they were wrong in choosing HBM?

 

[bigmike20vt]

So..at what price would you deem it acceptable, for the Radeon VII?
Or do you think they were wrong in choosing HBM?

as a gamer i am not convinced HBM offers anything to me that GDDR 6 does not offer for the gaming, when considering the price premium..... i cant comment on anything else none gaming.. (going on what we have seen so far in past AMD HBM gpus).

as for prices, this is what i put in another post

"but for gaming i cant help but feel they would have been better going for GDDR6 and offering 2 versions 8gb and 16gb. From what i have read about HBM2 and its prices, had they created a 16GB GDDR 6 card it could have been $100 cheaper, and an 8GB one maybe even $150 - $200 less.

An 8GB GDDR6 Radeon 7 with similar RTX 2080 performance but for $499 / £450-£499 or 16gb for $549 / £500-£550 is a card i could see making nvidia pause! (it would have made me think twice about going nvidia)"

 

[Gregster]

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gp...9_z8Chj9ufSnVfMeYZDcks7VV07JJ33qNJvouHwDxYGeA

AMD release more game benchmarks!

 

[TNA]

I can wait for a lot of games.

But I can't wait for KH3.
GOW sets the bar too for third person games.


The PS4 and Switch for me are almost necessary gaming purchases at this point.

Got me a Switch, to many exclusives to miss on. Though there have not been that many must play games for me thus far as I expected. Nintendo take ages to release games these days.

For me it is games like Resident Evil 2 or Deus Ex which cannot wait. The rest usually I can wait.

 

[Alexrose1uk]

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gp...9_z8Chj9ufSnVfMeYZDcks7VV07JJ33qNJvouHwDxYGeA

AMD release more game benchmarks!

So 20-30% on average boost, providing the results are accurate. Would have been better if they included a GTX 2080 as well though.

Honestly, it's the price that has sunk them here, probably because it costs so much to build, even if it is a salvage part, but that pricing is the most important part to most gamers.
As mentioned previously, like the 590, it seems to be obviously a holding pattern card, simply to give them more time to work on Navi/Arcturus.

Still, it'll no doubt suit some especially for those who want to buy now. Its not ideal, but it does mean AMD have SOMETHING in the marget segment, 20-30% performance boost over the previous top end card is nothing terrible; its just doing it at a cost and with features that wont matter to most gamers.

Now if you gamed AND did some development or other work that would benefit from the bandwidth and GPU performance, then that niche might indeed find this an interesting card.

Is it late - Yes
Is it expensive - Yes
Is it going to win hearts and minds - No
Is it better than only having Vega 64 as thier top card - undoubtedly.

Not entirely unsurprising though, hopefully if Ryzen continues to do well, AMD will be able to push a better R&D investment in Radeon and speed up future architectures and releases, they're definately playing catch up right now.

 

[0h_no_not_again]

The extra transistors are for 1:2 FP64 support used in the Instinct MI60, it has no value for gaming. AMD did a direct die shrink and added back in the FP64 support for HPC uses. This isn't a new GPU designed for gaming, it is failed MI60 cores. IPC (performance per clock tick) will be identical to Vega64, the only real difference is far more bandwidth.

My thoughts exactly. AMD needs a way to consume the partially faulty dies, although I'm a bit surprised these aren't landing as a prosumer Vega Frontier Edition replacement.
The yields of 7nm on such a die will be pretty poor at this stage, so it makes sense they'll have a lot of 60CU parts to play with. It also makes sense that the 7nm node has a long way to go yet, so this die is probably a primer for large 7nm dies.

It will be interesting to see what the compute specific changes are though, noting the 62% improvement in OpenCL performance. Might be compiler optimisation, but most likely VII has been tweaked to properly target compute unlike the half baked hybrid compute/gaming Vega.

 

[Steedie]

Has there been anything said about power consumption? Is it likely to be much lower given how much juice the original Vega cards used out of the box

 

[bigmike20vt]

Has there been anything said about power consumption? Is it likely to be much lower given how much juice the original Vega cards used out of the box

on a par with vega 64 so quite high

 

[wellibob]

Is this new card basically a 16 GB 1080ti for £700?

 

[Steedie]

on a par with vega 64 so quite high

Ah that's a shame I was hoping given the clock speeds aren't that much higher, as well as the lower number of compute units, we'd see less power draw on 7nm

 

[JonnyG1982]

O deary me AMD.

Great to see a product coming out doing pretty much all that was realistically expected (maybe a smidge short) but at that price point...

Barely any incentive to convince anyone thinking of going rtx2080 to go AMD.

They needed to get this out at the sub £550 to really stick it to nvidia (That price is still high for effectively best part of 2 year old performance). That would have caused a surge of those who wanted to buy nvidia but didn't because of price to switch brand.
nvidia would then have to get more realistic to with prices to try compete.

Fingers crossed this comes out cheaper than expected & newer drivers improve performance before release. If they wanted to charge £650+ they needed to bring rtx2080+10% performance.

 

[JCLDJB]

because the nvidia card has Ray Tracing and DLSS.


When nvidia launched at the prices they did their defence was that RTX is a new expensive tech but they took a LOT of flak for it. Are you really saying that AMD have released st those prices, and without DLSS or Ray Tracing it is now ok?

Note i am only talking about from a gaming perspective, there may be other non gaming reasons to get an AMD gpu.

I am not saying that AMD releasing RVII (without DLSS/RayTracing) at this price is justified, expensive, but justified.
I am saying that AMD releasing RVII with 16Gb of HBM on 7nm at this price is a little high, but equally as justified as Nvidia releasing a $700 RTX 2080.
At least, in my opinion.

 

[ANDREW GREEN]

but for gaming i cant help but feel they would have been better going for GDDR6 and offering 2 versions 8gb and 16gb. From what i have read about HBM2 and its prices, had they created a 16GB GDDR 6 card it could have been $100 cheaper, and an 8GB one maybe even $150 - $200 less.

The card chip are old stock and can only run with 16gb at the lowest. I imagine they have excess HBM2 supplies and this is why they want to shift them. Either that or the card chip will only run with HMB2

 

[Chrisc]

People seem to be fixated by it being 1080ti level of performance rather than 2080 levels. Yes it doesnt have Ray tracing capability, but in all honesty, is anybody bothered? id much rather be playing solidly at 1440p than 1080p with Ray tracing.

 

[Tom B]

Here's the point nobody has made yet: Early rumors said AMD would not release 7nm Vega. That WAS probably true.

Here's what I think happened: AMD already had the MI60 and knew that the performance was only 1080ti levels. They expected the nvidia 20 series to come out and improve on that. They probably anticipated that the 2080 would be better than the 1080ti like the rest of us, expected *80 pricing to be a little more sane (~£600) and a bit more performant than it is.

Given that, there was no way AMD could compete with what they predicted of the 2080: ~£599 and say 10% better than a 1080ti. However, when the 2080 was both underwhelming and overpriced, it opened the door for AMD to release the VII. They could charge more and it looks better on paper because it competes with the 2080 (Because the 2080 underperforms, not because the VII is anything special).

tl;dr AMD only released this because the 2080 series is overpriced and underperforming expectation.