AMD VEGA confirmed for 2017 H1

BigBANGtheory · 16 Mar 2017 at 21:41

Which then begs the question of when Vega is launched with real benchmarks, when is Vega available to buy and when are the non-hurricane blower cards are available. All of this is working against AMD...

TNA · 16 Mar 2017 at 21:43

H1 2017, not long now really

BigBANGtheory · 16 Mar 2017 at 21:56

TNA said:
H1 2017, not long now really

It is if (as we are now) you don't know what the product can do, when you can buy it and is there another wait after that for the non-jet engine version that no one wants. A H1 or Q2 2017 launch means very little without something to back it up.

TNA · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:01

BigBANGtheory said:
It is if (as we are now) you don't know what the product can do, when you can buy it and is there another wait after that for the non-jet engine version that no one wants. A H1 or Q2 2017 launch means very little without something to back it up.

I highly doubt it will be any later than June or any weaker than 1080. As for cooler, I am hoping for water cooled from day one like the Fury X. As far as I know Fury had custom air cooling on release also.

LoadsaMoney · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:02

Well as i said before, i expect big Vega to be ref cooler only, and WC'd, ala the Fury X, and small Vega, to be the one with the custom coolers, ala the Fury Pro.

TNA · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:07

LoadsaMoney said:
Well as i said before, i expect big Vega to be ref cooler only, and WC'd, ala the Fury X, and small Vega, to be the one with the custom coolers, ala the Fury Pro.

I don't think so. Won't big vega be two cards and small vega two cards? I thought the whole big small thing was in reference to die size and transistor count. Big being a big die like titan and 1080ti and small being like 1080/70. If I am right, what you said does not make sense. But I could be wrong

Edit: I am half asleep so not sure I even read correctly what you said actually

BigBANGtheory · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:11

LoadsaMoney said:
Well as i said before, i expect big Vega to be ref cooler only, and WC'd, ala the Fury X, and small Vega, to be the one with the custom coolers, ala the Fury Pro.

As long as it trumps the 1080Ti I'm interested, if it doesn't its going to take some serious price cutting to make me interested.

LoadsaMoney · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:12

As far as i know, its only 2x cards like the Furys, the big Vega, being the 10 (the Fury X), is the one going against the 1080Ti/TXP, and the small Vega, being the 11 (the Fury Pro), is going against the 1070/80, with the rebranded Polaris cards below those, although i could be wrong as well

TNA · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:17

BigBANGtheory said:
As long as it trumps the 1080Ti I'm interested, if it doesn't its going to take some serious price cutting to make me interested.

Well most people in this thread including loadsamoney have predicted big vega to be 1070/80 performance. But I have maintained laying out my reasoning why I think it can match or beat Titan XP. But you never really know, as they are both using different companies to manufacture. If GloFo **** things up again and cannot keep up with TSMC, then Vega might turn out to be another turd for RTG

TNA · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:19

LoadsaMoney said:
As far as i know, its only 2x cards like the Furys, the big Vega, being the 10 (the Fury X), is the one going against the 1080Ti/TXP, and the small Vega, being the 11 (the Fury Pro), is going against the 1070/80, with the rebranded Polaris cards below those, although i could be wrong as well

Bet you are wrong

JediFragger · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:26

BigBANGtheory said:
As long as it trumps the 1080Ti I'm interested, if it doesn't its going to take some serious price cutting to make me interested.

It won't imo, the Ti is a very very strong card. I can't see Vega being more than twice as fast as the FuryX in most titles, it's just too much of a jump.

However, I'm looking forward to eating my words if it is!

TheRealDeal · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:33

LoadsaMoney said:
As far as i know, its only 2x cards like the Furys, the big Vega, being the 10 (the Fury X), is the one going against the 1080Ti/TXP, and the small Vega, being the 11 (the Fury Pro), is going against the 1070/80, with the rebranded Polaris cards below those, although i could be wrong as well

That makes no sense. Polaris 10 (480/470) is a different chip from Polaris 11 (460) so you would assume Vega 10 and 11 are 2 different chips with one being bigger than the other. If it was going to be like Fury then you would think there would only be Vega 10 with the full part being Rx Vega X and a cut down Rx Vega Pro.

old gamer · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:38

Some how I can't see vega being faster than a 1080ti but will live in hope

JediFragger · 16 Mar 2017 at 22:46

Vega HAS to be good though, as nVidia have effectively killed their TitanX sales!! I can live with it being a little slower in DX11, as long as it's a touch faster in DX12/Vulkan

AlamoX · 17 Mar 2017 at 00:27

TheRealDeal said:
That makes no sense. Polaris 10 (480/470) is a different chip from Polaris 11 (460) so you would assume Vega 10 and 11 are 2 different chips with one being bigger than the other. If it was going to be like Fury then you would think there would only be Vega 10 with the full part being Rx Vega X and a cut down Rx Vega Pro.

i doubt it, if it was the case AMD wouldn't have branded it Vega, the naming wouldn't make sense.
besides i have no clue what's going on with AMD's next line up, the performance gap is stupid, 560 to 570 is like 90%, performance 570 to 580 is like 10%, then 580 to Vega is like 80%, what kind of line up is this ??

TheRealDeal · 17 Mar 2017 at 00:42

AlamoX said:
i doubt it, if it was the case AMD wouldn't have branded it Vega, the naming wouldn't make sense.
besides i have no clue what's going on with AMD's next line up, the performance gap is stupid, 560 to 570 is like 90%, performance 570 to 580 is like 10%, then 580 to Vega is like 80%, what kind of line up is this ??

Well like i said i expect a smaller Vega chip to be competing with the gtx1070 and possibly 80 with a bigger variant Taking on the Ti. Hence Vega 10 and 11.

TNA · 17 Mar 2017 at 07:15

TheRealDeal said:
Well like i said i expect a smaller Vega chip to be competing with the gtx1070 and possibly 80 with a bigger variant Taking on the Ti. Hence Vega 10 and 11.

Exactly. Lol. Just asking the simple question he has pretty much indicates Vega will be at least 4 cards.

Some people too busy reading the trash posted at wccftech rather than using common sense. It would be super strange if Vega was just two cards. It is clearly likely to be two different die sizes, with each having a cut down versions with some cores disabled.

JediFragger said:
Vega HAS to be good though, as nVidia have effectively killed their TitanX sales!! I can live with it being a little slower in DX11, as long as it's a touch faster in DX12/Vulkan

People have short memories also, remember when the original titan was out? People were like nah, AMD cannot beat it. It is too good. Costs £1000 for reason, etc etc. Then 290X came out

After that point AMD disappeared being busy designing APU's for the consoles and fell behind. Now if what Raja is saying is true they have put in hard work and concentrated on getting high end performance with Vega, then we will see a huge jump from Fury X. Just look at all the changes to the architecture. Hardly any one is excited about those features and what they may mean for performance, but had Mr Leather Jacket Man announced:

THE WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED GPU MEMORY ARCHITECTURE
This represents an entirely new memory hierarchy for Vega GPUs featuring a new high-bandwidth cache and a controller. The cache makes use of performance HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory 2) technology which allows double pin transfer rates up to 2 GT/s (gigatransfers per second), and as much as 8 gigabytes of RAM per package.

Another advantage of HBM2 is that it halves the amount of physical space needed on a board compared to an equivalent amount of GDDR5 memory.

Vega architecture is optimized for streaming very large datasets and can work with a variety of memory types with up to 512 terabytes of virtual address space.

NEXT-GENERATION GEOMETRY PIPELINE
Vega's next-generation geometry pipeline not only brings higher levels of efficiencies for processing complex geometry, but at the same time allows for more than 200 percent of the throughput-per-clock compared to previous Radeon architectures.

Vega also brings with it better load-balancing with an intelligent workload distributor to deliver consistent performance.

NEXT-GENERATION COMPUTE ENGINE
Vega's next-generation compute engine can natively process 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit operations in each clock cycle, and these compute units are optimized for significantly higher frequencies than previous generations and their support of variable datatypes makes the architecture highly versatile across workloads.

ADVANCED PIXEL ENGINE
The new Vega pixel engine employs a Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer, designed to improve performance and power efficiency, which allows for "fetch once, shade once" of pixels through the use of a smart on-chip bin cache and what AMD describes as "early culling of pixels invisible in a final scene."

Vega's pixel engine is now a client of the onboard L2 cache, which offers sizeable reduction in overhead for graphics workloads that make use of heavy read-after-write operations.

People would be losing their **** and be drooling waiting in anticipation. But you know, it is AMD so...

With Vega coming in closer to Volta than Pascal time frame, it should be able to at least compete with Pascals top offerings. I am not saying it definitely will, but there is a big possibility it will. There are two things I can see that will get in the way of that. The first is the fact that they have combined workstation and compute stuff in with it (ala original titan) rather than it being purely a gaming card design and the second is, if Global Foundries for some reason is still struggling with their 14nm process and not fully optimised it a year on from the crap that ended up churning out with Polaris.

If GloFo's 14nm has finally got to a stage where it is better than TSMC's current 16nm process used on the 1080ti, then the extra transistors and power saving with HBM2 should make it easy for the top dog Vega to challenge and beat 1080Ti IMO.

BigBANGtheory · 17 Mar 2017 at 08:06

I think there is a real chance which is why I have an interest, tbh I'm not going to shed any tears for either vendor not knowing strongly favors the one though. This time around I'm after raw performance at the high end, AMD keep telling a story about how they will disrupt the high end but aren't being fair to their customers imho.

AlamoX · 17 Mar 2017 at 08:11

TheRealDeal said:
Well like i said i expect a smaller Vega chip to be competing with the gtx1070 and possibly 80 with a bigger variant Taking on the Ti. Hence Vega 10 and 11.

that is exactly my point, AMD cards always had minimal perf difference between full and cut down version, usualy around 10%, so that still makes 580 to cutdown Vega 70% performance gap, and them branding it vega makes the naming complicated, unless they gave up on RX590, and they want to copy nvidia going up to X80 with no X90, and you will still have riddiculous performance lineup gap, (X560)100% > (RX570)180% > (RX580)190% > (Vega)340% > (Vega X )360%.

spikerules · 17 Mar 2017 at 08:45

I just want something the size of my Nano again. I want to replace the Nano in our HTPC and have it almost as powerful at a standard 1080, so I can maybe play at 4k with HDR.