AMD VEGA confirmed for 2017 H1

[Seanspeed]

Doom Vulkan on a 4690K and GTX 970 is really rather nice, i thought, DX12 is a bit 'meh' Vulkan is what DX12 promised to be.

Vulkan does hardly anything for a GTX970 in Doom, though.

Either way, this is not how it works. AMD cards see big gains with Vulkan in Doom because the original path is OpenGL, something AMD notoriously has lackluster driver support for. Vulkan over DX11 is not going to see anything like the same thing and will be generally identical to DX12 in terms of improvements. Vulkan and DX12 do not really differ much at all in terms of advantages. They are two sides of the same coin. As always, a low level API implementation and its results are going to depend a lot on effort, engine and specific bottlenecks for a given application. If you think Vulkan in Doom is somehow representative of how Vulkan will work everywhere, you obviously dont at all understand what DX12 and Vulkan actually are.

 

[opethdisciple]

We assume that Nvidia won't have anything to add to the party to counter Vega?

No refresh of current line up?

 

[N19h7m4r3]

We assume that Nvidia won't have anything to add to the party to counter Vega?

Well they have full fat GP100 still, although I seriously doubt they'd bother releasing a consumer card with that.
I'm sure the 1080Ti will give Vega competition.

 

[Seanspeed]

We assume that Nvidia won't have anything to add to the party to counter Vega?

No refresh of current line up?

There doesn't seem to be any indication that Nvidia are planning a refresh. The 1080Ti naming indicates they are sticking with the 1000 series moniker for the time being, which is most certainly expected to be a Vega 'cover' card.

Only thing I could imagine Nvidia might do is a 1060Ti/1070Ti. Otherwise, they'll price to keep competitive and I think that'll be mostly it til Volta comes. Hopefully late this year, but more likely early 2018.

 

[Rroff]

We assume that Nvidia won't have anything to add to the party to counter Vega?

No refresh of current line up?

Only thing I've seen is a guy over on one of the Chinese forums, who has been right before with obscure details regarding nVidia, that claims nVidia has a refresh planned using GDDR5X 12GB/s on all the mid and high end parts. If there is any truth to it probably gives a ballpark for Vega performance.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

We assume that Nvidia won't have anything to add to the party to counter Vega?

They don't need a counter.

 

[Rroff]

They don't need a counter.

Worst comes to worst it would force them to bring Volta forward for GeForce, which would be a bit costly for nVidia.

 

[Besty]

reading between the lines, there will be a refresh of the 1080 and the Titan with the faster VRAM chips from the 1080ti.

the 1080 with the faster vram will be the direct competitor to the top tier Vega and that leaves AMD gunning for a £499 price-point and Vega will be slightly quicker than a refreshed AIB 1080 by September across newer titles due to driver and game development advances. Vega will be slightly slower than a 1080 in legacy DX11 games.

My theory is that AMD are not waiting for GPU chips or an increase in yields, they are waiting for the tidalwave of next generation games to appear for the PS4 Pro and new Xbox. This year will be the best year since 2006 for PC games, it will be an epic year. Remember the big promotions AMD were doing around games? well I think there are many games in the AMD sponsored pipeline for 2016 which are optimised for Vega. AMD will ride on the coat-tales of a multi-billion pound marketing drive, paid for by other companies.

Its no good releasing Vega right now when the games simply cannot show how good it is and marketing budgets from the big players have not yet started to wind up.

A titan pascal black edition will be released to re-assert the Titan as quicker than the 1080ti until Volta arrives in server card form right at the end of 2017.

this is all speculation on my part.

 

[Seanspeed]

reading between the lines, there will be a refresh of the 1080 and the Titan with the faster VRAM chips from the 1080ti.

the 1080 with the faster vram will be the direct competitor to the top tier Vega and that leaves AMD gunning for a £499 price-point and Vega will be slightly quicker than a refreshed AIB 1080 by September across newer titles due to driver and game development advances. Vega will be slightly slower than a 1080 in legacy DX11 games.

My theory is that AMD are not waiting for GPU chips or an increase in yields, they are waiting for the tidalwave of next generation games to appear for the PS4 Pro and new Xbox. This year will be the best year since 2006 for PC games, it will be an epic year.

Its no good releasing Vega right now when the games simply cannot show how good it is.

A titan pascal black edition will be released to re-assert the Titan as quicker than the 1080ti until Volta arrives in server card form right at the end of 2017.

this is all speculation on my part.

AMD having Vega ready but not releasing because of games? :/ That's a truly bizarre one. Already tons of next-gen games that have AMD-biased development advantages by now.

And there will be no Titan Black. I dont even know what that would be, but there's zero need for one, whatever the case.

 

[Rroff]

1080 doesn't need faster RAM

Doesn't seem that way when you compare against the 1070 with its plain GDDR5 - the GDDR5X on the 1080 certainly isn't what is contributing to much of the performance and I believe people have underclocked the 1080 VRAM with little impact outside of 1-2 benchmarks.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

And there will be no Titan Black. I dont even know what that would be, but there's zero need for one, whatever the case.

If there is a Titan Black, it'll be GP100. Although I seriously doubt they'd do that. That core is extremely expensive, which is why they've been keeping it for Tesla only so far.

 

[AlamoX]

My theory is that AMD are not waiting for GPU chips or an increase in yields, they are waiting for the tidalwave of next generation games to appear for the PS4 Pro and new Xbox. This year will be the best year since 2006 for PC games, it will be an epic year. Remember the big promotions AMD were doing around games? well I think there are many games in the AMD sponsored pipeline for 2016 which are optimised for Vega. AMD will ride on the coat-tales of a multi-billion pound marketing drive, paid for by other companies.

Its no good releasing Vega right now when the games simply cannot show how good it is and marketing budgets from the big players have not yet started to wind up.

A titan pascal black edition will be released to re-assert the Titan as quicker than the 1080ti until Volta arrives in server card form right at the end of 2017.

this is all speculation on my part.

a high tech company cannot just sit on their products waiting for apps, while they have 0 product competing on the market for that segment.
1- high tech loses value pretty fast.
2- the couple hundred million dollars AMD stands to lose to their competitor, is much more valuable, nvidia last quarter made over 2billions, while they used to do 1.3-1.4billion, and a big chunck of that money is supposed to be AMDs if they had a competing product across all segments.
beside from what AMD said in the last presentation, they had power draw issue with vega, and my guess that's primarily where the tweaking is happening right now.

 

[Besty]

there is no point in AMD releasing a card and having it reviewed against a bunch of games in which it's simply slower than a 1080, it happened with almost every AMD release of recent memory. where AMD have a superior hardware product and rush release without the software.

like i say i suspect the vega card is quicker than a 1080 but it needs
software otherwise it will be a repeat of the 7970 and fury X launches i.e a great product but initial reviews are good but not great.

this time i think AMD are saying that if the software is not ready, no launch.

 

[nashathedog]

I got that impression from reading this. I think it goes on somewhere to talk about royalties or increased cost incurred for AMD.

Well i read it and it just doesn't say that at all, in fact it says it should be relatively straightforward to ad HDR with Free Sync as there is little or no change to the scalers and as with Free Sync 1 HDR is very much with AMD on the software side.

Actually it tells us a lot of important data such as how AMD are going to be more stringent with how vendors use the Freesync moniker, They are going to insist that all future monitors using Freesync 2 as a selling point support LFC. Which is what's needed to combat the mass of monitors currently flooding the market with poor Freesync support.

FreeSync 2: Tighter Standards for Variable Refresh
Earlier I mentioned that FreeSync 2 is really a collection of several idea/features, and while HDR is certainly the marquee feature of FreeSync 2, it’s not the only feature. With FreeSync 2 AMD will also be tightening the standards for what variable refresh functionality that approved monitors need to support.

The open nature of FreeSync has led to a large number of monitors that support the technology across a wide range of prices, but it has also led to a wide variety in how useful their FreeSync implementations are. A number of basic monitors on the market only support a range of 30Hz to 60Hz, for example. And while this is still useful, such a narrow range means that these monitors don’t deliver a very good experience below their minimum refresh rate. These monitors can’t support FreeSync’s Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) technology, which requires the maximum framerate to be at least 2.5x the minimum framerate (or 75Hz for our 30Hz monitor).
As a result, AMD has tightened the standards for FreeSync 2. All FreeSync 2 certified monitors will be required to support LFC, which in turn means they’ll need to support a wide enough range of refresh rates to meet the technology’s requirements. Consequently, anyone who buys a FreeSync 2 monitor will be guaranteed to get the best variable refresh experience on an AMD setup, as opposed to the less consistent presence of LFC on today’s FreeSync monitors.
Similar to this and AMD’s HDR efforts with FreeSync 2, AMD will also be mandating a general low latency requirement for the new standard. It’s not fully clear just what this will entail, but at a high-level AMD is going to require that monitors be low latency in SDR mode as well as HDR.

For us this is very good news because at the moment a lot of monitor companies use Freesync as a selling point on monitors that offer a very poor implementation of it, with LG being one of the big brand offenders. This will force them to either up their game or drop the branding.

 

[nashathedog]

Only thing I've seen is a guy over on one of the Chinese forums, who has been right before with obscure details regarding nVidia, that claims nVidia has a refresh planned using GDDR5X 12GB/s on all the mid and high end parts. If there is any truth to it probably gives a ballpark for Vega performance.

I can't see Nvidia doing that so soon after the 1080ti release, Maybe if Volta's delayed till late 2018 early 2019 they'll do something like that 6 months from now but to sell all the Nvidlings an 11gb 1080ti today and then sell slower 12gb cards is as stupid a move as selling 4gb Vega's after 8 gb Polaris's, Hmmm, maybe it is true.

 

[orbitalwalsh]

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...m2-versions-launch-is-just-around-the-corner/

Come on April. Don't let me down AMD

Seems like a recap of past news reports *

 

[orbitalwalsh]

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...m2-versions-launch-is-just-around-the-corner/

Come on April. Don't let me down AMD

Seems like a recap of past news reports *

wow, i stand corrected. My hopefully prediction of April has just been smashed ;( Will just have to settle for 580/70 in April

possible end of embargo on the 13th

 

[Gregster]

there is no point in AMD releasing a card and having it reviewed against a bunch of games in which it's simply slower than a 1080, it happened with almost every AMD release of recent memory. where AMD have a superior hardware product and rush release without the software.

like i say i suspect the vega card is quicker than a 1080 but it needs
software otherwise it will be a repeat of the 7970 and fury X launches i.e a great product but initial reviews are good but not great.

this time i think AMD are saying that if the software is not ready, no launch.

This!

AMD can't afford to release a card that has the power but not the drivers to compete. The 7970 was a great card but due to poor drivers, it suffered in the bench threads and lost out on sales.

 

[old gamer]

This!

AMD can't afford to release a card that has the power but not the drivers to compete. The 7970 was a great card but due to poor drivers, it suffered in the bench threads and lost out on sales.

yep i can remember the moans and groans on the 7970 release and took about 2 months to show what a good gpu it was

 

[tommybhoy]

7970 on 'poor drivers' only lost out@stock clocks.

A stock 800Mhz 7950 oc'ed to 1200Mhz a few months in was faster than an oc'ed 680, it was a champ.