AMD VEGA confirmed for 2017 H1

[opethdisciple]

Aye it's a real shame really. They recently announced they're adding Vulkan support, so I wonder how that'll turn out.



Maybe for Epic themselves, but many Indies are now using that engine, and they don't have the resources to sort that out.
So far the Fury X barely ran at GTX 1060 performance in many of the UE4 games I've played; that and had lots more crashes.
Where as the 980Ti I'm currently using it pulling up to 50% more, Paragon and Conan Exiles being prime examples.

It's because Nvidia have more resources than AMD. They probably gave Unreal money and engineering time as they know in the long run they will make 100x more back in sold GPU'S.

 

[SiDeards73]

But if the consoles were closer to to GCN architecture in nature, and Scorpio on wards use Vega, Vega could have been designed with this in mind, looks like AMD are going for a one design fits all kinda thing, they want to use Infinity Fabric and similar in both CPU and GPU, they want to use the GPU architecture in Professional and Gaming products, much like Ryzen looks like its getting scaled up for the Server market, its pretty much the same chip just multiplied etc.

With their experience in APU's, wouldn't surprise me if Vega is a NCU / Zen mashup, Zen has already shown incredible performance at low watts, if they put it in a console with NCU vega coupled with it, it could be pretty decent, especially if its got to run 4k? If they use the Infinity Fabric and whatnot too, that would maybe explain some of the scaling that Ryzen has with memory speed, could end up with Vega running high mhz Ram to really boost the performance.

If im AMD and im building basically a new architecture for CPU and GPU and im using similar tech n both and im also putting that same tech in consoles, any tuning for that Console should also benefit the CPU and GPU using it no?

I think a lot will be answered when we see what the Scorpio actually has in it.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

It's because Nvidia have more resources than AMD. They probably gave Unreal money and engineering time as they know in the long run they will make 100x more back in sold GPU'S.

Now that NVIDIA are atleast making gameworks opensource I hope AMD will get stuck in there. Gameworks is build directly into the Unreal Engine this time round, and due to that AMD had no hope of getting the best performance possible.

This atleast means they have the chance to optimise as much as possible through drivers, and help tackle the performance issues on Indie games using the engine.

 

[D.P.]

This. I was going to ask what difference has it made for AMD GPUs the fact the consoles use AMD parts?

I think the answer is not much.

I will say tho that there is something holding the gaming ecosystem back. Intel/Nvidia dominance perhaps?

Intel keeping everyone on four cores and Nvidia not putting enough support behind DX12 and Vulkan.

Both of which your notice are areas where AMD do do well. (FX chips being multi core and their GPUs implementing more DX12 features)

This line of reasoning is just nonsense. Intel built CPUs designed around the software that exists and the current trends of software developers. Multi-threaded programming is very hard, and not everything can be made multi-threaded. All the default libraries are not even thread safe, because you can write generic multi-threaded code. Thus, fewer cores that run faster is going to give a much better performance for a vast majority of software outside specific applications that are easier to parallelize. Much the same argument goes for DX12. The direction DX12 has gone is not desirable for a vast majority of developers. very few programmers ever want to get their hands dirty in close to the metal primitive APIs but prefer to have a higher level APis that are quicker to develop for and provide fast performance with less micro-optimizations.

As for Nvidia, they are very much supporting DX12 and Vulkan, they beat AMD to the line in releasing Vulkan drivers for example and their website has far mroe Vulkan related information, code examples, supporting documentation, debug tools etc. than AMd has. Just look at the Talos Principle, Nvidia is nearly twice as fast as AMD in that Vulkan game.


the simple fact is Nvidia and Intel have greater R&D budget and aren't spending a more limited budget on trying to beat 2 competitors in 2 different battles. I think Ryzen is a great success, people seem to have unrealistic expectations of AMD. These peopel spend all their time bashing Intel and Nvidia that they then belief their delusions that AMD is obviously to superhero that if AMD doesn't dominate then there must be some grand conspiracy against AMD.

 

[Panos]

I cannot see it posted the last three pages so

AMD Vega powered LiquidSky streaming servers go live
http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/103957-amd-vega-powered-liquidsky-streaming-servers-go-live/

 

[Seanspeed]

You would think with AMD being in the consoles, when all the games are ported across to the PC, their cards would run them much better than Nvidias, but they don't, as Nvidia own the PC gaming market, the games are ported across from AMD to Nvidia, and that won't change.

I really think some of you are still stuck in 2014/2015. As time has gone on, multiplatform AAA games are becoming increasingly AMD-favored. This is an undeniable trend.

The main games that retain Nvidia advantages are games that are largely PC-led. Even then, you have something like Battlefield 1 which actually does better on AMD cards, though only slightly.

The trend will continue. You guys can pretend it's not happening if you like. Doesn't change reality.

 

[TNA]

100% correct, but AMD release cards a lot less frequent than NVidia. Granted, they are smaller and have less budget, but this also means that people have to wait a lot to get better cards and let's face it not everyone is going to wait forever. They could provide some information, get people hyped with some real info every now and then, at least people know what to expect. If they wait and get disapointed again and again, less and less people are going to buy their cards.

I do understand what you are saying, and would be great from a consumer point of view. But I think things change during development and if AMD come out with something and do not deliver, it will back fire on them badly. From a business stand point just like nvidia, it is best to stay silent until you are ready to deliver.

I cannot see it posted the last three pages so

AMD Vega powered LiquidSky streaming servers go live
http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/103957-amd-vega-powered-liquidsky-streaming-servers-go-live/

Nice

I really think some of you are still stuck in 2014/2015. As time has gone on, multiplatform AAA games are becoming increasingly AMD-favored. This is an undeniable trend.

The main games that retain Nvidia advantages are games that are largely PC-led. Even then, you have something like Battlefield 1 which actually does better on AMD cards, though only slightly.

The trend will continue. You guys can pretend it's not happening if you like. Doesn't change reality.

Loadsamoney is definitely stuck in those years and will forever be as far as AMD is concerned after buying two Fury's and never enabling the second one

The amount of time and energy he spent slating AMD since, one would have thought it would have required less to just pop one out and sell it a couple of year ago

 

[Sargatanas2511]

I cannot see it posted the last three pages so

AMD Vega powered LiquidSky streaming servers go live
http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/103957-amd-vega-powered-liquidsky-streaming-servers-go-live/

Hopefully this means Vega is very close. Thanks for the info .

 

[Rroff]

I really think some of you are still stuck in 2014/2015. As time has gone on, multiplatform AAA games are becoming increasingly AMD-favored. This is an undeniable trend.

The main games that retain Nvidia advantages are games that are largely PC-led. Even then, you have something like Battlefield 1 which actually does better on AMD cards, though only slightly.

The trend will continue. You guys can pretend it's not happening if you like. Doesn't change reality.

To be frank more than half of those games you allude to are poorly coded/optimised and it just happens AMD's wider architecture is less penalised by lazy sprawling GPU tasks than nVidia's which is under utilised.

 

[nashathedog]

It wont be, come on guys. That is a ridiculous stretch.

Use a bit of common sense. The 480 isn't even as powerful as a 390X in most games. Now you think a refresh is suddenly going to leapfrog it and put all the way at a 1070?

+1 If the 580 is a 480 refresh the performance increase will be like going from a 290x to a 390x, It's very unlikely it will be any better,

What I think makes more sense is the possibility that the 480 will become a 570 and the smallest cut down version of Vega becoming the 580.

 

[TNA]

+1 If the 580 is a 480 refresh the performance increase will be like going from a 290x to a 390x, It's very unlikely it will be any better,

What I think makes more sense is the possibility that the 480 will become a 570 and the smallest cut down version of Vega becoming the 580.

Let us not forget they still have the option to use 590/595 for small vega if they wanted. But I get the feeling they will just stick all vega cards under RX Vega branding.

 

[opethdisciple]

This line of reasoning is just nonsense. Intel built CPUs designed around the software that exists and the current trends of software developers. Multi-threaded programming is very hard, and not everything can be made multi-threaded. All the default libraries are not even thread safe, because you can write generic multi-threaded code. Thus, fewer cores that run faster is going to give a much better performance for a vast majority of software outside specific applications that are easier to parallelize. Much the same argument goes for DX12. The direction DX12 has gone is not desirable for a vast majority of developers. very few programmers ever want to get their hands dirty in close to the metal primitive APIs but prefer to have a higher level APis that are quicker to develop for and provide fast performance with less micro-optimizations.

As for Nvidia, they are very much supporting DX12 and Vulkan, they beat AMD to the line in releasing Vulkan drivers for example and their website has far mroe Vulkan related information, code examples, supporting documentation, debug tools etc. than AMd has. Just look at the Talos Principle, Nvidia is nearly twice as fast as AMD in that Vulkan game.


the simple fact is Nvidia and Intel have greater R&D budget and aren't spending a more limited budget on trying to beat 2 competitors in 2 different battles. I think Ryzen is a great success, people seem to have unrealistic expectations of AMD. These peopel spend all their time bashing Intel and Nvidia that they then belief their delusions that AMD is obviously to superhero that if AMD doesn't dominate then there must be some grand conspiracy against AMD.

Fair enough. But even AMD kind of said to explain Ryzens gaming performance that the gaming ecosystem over the last few years has been developing around Intel's architecture. So there are two ways to look at it.

I agree, that we shouldn't see it as a conspiracy. And maybe you are right about Nvidia and Vulkan. I just haven't a great time with either API with my 970. Maybe it's better in the 10 series.

 

[tommybhoy]

let's face it not everyone is going to wait forever. They could provide some information, get people hyped with some real info every now and then, at least people know what to expect. If they wait and get disapointed again and again, less and less people are going to buy their cards.

How many 970's sold, how much was it?

The people that don't have >£350 to spend on a 1070/+ performance segment
GPU have zero option but wait as long as long as it takes until the £250 to £350 pp is filled regardless the vendor.

 

[nashathedog]

Gameworks has started dying out as well which could be down to developers not wanting to use it as much because in Console games it would most likely hinder the performance.

Gameworks was just a way to give there hardware a leg up on the competition and it worked in the short term, Longterm however it is as you said losing traction for the same reason, Owning the first of the new PC based Console generations was a strategically brilliant move that has weakened the influence Nvidia has.
I think Nvidia was being very shortsighted back then and I hope it comes back and bites them on the arse.

 

[Sargatanas2511]

+1 If the 580 is a 480 refresh the performance increase will be like going from a 290x to a 390x, It's very unlikely it will be any better,

What I think makes more sense is the possibility that the 480 will become a 570 and the smallest cut down version of Vega becoming the 580.

Funny when the 390X came out everyone was saying it's just a 290X with more VRAM, now suddenly a 480X(which is about as fast as a 390X) with a clock bump is going from a 290X to a 390X? We don't even have any clear information on what the 580 is, but if it even gets to 10-12% faster than a 480X it'll be clear of the 290X/390X/480X.

 

[D.P.]

Fair enough. But even AMD kind of said to explain Ryzens gaming performance that the gaming ecosystem over the last few years has been developing around Intel's architecture. So there are two ways to look at it.

I agree, that we shouldn't see it as a conspiracy. And maybe you are right about Nvidia and Vulkan. I just haven't a great time with either API with my 970. Maybe it's better in the 10 series.

It is partly a chicken and egg situation. Most software isn't extremely mutli-threaded, and for many algorithms it is impossible in any case. Even when it is possible to create multi-threaded code, it doesn't always result in a substantial improvement in performance due to race conditions and mutex fighting, plus diminishing returns. Intel struck a balance between the number of cores and the performance of each core. AMD has less resources to make faster cores so simply offer more of them. Its much easier to designs a 8 core CPU where each core is much simpler than a 4 core CPU with more sophisticated tricks for eeking out better performance with more complex branch prediction and register caches etc. In the usual AMD fashion AMD are claiming that developers are at fault for not developing code that works well on their specific architectures, when in reality its far form that simple. Its the same with their GPUs, AMD use a brute-force method with the transistor budget spent on more and more cores. This just doesn't scale that well and you quickly come to other bottlenecks. If you compare the theoretical performance of the FuryX against the 980Ti it should have trounced the Nvidia offering, except Nvidia spent their transistors making a very clear and efficient architecture with tile-based rendering.
Vega will hopefully close the gap a little as AMd works on the bottlenecks instead of simply adding more and more cores.

 

[eiamhere69]

This line of reasoning is just nonsense. Intel built CPUs designed around the software that exists and the current trends of software developers. Multi-threaded programming is very hard, and not everything can be made multi-threaded. All the default libraries are not even thread safe, because you can write generic multi-threaded code. Thus, fewer cores that run faster is going to give a much better performance for a vast majority of software outside specific applications that are easier to parallelize. Much the same argument goes for DX12. The direction DX12 has gone is not desirable for a vast majority of developers. very few programmers ever want to get their hands dirty in close to the metal primitive APIs but prefer to have a higher level APis that are quicker to develop for and provide fast performance with less micro-optimizations.

As for Nvidia, they are very much supporting DX12 and Vulkan, they beat AMD to the line in releasing Vulkan drivers for example and their website has far mroe Vulkan related information, code examples, supporting documentation, debug tools etc. than AMd has. Just look at the Talos Principle, Nvidia is nearly twice as fast as AMD in that Vulkan game.


the simple fact is Nvidia and Intel have greater R&D budget and aren't spending a more limited budget on trying to beat 2 competitors in 2 different battles. I think Ryzen is a great success, people seem to have unrealistic expectations of AMD. These peopel spend all their time bashing Intel and Nvidia that they then belief their delusions that AMD is obviously to superhero that if AMD doesn't dominate then there must be some grand conspiracy against AMD.

Hahaha. Yeah. AMD do themselves no favours sometimes, they too gave tried proprietary software , but were forced to make it open source to survive.

Truth be told though, there gave been a lot of conspiracies against AMD, the main reason people go on the way they do. Nvidia and Gameworks is one thing, that's just very coy business, most companies do it to some extent.

Intel however, should not have been rewarded for the things they did (and the fine they received, but still appeal against )is exactly that, a reward.

They took an open market, killed several competitors and left the only survivor almost bankrupt . They throw away more cash on r&d or gamble on silly projects annually, than they received in fines.

Yes there are still are IBM ('ish)and mobile pricessors. If not for mobile taking things in a different direction, who knows how bad things would be.

 

[opethdisciple]

From 10:50 on your here Raja Koduri say what I have been saying, that is that AMD are making the high end features that Intel and Nvidia make us pay an arm and a leg for and bringing them down to consumer prices. They done this with Ryzen making 8/16 thread cpu's more affordable so no doubt they are working on making a 4k capable card cheaper.

Just wish they'd hurry up as I have been trying to find a reason why I should just go for a 1070.

 

[opethdisciple]

What game developers over the the recent years have mostly sided with AMD and implemented AMD features?

It's a hard choice at the moment to wait for Vega. If I buy a Vega gpu I'm giving up Gameworks & adaptive vysnc in Nvidia drivers.

It sounds like for me to get adaptive vsync with Vega I will also need a new monitor!

And AMD seem to have a big emphasis on VR, something I have zero interest in.

 

[TNA]

What game developers over the the recent years have mostly sided with AMD and implemented AMD features?

It's a hard choice at the moment to wait for Vega. If I buy a Vega gpu I'm giving up Gameworks & adaptive vysnc in Nvidia drivers.

It sounds like for me to get adaptive vsync with Vega I will also need a new monitor!

And AMD seem to have a big emphasis on VR, something I have zero interest in.

I am confused, I thought you already came to the conclusion you need a monitor soon anyway? Changed your mind?

It is simple really, getting new monitor within the next 12 months? Wait and see what Vega has to offer. If not get a nvidia card and be done with it