RTG boss takes 'sabbatical'

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 18:18

Martini1991 said:
Removing him as the leader doesn't sound a bad thing given the PR gaffs.

Exactly.

4K8KW10 · 13 Sep 2017 at 18:20

AMD needs again products like the Radeon 3870, Radeon 3870 X2, Radeon 4870, Radeon 4870 X2, Radeon 4890, Radeon 5870.
After those, somehow the Radeon 6970, Radeon 7970 Ghz Edition, Radeon 290X/390X were all somehow... not that strong.... and the company began to lose focus. Fury X and Vega 64 the weakest gamingwise.

Killer7xx · 13 Sep 2017 at 18:38

D.P. said:
And look at the power the RX580 consumes. The RX580 at the same clocks is no more efficient than the RX480.

GF may be to blame but the process hasn't matured much. And the process can only explain so much, the GCN architecture has just run its course. You see this with Vega, a massive chip and lots of theoretical performance but it can barely keep up with a GP104 that is way smaller.

I agree with your point of GCN being on it's last legs, but with the RX 580 the main reason for the higher power consumption is the higher clocks and higher voltage in some cases. The vast majority of them you can undervolt significantly and achieve RX 480 clocks whilst consuming less power than the stock 480. That's definitely a sign that it's using more mature silicon.

Dave2150 · 13 Sep 2017 at 18:59

nashathedog said:
If true and he doesn't return to the same position is it a surprise? I don't think so, He may be a good architecture designer but he's no good as a boss, He's completely destroyed my faith & trust in AMD's Graphics team over the way everything Vega has been handled, Nothing but smoke & mirror's, Vega isn't necessarily a bad product, far from perfect yes but handled right it could have been well received even as it is. But the man at the reigns was in over his head. I'm annoyed that after a year of waiting I ended up with a GTX 1080 I don't really want. All the big Vega info events over the last year have been a joke, There's numerous examples but here's a couple, He did an event where he promised news about Vega at the end, That keep us waiting & watching a boring presentation about a Bollywood movie and Vega's supposed importance in creating a virtual backdrop which is not exactly something new. So we sat through that and when we finally reach the end we get a 4 second titbit where he tells us Vega will be named Vega and leaves the stage. It seems to me that he's used his position at AMD to promote stuff in his home country rather than focusing on Vega and it's position on the World stage. On the final day's leading to the release he had Linus doing a Vega presentation where they seemed to have hijacked a middleschool bus full of pre-teens to watch the unboxing of a non product, ie: Show the card for ten seconds and then pull out the cube and make that the focus of this Vega event. Raj Koduri's handling of the situation has been dire. RTG is a mess at the moment so if it's true and Mr Koduri doesn't come back good riddance.

The King is dead, Long live the Queen.

Vega is doing well - it's a great update for those already rocking freesync monitors. I'm extremely happy with my Vega64 Liquid Edition, it runs my BenQ XL2730Z 1440P 144Hz monitor perfectly, and is very quiet at the same time. I also love the limited edition cards looks, the best looking card I've ever had by a long shot.

For those with freesync monitors, Vega is a no-brainer. For those with gsync or non adaptive sync monitors, the 1070/1080 are the best choices.

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:04

Dave2150 said:
Vega is doing well - it's a great update for those already rocking freesync monitors. I'm extremely happy with my Vega64 Liquid Edition, it runs my BenQ XL2730Z 1440P 144Hz monitor perfectly, and is very quiet at the same time. I also love the limited edition cards looks, the best looking card I've ever had by a long shot.

For those with freesync monitors, Vega is a no-brainer. For those with gsync or non adaptive sync monitors, the 1070/1080 are the best choices.

Hi, I thought the same, the AIO's a lovely card but it's not worth £800 which is what's being charged for it. The air-cooled reference Vega's aren't a good deal either.

Let's take a look at the so called Black pack deal

An Air cooled Vega 64 from Sapphire with no games is £469
The same Sapphire card with the games Prey and Wolfy2 make up the Black pack deal which costs £578, That's an extra £109 for 2 games that the promotion itself values at £59.99.
Even if you say that the Sapphire card at £469 should really be £500 like the other brands have their air-cooled reference Vega 64's the deal still charges an extra £78 for £60 worth of games.

It's been a marketing disaster,
The card itself isn't that bad as I said earlier but right now Vega isn't doing well, If it was it would be flying of the shelves and as a Freesync owner I'd of had one myself,
As it is I bought the cheapest non-reference 1080 I could find and I'm now hoping a decent non-reference version turns,
Infact I'm relying on it, I just bought a SFF case even though I knew the 1080 wouldn't fit, Like you said it should have been a no-brainer for Freesync users

andybird123 · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:06

Dave2150 said:
Vega is doing well - it's a great update for those already rocking freesync monitors. I'm extremely happy with my Vega64 Liquid Edition, it runs my BenQ XL2730Z 1440P 144Hz monitor perfectly, and is very quiet at the same time. I also love the limited edition cards looks, the best looking card I've ever had by a long shot.

For those with freesync monitors, Vega is a no-brainer. For those with gsync or non adaptive sync monitors, the 1070/1080 are the best choices.

Isn't the liquid cooled version £800?
Thats not really a no brainer as it pushes a 1080ti + gsync monitor in to the same bracket as selling a freesync monitor and not bothering with AMD

Gerard · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:09

nashathedog said:
Hi, I thought the same, the AIO's a lovely card but it's not worth £800 which is what's being charged for it. The air-cooled reference Vega's aren't a good deal either.

According to matt the aio card should cost £640, so £160 pure profiteering. :mad:

Etailers love this kinda thing, they just count the pennies while hoping supply stays low. Its around the same mark up fury x had

LtMatt · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:21

Gerard said:
According to matt the aio card should cost £640, so £160 pure profiteering. Etailers love this kinda thing, they just count the pennies while hoping supply stays low. Its around the same mark up fury x had

Yep, RRP is £640 for the AIO.

JediFragger · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:46

Dave2150 said:
Vega is doing well - it's a great update for those already rocking freesync monitors.

Indeed, those locked-in sales have sold Vega some cards

JediFragger · 13 Sep 2017 at 20:46

nashathedog said:
the AIO's a lovely card

When they work proper...

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:36

JediFragger said:
When they work proper...

Waiting on the AIB's now.

JediFragger · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:40

nashathedog said:
Waiting on the AIB's now.

Still zero news from anyone but Asus, like they're not that bothered at all about it. Weird.

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:46

AMDMatt said:
Yep, RRP is £640 for the AIO.

That was only the first batch that was priced like that though. AMD did it for a limited time, Yes when you look at pricing today there's price gouging on top but that is not AMD's price and if it is now it's because they dropped it back down after the backlash from reviewers.

JediFragger · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:52

All 3 Powercolors still in stock, no wonder Raja needs a holiday

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:52

JediFragger said:
Still zero news from anyone but Asus, like they're not that bothered at all about it. Weird.

I got my monthly letter from Sapphire yesterday or the day before from which I got linked to a site with a post from one of the Sapphire people saying they're working on some great Vega products right now. He didn't add more than that though. I still think they're at least a month away so I went ahead and bought a Ryzen 1700x, m/b and new case. I've still got to get the ram and OS though. And after that I hope the Vega Tri-x appears as my 1080 won't fit in the SFF case I just bought.

JediFragger · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:53

nashathedog said:
and bought a Ryzen 1700x, m/b and new case

Nice purchase :cool:

I only went for the 7700K tbh as I only game now on my system, with a little encoding thrown in now and again for good measure. It'll still be good for a couple of years til I do a major upgrade

nashathedog · 13 Sep 2017 at 21:59

JediFragger said:
Nice purchase

I only went for the 7700K tbh as I only game now on my system, with a little encoding thrown in now and again for good measure. It'll still be good for a couple of years til I do a major upgrade

I just spent close to a hundred on a series of Udemy courses for coding and game development etc so I'm planning to need multiple cores for stuff like compiling levels. Hoping is more accurate

N19h7m4r3 · 13 Sep 2017 at 22:41

4K8KW10 said:
AMD needs again products like the Radeon 3870, Radeon 3870 X2, Radeon 4870, Radeon 4870 X2, Radeon 4890, Radeon 5870.
After those, somehow the Radeon 6970, Radeon 7970 Ghz Edition, Radeon 290X/390X were all somehow... not that strong.... and the company began to lose focus. Fury X and Vega 64 the weakest gamingwise.

Everything from the 9700 Pro to 5870 was what Raja had worked on.
He was at Apple when GCN was developed and launched, and he returned to AMD just before Fiji; taking charge of RTG months after Fiji.

So he's actually helped develop AMD's greatest GPUs out there.

Vega is big disappointment considering the performance per watt.
For me it seems GCN is at it's limits and they tried to get the last they could out of it; hopefully Zen doing well on the CPU side, they have the money to invest in a new GPU architecture.

Kirby Wurm · 13 Sep 2017 at 22:56

The 3870? That was not a good card. Better than the HD2900 (what wasn't?) but it picked up from the 4870 onward (still have that 512MB beauty somewhere).

TheRealDeal · 13 Sep 2017 at 23:18

4K8KW10 said:
AMD needs again products like the Radeon 3870, Radeon 3870 X2, Radeon 4870, Radeon 4870 X2, Radeon 4890, Radeon 5870.
After those, somehow the Radeon 6970, Radeon 7970 Ghz Edition, Radeon 290X/390X were all somehow... not that strong.... and the company began to lose focus. Fury X and Vega 64 the weakest gamingwise.

The problem is the Radeon 6970 2gb, 7970 and 290x were all good cards. AMD lost market share under these cards so it's not just Hardware that's the problem as arguably the 7970 and 290x were better hardware to what Nvidia had at the time especially as time went on. Both these cards also offered 1gb more Vram than the competition. The 3870/x2 were not great cards either. I owned a 3870 and would much rather have had a 8800gt for similar money but it was sold out and i needed a card asap.