Rumour: AMD Cancels RX Vega Primitive Shaders From Drivers

LoadsaMoney · 23 Jan 2018 at 14:54

After CES2018, AMD told people in a breakout session, that they cancelled the implicit driver path for Primitive Shaders, they are now offering only explicit control to developers who wishes to implement it. So Primitive Shaders will only be ever implemented if a developer properly codes for it. The driver portion has been cancelled.

This comes directly from Marc Sauter (y33H@), editor at the german IT site Golem.de.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7sedpq/amd_cancels_the_driver_path_for_primitive_shaders/

Martini1991 · 23 Jan 2018 at 15:03

Fine wine.

JediFragger · 23 Jan 2018 at 15:25

Red red whine

Rroff · 23 Jan 2018 at 15:26

Could never really see it working.

opethdisciple · 23 Jan 2018 at 15:29

Ouch. So all the promises AMD made regarding Vega are unravelling.

D.P. · 23 Jan 2018 at 15:37

Red whine vinegar more like

BS Dave · 23 Jan 2018 at 16:01

opethdisciple said:
Ouch. So all the promises AMD made regarding Vega are unravelling.

980ti - a-sync - both sides can seemingly play that game (and i have a 980ti), shame though for vega

TheRealDeal · 23 Jan 2018 at 16:31

BS Dave said:
980ti - a-sync - both sides can seemingly play that game (and i have a 980ti), shame though for vega

Vega can actually do it though it just needs a Dev to code them in the game. Think Rroff said this either before or around the time of Vega launch. Was it not something along the lines of with Vega to see real benefit's the Devs would need to code for it to see proper advantages. Is it a case of the hardware is capable but unless used by Devs it's not really something that the drivers can make good use of unlike Nvidia's implementation. Where as with the 980ti and the like async would not really benefit them at all. Slightly different but similar.

Any how Vega could have Jurassic age Shaders and i wouldn't touch one at current prices.

DragonQ · 23 Jan 2018 at 16:34

Shame but it's not exactly the straw that broke the camel's back; that happened before launch day for most.

BS Dave · 23 Jan 2018 at 16:40

TheRealDeal said:
Vega can actually do it though it just needs a Dev to code them in the game. Think Rroff said this either before or around the time of Vega launch. Was it not something along the lines of with Vega to see real benefit's the Devs would need to code for it to see proper advantages. Is it a case of the hardware is capable but unless used by Devs it's not really something that the drivers can make good use of unlike Nvidia's implementation. Where as with the 980ti and the like async would not really benefit them at all. Slightly different but similar.

Any how Vega could have Jurassic age Shaders and i wouldn't touch one at current prices.

Fair enough - i just meant both were promised in forthcoming drivers - neither happened. but i get your point about Vega actually being able to do it

JediFragger · 23 Jan 2018 at 17:04

Drivers...too hard...sob....sob.....

nashathedog · 23 Jan 2018 at 19:22

JediFragger said:
Drivers...too hard...sob....sob.....

No shock here, To me it just sounds like AMD want to wipe their hands of Vega and brush it under the carpet, For AMD 2017 was going quite well until Vega landed and then it took a nose dive but at least they knew who to thank for that.

Rroff · 23 Jan 2018 at 19:32

nashathedog said:
No shock here, To me it just sounds like AMD want to wipe their hands of Vega and brush it under the carpet, For AMD 2017 was going quite well until Vega landed and then it took a nose dive but at least they knew who to thank for that.

I really don't get what AMD is/was trying to do with Vega - get it on something equivalent to TSMC's 16nm or better a proper 12FF, streamline it a bit with a narrower but higher tickrate implementation of the architecture, forget the stuff that needs developers to specifically program for, and it would compete with anything nVidia has got.

melmac · 23 Jan 2018 at 20:29

I thought it was always up to the developers to make use of these things?

Surely it's up to AMD to work with the developers.

Davedree · 23 Jan 2018 at 20:56

Rroff said:
I really don't get what AMD is/was trying to do with Vega - get it on something equivalent to TSMC's 16nm or better a proper 12FF, streamline it a bit with a narrower but higher tickrate implementation of the architecture, forget the stuff that needs developers to specifically program for, and it would compete with anything nVidia has got.

As we've both said from way before release, to the time of elease. It was a Fury II with some seriously bad add-ons. They didn't want to scale to a 6 geometry front end, so plan b clock Fury by 300mhz and redraw for 14nm, they couldn't even get plan b right.

r22snapper · 23 Jan 2018 at 21:18

Disappointing. I wish companies would have the testicular fortitude to come out and say this sort of thing (assuming it is true) rather than snidely leaking it and walking away whistling.

Freddie1980 · 23 Jan 2018 at 21:50

I take it you don't need primitive shaders for mining then.....

drunkenmaster · 24 Jan 2018 at 01:16

That isn't what the comments are saying at all, so it's a bs misleading title for this thread.

AMD has primitive shaders, they've worked in multiple games, they work well. The statements (if true) say they are stopping trying to get implicit primitive shaders to work via the driver (ie recognising and switching out on the fly which no game has done yet for Vega) but explicit primitive shaders still work and is the only ones we've seen for Vega. Essentially nothing has changed and if they can't get the implicit prim shaders working via driver then wasting more time on it is just that, a waste.

I suspect the 'rumour' that something was broken in hardware making it incredibly unlikely that this would be made to work in the future wasn't far away from the truth.

It's also very possible that a huge part of the reason Nvidia get it working well is that do so much more on the CPU side of the driver rather than in hardware on the GPU and AMD can't get this working on the fly on the gpu as it needs to without bugs.

JediFragger · 24 Jan 2018 at 01:43

AMD driver guy has tried but has given up, he remains committed to making the Adrenaline drivers worse than the Crimson ones

Muhammad.Abdelhameed · 24 Jan 2018 at 02:16

BS Dave said:
980ti - a-sync - both sides can seemingly play that game (and i have a 980ti), shame though for vega

Ryan Smith from Anandtech wrote it best:

Moving to Maxwell, Maxwell 1 was a repeat of Big Kepler, offering HyperQ without any way to mix it with graphics. It was only with Maxwell 2 that NVIDIA finally gained the ability to mix compute queues with graphics mode, allowing for the single graphics queue to be joined with up to 31 compute queues, for a total of 32 queues. This from a technical perspective is all that you need to offer a basic level of asynchronous compute support: expose multiple queues so that asynchronous jobs can be submitted. Past that, it's up to the driver/hardware to handle the situation as it sees fit; true async execution is not guaranteed.

But then after AOTS the entire community became obsessed with the idea that when implemented the way AMD has it increases gaming performance. Which is fine but remember the whole complaint was that Nvidia had numerous whitepapers/slides/a statement that said Maxwell supported it (which again is technically true and even useful for some applications) - but because it didn't work specifically in games everyone continues to believe to this day that Maxwell never supported it - which is untrue.

drunkenmaster said:
AMD has primitive shaders, they've worked in multiple games, they work well.

Primitive Shaders have never been implemented in any game. They are not yet even enabled for RX Vega.