Poll: The Vega Review Thread.

[Ian Evey]

If you add in the panic buying of a new psu to power the v64 whether it needs it or not l you have to ask yourself is it worth bothering.

I have a 850w seasonic gold thats 2 years old but i would still feel apprehensive using it for a vega.

Stick with the 780 for another year i think.

 

[DragonQ]

The guy asks for no more questions because he has no answers and immediately gets more questions.

I suggest bold, underlined and italics, he wasn't clear enough.


Anyway.


Despite very loud gamers declaring it to be so, it's going to be close to impossible to tell if pricing is actually off vs what the market finds acceptable to pay.

AMD isn't going to squeak about stock, shops won't spill the beans unless they don't mind being on AMD's **** list of lowest priority for stock of everything, forever. So if we never know how stock is shifting we don't know if its far too much demand, too little stock or just early days causing the sell outs.

Technology always costs more in the first month or two after release, it's not really a revelation. That, coupled with the mining craze and possible lack of stock, has made prices far higher than SRP (which should be £460 ish). OcUK should be commended for selling a bunch for £450 on launch day no matter how critical we are of the SRP.

 

[Hotwired]

I have a 850w seasonic gold thats 2 years old but i would still feel apprehensive using it for a vega.

Either you have zero faith that you've bought a reputable power supply or you have an interesting calculation for your system power consumption.

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

If you add in the panic buying of a new psu to power the v64 whether it needs it or not l you have to ask yourself is it worth bothering.

I have a 850w seasonic gold thats 2 years old but i would still feel apprehensive using it for a vega.

I have an EVGA Supernova 650 G2 powering my Vega. All seems to be well so far. The tests I've seen so far show it drawing 250-350W under load, depending on power settings etc. I don't think my PSU is going to struggle, given the rest of the components need about 150W between them.

I won't be going crossfire anytime soon of course!

 

[Besty]

So if we never know how stock is shifting we don't know if its far too much demand, too little stock or just early days causing the sell outs.

It is fairly easy to see that the blower cards are not shifting at £580-599 because Vega is not sold out everywhere. It is sold out here due to the customer service and great delivery options.

That is why it is sensible for vendors to wait to see what they can price the 2nd tranche of stock at. If the pin the card at £599 they won't sell anywhere near as many and will end-up discounting anyway. IMHO the blower needs to be pinned at £499 as the AIB cards will surely be £599.

 

[pagepack]

Got to hand it to AMD, either not knowing the price of your own product or they're not willing to tell anyone is a desperately pathetic stance.

Hold your hands up, always better to admit something that let your silence condemn your own actions.

 

[Freddie1980]

True. Though in fairness, if AMD can leverage IF to use multi-dies on the package with Navi, that *could* be a game changer. They'll need to address the power draw issues they're facing ATM though.

I can't see it personally. AMD’s hardware just doesn’t have the software support needed to see the full potential of it’s hardware.

If I were AMD I would build my own benchmark application running in Vulkan or DX12 that took advantage of every technology I had available to it so we could all see the true potential of GNC 5.0. Granted it won’t make a difference to sales of the hardware (saying Vega seems to have no issues ATM) but it would allow developers to see what is possible.

 

[Brazo]

Either you have zero faith that you've bought a reputable power supply or you have an interesting calculation for your system power consumption.

Or he was just going by what the manufacture recommends on the box?

Reviewers have shown the cards can take 600w under certain applications. The recommended PSU has to account for all situations. You can't sell a card and say a 600w psu is fine as long as you don't switch on...

Nope don't press the red button...

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Just tried that mining driver myself (I just do ether when not gaming) and the results are good. So in standard guise it's not great, but that's because Vega throttles something at any temp above 70c, something weird happens and hashes drop quick, so you get about 34 on standard driver and 34.5 or maybe 35 if you're lucky.

With it -30% power and 960 men, -30% core, it manages to stay cool and gives a score of about 33 on the standard driver

Where it gets interesting though is when you use the new Blockchain driver at those settings...

37.3 mh at 240w total system draw!!! That's pretty good right? Well compared to standard.

The drop in gaming (3dmark) performance is about 4% in balanced mode with the Blockchain driver...

Thanks for testing - so it seems if you drop core clockspeeds,and increase memory speeds,and use the new driver it increases mining performance and drops power.

 

[Davedree]

I'm still interested in how it will perform finally if they enable the yet disabled features. Would be nice to see a Vega card working not an emulated Fiji.
Tho it's just an AMD slide but primitive shaders should enable NGG fast pathso the throughput rate would jump nicely from 4 primitives to 17/ clock.

Sure I will say that in time and with game engines that are tuned towards Amd's 'intelligent workgroup distributor' that'll we'll see improved load balancing and efficiency in managing the work generated by the geometry-pipeline stage, leading to hopefully better throughput.
But just as they have a more refined and programmable front end they also have an improved back end DSBR ''draw-stream binning rasterizer" which will aid bandwidth and power saving.
The problem is that it's too early and unclear with no indications as to what the current operational status of these hardware techniques are.

 

[jaffveyda]

Poor Kepler is the only accurate statement they can make.

Poor Fermi.

 

[Mr_Clark1000]

Thanks for testing - so it seems if you drop core clockspeeds,and increase memory speeds,and use the new driver it increases mining performance and drops power.

Seems that way, the blockchain driver isn't that great for gaming though so you will lose out there, but it doesn't take that long to switch drivers, just enough time to get a cold beer before an hour or two gaming...

The key take away here is that it is quite fast mining at -30% clocks and a tiny boost to memory, and -30% power limit. You have to tweak the fan speeds to make it stay under 70c (around 2500rpm does it) otherwise, as soon as 70c is breached, the hash rate drops to less than 35, it is very odd, but something happens at 70c

Wish I had the water cooled one now as it would be silent whilst mining at low temps...

 

[Zeed]

Not sure if it was mentioned here that Vega is Bios mod locked... You cant play around with Flashing or editing bioses LOL

 

[jaffveyda]

Seems that way, the blockchain driver isn't that great for gaming though so you will lose out there, but it doesn't take that long to switch drivers, just enough time to get a cold beer before an hour or two gaming...

The key take away here is that it is quite fast mining at -30% clocks and a tiny boost to memory, and -30% power limit. You have to tweak the fan speeds to make it stay under 70c (around 2500rpm does it) otherwise, as soon as 70c is breached, the hash rate drops to less than 35, it is very odd, but something happens at 70c

Wish I had the water cooled one now as it would be silent whilst mining at low temps...

It's funny how they can create a mining driver but cannot optimize the card for what's designed - gaming when the product is launched. Well we will wait for Navi..... 2030 maybe.

 

[DragonQ]

It's funny how they can create a mining driver but cannot optimize the card for what's designed - gaming when the product is launched. Well we will wait for Navi..... 2030 maybe.

Won't we see small Vega before then? i.e. RX 590 or somethnig with some cores etc. disabled compared to Vega 56 and presumably lower clocks to be far more efficient.

 

[Mr_Clark1000]

It's funny how they can create a mining driver but cannot optimize the card for what's designed - gaming when the product is launched. Well we will wait for Navi..... 2030 maybe.

I agree, there's a few issues. DX12 in BF1 is terrible, Freesync in GTA V is weird and a little broken, but other than that, the frame rates are quite good and with free sync locked in, very responsive and crisp.

I had a 1080ti, and I have to admit, with free sync, it is a much smoother fluid experience. With the ti, even though I had good frame rates, it would either be screen tearing which made having high quality graphics absolutely pointless (it not really high quality if theres a big gash in every frame when moving!) or with fast. sync / adaptive sync thing enabled, it would be very laggy in comparison to the Vega and free sync, like adding another 50ms mouse lag it felt like...

But thats just my views, for me, with freesync, it is a much much better experience, and at the £450 I got it for, over 200quid less than the ti I had.

 

[Hotwired]

Or he was just going by what the manufacture recommends on the box?

Reviewers have shown the cards can take 600w under certain applications. The recommended PSU has to account for all situations. You can't sell a card and say a 600w psu is fine as long as you don't switch on...

Nope don't press the red button...

I know and I did suggest an interesting power calculation as a reason that 850W would not cover a Vega 64 system.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Seems that way, the blockchain driver isn't that great for gaming though so you will lose out there, but it doesn't take that long to switch drivers, just enough time to get a cold beer before an hour or two gaming...

The key take away here is that it is quite fast mining at -30% clocks and a tiny boost to memory, and -30% power limit. You have to tweak the fan speeds to make it stay under 70c (around 2500rpm does it) otherwise, as soon as 70c is breached, the hash rate drops to less than 35, it is very odd, but something happens at 70c

Wish I had the water cooled one now as it would be silent whilst mining at low temps...

High temperatures tend to make power consumption even worse,so probably some way of keeping power consumption within reason??

With this launch AMD are just coming across as very amateur, how long have they been in the business?

"Only" with this launch. LOL,you might want to see a couple of their previous launches too. Its an AMD tradition. Some of their best products have also been almost scuppered by some weird decisions!

 

[AmateurExpert]

But thats just my views, for me, with freesync, it is a much much better experience, and at the £450 I got it for, over 200quid less than the ti I had.

One of the things I noticed with the benchmark results was the relatively small gap between average and minimum (1% low & 0.1% low) fps for Vega. I don't think previous AMD cards were too great at this, but the improvement points to greater consistency in frame times which should help provide a smoother gaming experience. I'm interested to see if people actually see this in reality.

 

[ubersonic]

Not sure if it was mentioned here that Vega is Bios mod locked... You cant play around with Flashing or editing bioses LOL

Yeah, there's already workarounds being worked on though, hopefully it's successful otherwise Pascal will be the last generation of GPU with user changeable BIOSes