Poll: The Vega Review Thread.

[Zeed]

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

AFAIK You cant change bios on Pascal still got one myself... Only glue on / solder mod is an tdp removal option :/

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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.

Well you can notice it in some of the video reviews from Digital Foundry and Joker Productions comparing the Vega56 and the GTX1070.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

I feel sorry for any of the reviewers who amd quoted yesterday in their global email and social media campaign based on prices that have never existed.

 

[Martini1991]

It's weird to quote vega 56 as if it's available

 

[Broken Hope]

It's just massively deceptive, tell reviewers your product costs a certain price, get them to review your product and say it's good value for money and then hike the prices up.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It's weird to quote vega 56 as if it's available

No different then all the other card launches were stock was only realistically available weeks after launch!!

 

[TNA]

It's just massively deceptive, tell reviewers your product costs a certain price, get them to review your product and say it's good value for money and then hike the prices up.

We give AMD credit for being the lesser of two evils, but they seem to be doing their utmost with the launch of Vega to catch up with Nvidia. All the good will they got from Ryzen has been seemingly squandered

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

All the good will they got from Ryzen has been seemingly squandered

I think for most people,it won't register since many gamers tend to just buy Nvidia anyway(going by history) and the market for the higher end cards is also smaller.

I also think AMD did a bad mistake of not keeping the ATI brand name too - even when they had good cards,people think of AMD as a CPU company not a GPU company.

Even with the disastrous 2000 series,and the bargain basement HD3000 series with Nvidia having the fantastic 8000 series(including the 8800GT),ATI had more marketshare in sales than AMD has now or even two years ago.

 

[D.P.]

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.

But why would developers care about such a tiny share if the market?

Developers have never been interested in supporting the newest features. Pascal has some great DX12 such as conservative rastorization and ROV and despite a top to bottom lineup of Pascal's you don't see develop putting such feature support in games.


Features don't sell GPUs, or at least they shouldn't for any rational buyer.

 

[TNA]

I think for most people,it won't register since many gamers tend to just buy Nvidia anyway(going by history) and the market for the higher end cards is also smaller.

I also think AMD did a bad mistake of not keeping the ATI brand name too - even when they had good cards,people think of AMD as a CPU company not a GPU company.

Even with the disastrous 2000 series,and the bargain basement HD3000 series with Nvidia having the fantastic 8000 series(including the 8800GT),ATI had more marketshare in sales than AMD has now or even two years ago.

They could still use ATI if they wanted. But the only time worth doing that is if they made a product that was like say a like Radeon 9700 which was by far the best card on release.

I know people go on about branding and yes it makes some difference, but the main thing is performance and price for performance. Without those, even if they were ATI or whatever, it would not make a big difference. If they could get the lead back from Nvidia for 3 generations say and do good marketing, they could easily end up with more market share than nvidia as people's perceptions would change slowly.

I always like to go with who ever offers the best price for performance in the price range I am comfortable with which I usually is 1070/Vega 56. Trouble is AMD are slipping so far behind now. I really hope for their sakes GloFo 7nm tech is on schedule or ahead of schedule.

 

[D.P.]

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.

As well as.smaller Vega 11 chips AMD have also presented Vega20, which will be the 2018 AMD GPU.

If Navi really is a multi-die NUMA GPU then it won't be possible before 2019 or 2020 at the earliest. It likely won't be feasible on 7nm so would be looking towards 5nm process

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

They could still use ATI if they wanted. But the only time worth doing that is if they made a product that was like say a like Radeon 9700 which was by far the best card on release.

I know people go on about branding and yes it makes some difference, but the main thing is performance and price for performance. Without those, even if they were ATI or whatever, it would not make a big difference. If they could get the lead back from Nvidia for 3 generations say and do good marketing, they could easily end up with more market share than nvidia as people's perceptions would change slowly.

I always like to go with who ever offers the best price for performance in the price range I am comfortable with which I usually is 1070/Vega 56. Trouble is AMD are slipping so far behind now. I really hope for their sakes GloFo 7nm tech is on schedule or ahead of schedule.

The problem is under the AMD banner,even their more successful launches(the initial GCN ones) still showed them ceding sales marketshare,and I think you need to remember back to how poor the 2000 and HD3000 series were. I had both the HD3870 GDDR4 and 8800GTS 512MB back then.The HD3870 GDDR4 could only trade blows with a 9600GT(faster with no AA and slower with AA),with Nvidia having the faster 8800GT,8800GTS 512MB,8800GTX and 8800 Ultra,and despite this ATI still had more marketshare than AMD at its lowest ebb a few years ago when they had cards like the R9 290/390 and Fury series which were only beaten to the punch in performance by the £500+ Nvidia cards. The thing is AMD marketing on its GPU side is muddled,and they have made some very poor design decisions on cards like the R9 290/290X with a subpar cooler to which they added a "quiet mode",which Nvidia PR actually exploited. Even when ATI had meh products they seemed to be able to pull a more coherent marketing campaign and IMHO they also tended to be more realistic about the performance of their products too.

I mean even Ryzen was launched in the WORST possible way possible,but luckily for AMD,Intel was apparently caught off guard and there was time for improved BIOSes for motherboards,etc to be released in good time. Intel also has some LOLWTF launches too but they have such a large legacy product stack which kind of acts like a buffer,which AMD did not have.

Vega56 looks like it might salvage the whole launch but only if pricing does not go mental in the RL.

 

[eddyr]

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...

Have you also tried the 2nd bios with powersave setting. TPU got a boost from 33 to 35MH/s on their review driver. I would be curious as to how the combination of the 2nd bios along with clock/power tweaks and the new driver fares.

 

[doodah]

If this is true, I await their inevitable comical levels of spin to explain this one away.

 

[RBImGuy]

56cu vega looks superb, 30% faster than 1070 in dirt4

amd pricing atm is like, we dont know what we are doing atm, please stand by for a reply
(means we dont know what we are doing)
get it.....

 

[spikerules]

No worries mate. We appreciate you being around.

On a more general note (and this is not a question to you), what I'm really looking forward to are partner Vega 56s. I recon we're not going to see any sooner than October/November. Really worried that prices may be terrible by then. Miners, the price of RAM...

Um why you thanking him for basically linking a twitter post that has nothing to do with the original question which he knows full well?

 

[ubersonic]

They could still use ATI if they wanted.

Dropping the ATi brand was IMO the dumbest thing AMD have done in the GPU marketspace. For a very very long time ATi were a bigger/better name than Nvidia and even when Nvidia surpassed them and then 3DFX it wasn't that long before ATi surpassed 3DFX to reclaim the #2 spot (back when there were still half a dozen GPU manufacturers) when the 9700 beat the Geforce 4 it wasn't seen as an upset it was seen as a return to form by a big dog. By contrast AMD was a lesser name, always playing second fiddle to Intel (even when they were lucky enough to be in the lead like the Athlon XP) and sometimes struggling to best Cyrix/IDT/etc.

Stupid idea, utterly stupid.

 

[spikerules]

Dropping the ATi brand was IMO the dumbest thing AMD have done in the GPU marketspace. For a very very long time ATi were a bigger/better name than Nvidia and even when Nvidia surpassed them and then 3DFX it wasn't that long before ATi surpassed 3DFX to reclaim the #2 spot (back when there were still half a dozen GPU manufacturers) when the 9700 beat the Geforce 4 it wasn't seen as an upset it was seen as a return to form by a big dog. By contrast AMD was a lesser name, always playing second fiddle to Intel (even when they were lucky enough to be in the lead like the Athlon XP) and sometimes struggling to best Cyrix/IDT/etc.

Stupid idea, utterly stupid.

Let's be honest here AMD's marketing department has to be the worst out there... yet they still managed to convince people - knowledgeable OCuk people at that - that the Vega64 was worth buying

Got to give them credit for that!

 

[jaffveyda]

Who's camping with me in front of Ocuk office to get hands on Vega on Monday?

 

[spikerules]

Who's camping with me in front of Ocuk office to get hands on Vega on Monday?

Case in point this ^ guy...