AMD on the Road: takes Radeon RX Vega to the Gamers

Budapest... huh. Thought they'd maybe reach more people going to London or something like that.

 

They rather stick with EU places ;-)

 

They better show off gameplay WITH FPS UNLOCKED!!! No more gameplay comparing to 1080/Ti's but with a cap of 60fps nonsense . They owe us this for making us wait so long. Or price it at 400$

 

Delay tactics

No, nothing about Brexit UK is interesting to business or the world at this time. Well, maybe to Donald Trump and the and petrochemical cartels. In short, they totally F'ed themselves.*


AMD: Just launch already, this is a bit embarrassing.

 

I was more thinking about the serving the market, UK PC gamers, not if AMD wants to build a new business department there. Gamers are still gamers, even after Brexit.

 

Not as embarrassing as the crass coming out your head. uke2:

Which is funny considering Hungary is as anti EU as it gets. They closed their borders and are one of these EU countries, like Poland, which are untouched by terrorism and crime waves by "refugees".

:stewpid:

 

He meant ethnically more EU. Londonistan is quite Asian/middle-Eastern.

 

"AMD on the Road: takes Radeon RX Vega to the" Miners

Fixed that for ya.

 

I hope these new Vega mining cards will reduce pricing for gam.. khm, nV cards.

 

This whole Vega launch is puzzling. Take it on the road? Its like they are going out of their way to not unveil final performance till the very last second. One could think they are slow playing Nvidia, trying to draw out some indication of Volta performance, or, as has most often been the case, when they do not show performance readily it is because performance is not up to snuff.

I hope not, but I fear the latter is a more realistic guess....

 

Now that Ethereum price seems to have taken a 50% hit in exchange rates, maybe gamers will get their hands on cards again.
One of the bigger German online retailers has already taken AMD cards out of their store because they just can't get them because of the mining.

 

It is very puzzling. They are either sandbagging extremely hard or most likely simply need more time to finish up the driver certifications for a larger set of games.

 

Vega is on pair with the 1080. AMD knows its not good enough so its "hiding" the numbers.
Still, drivers haven't matured enough and the gaming card wasn't launched yet, but I don't believe it will touch the 1080Ti.

As to mining, ****ing retailers keep selling all their units to just one person, who then proceeds to put them online for double the price! For **** sake! I'm closer each week to pull the trigger on a 1060, I really don't want to because I hate Nvidia and want FreeSync, but **** this!

 

It's called 'breaking bad news softly", aka, managing expectations.

 

Pretty much all countries involved in the so called "war on terrorism" have faced blowbacks. And refugees it has created in millions, first from Iraq when millions fled and most of them to Syria, and then there have been coup efforts in Syria (this began in 2006) as well and yet again the people have to flee. But amazingly enough here in the west people still manage not to feel any sort of responsibility for it.
__
On February 10, 2003, one month before the war began, the U.K.’s Joint Intelligence Committee — the key advisory body for the British Prime Minister on intelligence matters — issued a white paper titled “International Terrorism: War With Iraq.”

It began:

The threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq. They will target Coalition forces and other Western interests in the Middle East. Attacks against Western interests elsewhere are also likely, especially in the US and UK, for maximum impact. The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly.

And it concluded much the same way:

Al Qaida and associated groups will continue to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat will be heightened by military action against Iraq. The broader threat from Islamist terrorists will also increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West. [emphasis added in both cases]
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/23...ster-like-terrorism-if-the-west-invaded-iraq/


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But to Vega... I think I will have to skip this one too, it will likely perform better than 1080 but the core speeds have been cranked up so high in order to compete that it will be a very power hungry chip. Efficiency matters, and sadly AMD is not that effective here.

They also seem to have made the mistake of going with HBM2 as it will drive costs and lead to less profit for the company.. sadly.

 

I know I'm not a mod, but can we keep this thread politics-free pretty please?

I wonder why people are so crazy about efficiency in gaming. Isn't that only a thing for mining after all? It's an issue of heat, but that's been with AMD for a long time now, no big surprised if they once again release an AIO reference cooler.

Yeah HBM2 is more or less a publicity stunt... in gaming environments it won't show that much of a gain sadly. I wonder if it also delayed Vega unneccesarily, since I believe the chips might have been around longer than HBM2 in terms of availability.

 

You started it.

Other than that, AMD please release SOMETHING already.

 

The way I see it... AMD is taking Vega "on the road" in order to create the first impressions.
This first impression cushion should soak up some of the damage created by real reviews afterwards.

Poor GCN efficiency(compared to Pascal) is why AMD had to put HBM2 in Vega. DDR5 was not even a choice.
Poor efficiency is the reason why Vega FE throttles and runs at 1440MHz instead of for example 1700MHz.

Efficiency = performance, because if you have ample efficiency there is nothing stopping you to trade that efficiency for higher clocks aka for higher performance.
Any fool can make a XY product which produces WZ amount of TFlops. The idea is to contain it within certain area and power envelope.
Efficiency is the name of game, and for the last several years Nvidia has been doing nothing but figuring out how to move the bits around by using the least amount of energy.
Efficiency + perf/mm2 = Everything

 

Efficiency is a metric people look at when two cards are more or less equal. Like let's just assume that the Vega RX performs roughly equivalent to a 1080. Price comes in at $499. Performance/price it roughly compares to the 1080 (I know miners are driving prices up atm, lets ignore that) - what other things can we look at to determine which card is the better purchase? That's when efficiency and value add features like Freesync/Ansel/etc come into play. 1080 uses almost 100w less than what we expect Vega RX to use. I game roughly 3-4 hours a day, probably more on a weekends. That's ~$18 a year where I live. So if I hold my card for two years, that makes it roughly $40 cheaper for the 1080. On the flipside, if I'm buying a new monitor, a comparable freesync display is over a hundred dollars cheaper than a Gsync one. So depending on whether or not you already have a G-Sync display, how much game, etc, people are going to value different aspects of cards.

Then as Noisiv said, it also gives an indication of future/architectural performance. A good example is Pascal - GP102 is currently only ~480mm2. Nvidia has built larger chips, all the way up at ~600 - the limit here is power consumption. Nvidia doesn't like to cross the ~250-300w barrier with their reference models. So basically Nvidia is stuck at 480mm2, at the given freq/core count, unless they improve power efficiency. Nvidia claims Volta's FP32 CUDA cores are 50% more efficient than Pascal. Theoretically this will allow them to push a 600mm2 Volta card operating at roughly the same frequencies as the current Ti models.

As far as HBM2, I don't think it's publicity or advertising, I think it's AMD's lack of funding for multiple SKU's. HBM2 is almost definitely necessary in cloud computing/deep learning/etc. So AMD needs their top tier card to support it, as Nvidia's does. The problem is that AMD can't afford to split their line up like Nvidia. GP100 is radically different than GP102, not only HBM2, but even the CUDA cores, cache hierarchy, etc are all different. For AMD to follow that, it requires them to design/fab/validate completely separate products. So instead they opt to basically sell their "GP100" variant as a consumer card. Margins are lower due to this, but the upfront cost and time to market is drastically reduced.

That being said, there are people that think RX Vega will be slightly different architecturally. I haven't seen any rumors/information that support this claim and historically AMD hasn't split it's consumer/workstation/compute cards to the same degree that Nvidia has.