AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Review
- Thread starter Steve
- Start date
NOT ANYMORE that is. LOL.
AMD has always been about better pricing, and by a lot. AMD is supposed to get us unrivaled pricing versus Intel, like those AthlonXPs from backin 2001 or the K6-2. And even when they were able to get the performance crown with the socket 939s, they did NOT price higher than Intel. Somewhere along the way AMD lost their meaning and purpose, especially after the ATI merger, when they manage to screw up delivered lower performing products on both the CPU and GPU front, which meant they had no choice but to price lower.
Avro Arrow
Posts: 3,721 +4,821
Well, it's quite obvious to everyone (including me) that Vega has fallen short which isn't great since it's a year late to market. To be honest, I expected this to happen when I saw the RX 4xx and 5xx cards. My guess is that for the past few years, AMD has been pouring its time, manpower and resources into Zen and with good reason. Look at what they've achieved with Zen; Ryzen, Threadrippper and EPYC. EPYC alone will most likely bring AMD more revenue in one year than nVidia pulls in over three.
AMD had to make a choice with the resources they had and NOTHING in the tech sector is more profitable than a high-performance server-grade CPU. Since every Zen-based CPU has basically "hit it out of the park", AMD can consider their mission accomplished. Once the money starts flowing in from EPYC (this year), AMD will actually be able to give ATi more than just the shoestring budget that they've had over the past two or three years. We can expect that ATi will pull even (or even ahead) of nVidia again.
To everyone who thinks that ATi will NEVER catch nVidia again, AMD's ability to come out of nowhere with something like Zen shows their incredible penchant for innovation. AMD has NEVER been as far behind nVidia in GPU design as they were behind Intel in CPU design (It took 10+ years to get the performance crown back) and look what happened there. They came seemingly out of NOWHERE to lay a major beat-down on Intel, something that has honestly been nothing short of mind-blowing. If AMD can come back against Intel, ATi can come back against nVidia.
With the money that EPYC will bring, nVidia is scrambling because they are acutely aware of how ATi has managed to remain competitive in the mainstream GPU market and how Vega Instinct offers tremendous parallel compute performance despite ATi having very little R&D budget. We have all seen how nVidia has been releasing products left and right because they know that they're going to have to weather a Radeon storm. ATi has been (let's face it) competitive with no money, just imagine what they'll be capable of with real money to play with, something they haven't really had since the Evergreen (HD 5xxx) days.
To those who are concerned about Vega's pricing, don't worry. Vega's price will drop because it has to. Very few people will buy a Vega at its current price point and the prices will fall as a result. I've seen it over a dozen times in tech history. Vega will be compelling once it has dropped about $50-$75. For a lot of people, an upgrade isn't even really needed unless you do 4K. In the case of 4K, as long as you have an R9 Fury or better, you're good because the HBM of the Fury series works magic at 4K.
AMD had to make a choice with the resources they had and NOTHING in the tech sector is more profitable than a high-performance server-grade CPU. Since every Zen-based CPU has basically "hit it out of the park", AMD can consider their mission accomplished. Once the money starts flowing in from EPYC (this year), AMD will actually be able to give ATi more than just the shoestring budget that they've had over the past two or three years. We can expect that ATi will pull even (or even ahead) of nVidia again.
To everyone who thinks that ATi will NEVER catch nVidia again, AMD's ability to come out of nowhere with something like Zen shows their incredible penchant for innovation. AMD has NEVER been as far behind nVidia in GPU design as they were behind Intel in CPU design (It took 10+ years to get the performance crown back) and look what happened there. They came seemingly out of NOWHERE to lay a major beat-down on Intel, something that has honestly been nothing short of mind-blowing. If AMD can come back against Intel, ATi can come back against nVidia.
With the money that EPYC will bring, nVidia is scrambling because they are acutely aware of how ATi has managed to remain competitive in the mainstream GPU market and how Vega Instinct offers tremendous parallel compute performance despite ATi having very little R&D budget. We have all seen how nVidia has been releasing products left and right because they know that they're going to have to weather a Radeon storm. ATi has been (let's face it) competitive with no money, just imagine what they'll be capable of with real money to play with, something they haven't really had since the Evergreen (HD 5xxx) days.
To those who are concerned about Vega's pricing, don't worry. Vega's price will drop because it has to. Very few people will buy a Vega at its current price point and the prices will fall as a result. I've seen it over a dozen times in tech history. Vega will be compelling once it has dropped about $50-$75. For a lot of people, an upgrade isn't even really needed unless you do 4K. In the case of 4K, as long as you have an R9 Fury or better, you're good because the HBM of the Fury series works magic at 4K.
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Avro Arrow
Posts: 3,721 +4,821
It's not true at all, it's an old wives' tale. There has never been any evidence in history showing GeForces performing better on Intel platforms than Radeons. Until Ryzen, any performance difference between Radeons and GeForces has always been uniform whether the platform was AMD or Intel.I don't think this is true to be honest, having looked at lots of footage from AMD GPU launch events over the years, they have been using intel CPU's in their test systems at events, now why would they do that if it hindered the performance of the product they are trying to promote?
I would be interested to see if this is a true though
darisalfafa
Posts: 8 +11
Steve, I know you are helping us a ton with these no-compromise reviews, but I noticed that you have not taken a good care of yourself recently. I'm sure you consider your health to be the first, please take care of yourself!
As for the card itself, I have to be honest that it's probably the most disappointing launch from AMD since Bulldozer. It's engineered to be a 1080 Ti killer, but instead its not even close. But for the consumer that doesn't care, at its MSRP it's actually a smart buy.
I also noticed that you're using a factory overclocked model of the GTX 1070, a factory overclocked Vega 56 looks to be a fairer match and will probably be closer to the GTX 1080. With AMD's track records of giving free performance from newer drivers, I have no doubts that it will match the 1080 at some point.
As for the card itself, I have to be honest that it's probably the most disappointing launch from AMD since Bulldozer. It's engineered to be a 1080 Ti killer, but instead its not even close. But for the consumer that doesn't care, at its MSRP it's actually a smart buy.
I also noticed that you're using a factory overclocked model of the GTX 1070, a factory overclocked Vega 56 looks to be a fairer match and will probably be closer to the GTX 1080. With AMD's track records of giving free performance from newer drivers, I have no doubts that it will match the 1080 at some point.
OcelotRex
Posts: 558 +302
That's a kind way of stating "releasing unoptimized drivers.
Seriously? Such ridiculous hyperbole. I hope you are not trying to hype AMD's stock now.
In terms to absolute performance, in what way has AMD got a server level processor that is has beat intel? See:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
There was no major beat-down. Only thing AMD can make a reasonable play on is price. AMD has to deliver unrivaled value to the customer. As much as Intel hates this, Intel only has to lower their prices, but no performance crown has been taken by AMD, and this is a fact. Morever, Intel can easily glue more cores together and it would just be a packaging issue to put something out like that and price accordingly.
As far as Ryzen is concerned, AMD has overpriced them and you can see the pricing trends. The i7-7700k at release in January was $305, today it is at $280 see:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/472529/Core_i7-7700K_Kaby_Lake_42_GHz_LGA_1151_Boxed_Processor
On the other hand the R7 1800x released at $500 and it is now at $350 see:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/476003/Ryzen_7_1800X_36_GHz_8_Core_AM4_Boxed_Processor
For product that supposed "hit out of the park", how the heck did the price drop 30% in less than 6 months? Yep they sure hit it out of the park, but it didn't land on the fairway or the green, and they forgot the people were actually playing golf, not sure what that base ball bat is good for. LOL. And even at $350, the 1800x is overpriced compared to their own 1700 at $270 see, which everyone now know benches roughly the same as the 1800x see:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/..._AM4_Boxed_Processor_with_Wraith_Spire_Cooler
AMD should have priced Ryzen like this from day 1:
$250 max for their top line Ryzen 7
$150 max for their top line Ryzen 5
$100 max for their top line Ryzen 3
Especially since it is well known that Ryzen have GPU bottleneck timebomb that will only get worse with faster GPU going forarward and the ryzen failing to keep up with the GPU. We can already seen that with GTX1080ti at 1440p being capped by the current iteration of Ryzen. The sleight-of-hand 4K 60fps or less is good enough GPU bottleneck trick fools no one.
They need to earn back whatever remains of the goodwill of their customers leftover from back in the socket 939 era. And since their products do NOT win accross the board, they must deliver unrivaled value, just like what they did with the AthlonXP(barton, thoroughbred, t-bird) back in the late 90's and early 2000s. Vega being more power hungry will also require a serious price reduction to be competitive.
I do NOT doubt AMD can put out a reasonably competitive products, and I stress "reasonable". Reasonable require AMD to price for the consumers, games, and other users alike a price that provide unrivaled value.
Evernessince
Posts: 5,469 +6,158
This is a fail by AMD. This came far too late with far too little performance. Now I doubt Nvidia is going to release Volta anytime soon, zero incentive for them to do so. For AMD's sake, I hope the die space the HBCC is using comes in handy in the professional space because it certainly isn't doing enough for gaming. No idea what's going on in the games where the Fury X is beating it but my guess is the usual "AMD needs to work on it's drivers" stuff.
Also, WTF is with the pricing AMD? You are supposed to be the value proposition brand. Who in their right mind is going to want to buy AMD, the bargain product, when they can get a less power hungry "premium" brand in Nvidia. Like I said, this card better perform in the professional space and it's screwed at it's current price.
Also, WTF is with the pricing AMD? You are supposed to be the value proposition brand. Who in their right mind is going to want to buy AMD, the bargain product, when they can get a less power hungry "premium" brand in Nvidia. Like I said, this card better perform in the professional space and it's screwed at it's current price.
ATI putting out bad drivers is is well known since back in late 90s, and when is this really going to change? People should be advised NOT to make decisions based on wishful thinking about how it will match GTX1080 sometime in the future when they will have to give AMD their money, now/today, it is not like you can pay AMD later when they finally deliver.
As for factory overclocked 1070, this is actually more realistic and more representative of what is available in the market. Why AMD doesn't provide overclocking on their Vega56 for review, that is on AMD. As readers should be more skeptical and suspect that AMD may even be providing the "golden sample" per se. As consumers we need to resist the marketing efforts of all these companies trying to drive up the prices of these things.
actually, AMD put their money in the compute performance of Vega so they can have a complete server solution something which nobody else has at the moment. I kinda understand why they didn't focus on gaming with Vega although as a gamer I do feel a bit disappointed.
AMD take builds truck and takes to the Nurburgring and tells everyone they can tow more than anyone else around the track, forgetting that people are racing to get the best lap times. Yep this is going to sell well.This lets Intel, nVidia win the race with far less effort and provides no downward pricing pressure.
What is with this latest marketing play, about "compute"? Ryzen, Vega, if they want to build a bitcoin miner, render farm, then do that and advertise to that. Stop with the bait-and-switch to the gamers. This is deceitful marketing, and then AMD overprices it all while doing it. This kind of behavior should never be acceptable.
Conclusion for everyone:
Vega 56 is the new high-performance value king. It costs as much as a 1070, while being as fast or faster, with expected potential to become faster due to drivers and OC potential due to 3rd party coolers. (also packed math!)
Also, the 60-70W difference between Vega 56 and 1070 is peanuts. Nobody cares. People bought and loved 290/X/390/X and those were 275-250W GPUs, while this uses just 210W.
Vega 56 is the new high-performance value king. It costs as much as a 1070, while being as fast or faster, with expected potential to become faster due to drivers and OC potential due to 3rd party coolers. (also packed math!)
Also, the 60-70W difference between Vega 56 and 1070 is peanuts. Nobody cares. People bought and loved 290/X/390/X and those were 275-250W GPUs, while this uses just 210W.
There are a lot of grammatical typos in that review, which make it hard to read - no doubt due to the initial review being rushed. Also a few mistakes such as the graphs showing the Vega ahead in 2 resolutions of Far Cry Primal but the text says only 1. Also the DoW III text uses the Total War Warhammer table.
That aside, this is a competition between a card with mature drivers versus a brand new card. I'm discouraged by the results/price but I hope that AMD can pump out a few good driver updates within the next 1-2 months. If not, I see no reason to move away from the 1070.
That aside, this is a competition between a card with mature drivers versus a brand new card. I'm discouraged by the results/price but I hope that AMD can pump out a few good driver updates within the next 1-2 months. If not, I see no reason to move away from the 1070.
Theinsanegamer
Posts: 5,474 +10,274
Funny, I remember the FX-55 launching for $829. Meanwhile, the high end penium 4 560 launched at just $637.
Since when were you appointed to speak for everyone?
And that 60-70W difference is a big deal. If you want a quiet system, you want lower power consumption, so your fan speeds can be lower. And priced the same does NOT make it a value king, especially since it is NOT faster and it consumes more power, makes more noise, and it is only a 90% me-too product.
Funny you like to look at one side of the coin only. Did you forget the Intel competition for the FX series back then... here is a refresher:
https://www.geek.com/blurb/pentium-4-extreme-edition-will-cost-almost-1000-553835/
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_4/Intel-Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4 GHz - RK80532PG0962M (BX80532PG3400F).html
$1000 for P4 Extreme edition. Besides, the Socket 939s that were value kings were more along the lines of the Athlon64 3500 recall:
http://techreport.com/review/7134/amd-athlon-64-3500-processor/16
darisalfafa
Posts: 8 +11
All I can see is you getting sour on AMD for whatever reason. Are you really an "AntiShill"? Perhaps more like the shill himself. I can advise anything I want. Right now, I advise the Vega 56 for its performance and the GTX 1070 for efficiency. I think the 56 is a smart buy, regardless of how it performs on the future. I would not bother if anyone disagrees with me if he/she doesn't have a good refutation.
And with confidence, I reckon the Vega 56 will match the 1080 in the future considering AMD's track record. It does not have anything to do with what I advise or what I want people to believe in. I believe in that, you don't have to. Don't advise me to "stop being hopeful".
Factory overclocked Vega 56 models are bound to launch in the near future, and no one in the right mind would rush buying a reference model. Your inflexible sights are not refuting my point that a factory overclocked Vega 56 is a "fairer match". Last but not least, the advise to be sceptical about AMD issuing "golden samples" is a pathetically baseless accusation that I think needs a special level of retardation to say.
Really now with name calling? And besides what is so wrong with saving money? You go ahead and be hopeful that your donations help AMD. But advising others to pay more fore less is the actually what would lead people to believe someone is either are paid by AMD or work for AMD.
I can't be a shill, when I advocate for everyone to get more for their money and pay less in any way possible, and demand, AMD, Intel, nVidia lower their prices. The only gain I get is when I get to pay less for stuff for myself, but I make no money from it. Maximizing bang for the buck is all I am trying to do. It is counter productive when we have fanboys too eager to make donations for unjustified higher prices.
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Avro Arrow
Posts: 3,721 +4,821
TechSpot's OWN testing has shown Ryzen to deliver superior fps per clock compared to Intel over a thirty game testing suite. Furthermore, TechSpot's OWN review of Threadripper calls it the "i9 Killer" and it is. AMD has the current desktop performance crown with the TR-1950X. Anyone who debates this better have some numbers to show because every reviewer has the TR-1950X ahead of the i9-7900X in almost every single relevant benchmark including performance per watt.
The only wins for the i9 come in single-threaded tests that are irrelevant because why would someone pay for an i9 or a TR CPU for single-core operations unless they were nuts? If single-core operations were the mainstay of the potential customer, they'd be looking at something far cheaper like an i7-7700K.
Intel has nothing that can match the processing performance of the TR-1950X at the moment and I'm willing to bet that AMD is sitting on a 20-core TR-1960X and a 24-core TR-1970X since their manufacturing process makes it easy for them to do this. I believe that AMD will likely release it only days before Intel releases the i9-7980XE which will completely spoil it. Since Intel still uses a monolithic manufacturing process, they won't be able to respond in time and the performance crown will remain with AMD. This is of course only speculation on my part but it would fit the situation.
The only wins for the i9 come in single-threaded tests that are irrelevant because why would someone pay for an i9 or a TR CPU for single-core operations unless they were nuts? If single-core operations were the mainstay of the potential customer, they'd be looking at something far cheaper like an i7-7700K.
Intel has nothing that can match the processing performance of the TR-1950X at the moment and I'm willing to bet that AMD is sitting on a 20-core TR-1960X and a 24-core TR-1970X since their manufacturing process makes it easy for them to do this. I believe that AMD will likely release it only days before Intel releases the i9-7980XE which will completely spoil it. Since Intel still uses a monolithic manufacturing process, they won't be able to respond in time and the performance crown will remain with AMD. This is of course only speculation on my part but it would fit the situation.
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Great review Steve. Thanks for banging it out so fast.
"So in a way you might be forced to wait and see how well Vega matures anyway."
True- but then you may as well wait a little longer (AMD fans should be experts at this by now) as Volta is coming out in the next six months (Q1 2018).
I'm also guessing, based on the spec differences between Vega 56 and 64, that the 64 will only be 10-15% faster, so forget about a 1080 Ti challenger. It might even need a little luck just to match the 1080.
"So in a way you might be forced to wait and see how well Vega matures anyway."
True- but then you may as well wait a little longer (AMD fans should be experts at this by now) as Volta is coming out in the next six months (Q1 2018).
I'm also guessing, based on the spec differences between Vega 56 and 64, that the 64 will only be 10-15% faster, so forget about a 1080 Ti challenger. It might even need a little luck just to match the 1080.
Tgard
Posts: 99 +37
Regardless of what "some" (read
The only wins for the i9 come in single-threaded tests that are irrelevant because why would someone pay for an i9 or a TR CPU for single-core operations unless they were nuts? If single-core operations were the mainstay of the potential customer, they'd be looking at something far cheaper like an i7-7700K.
Intel has nothing that can match the processing performance of the TR-1950X at the moment and I'm willing to bet that AMD is sitting on a 20-core TR-1960X and 24-core TR-1970X since their manufacturing process makes it easy for them to do this. I believe that AMD will likely release it only days before Intel releases the i9-7980XE which will completely spoil it. Since Intel still uses a monolithic manufacturing process, they won't be able to respond in time and the performance crown will remain with AMD.
+1
And it is getting a bit tiring seeing the same anti-AMD statements by a commentator in almost every single post or thread that Techspot has posted relating to AMD or Intels cpus or their video cards. Same statements over and over again argued Ad Nauseam in every related post.
AMD does seem to have dropped the ball with pricing a bit here but once the miner's get involved I expect they will get their overpriced price and it will take a while for the price to come down if you can even find the cards to purchase. In the meantime AMD will earn some coin which hopefully will go back into R & D which will let them be more competitive in the Video card arena which is a win for us all.
On a personal note, I have run AMD video cards for the last couple decades until my last video card upgrade and I can attest to the fact that you do get a performance increase as soon as the drivers mature a bit. I went for higher performance and lower power requirements for my last upgrade and that equaled NVidia this time and I have been well pleased with my decision. I still want AMD to be competitive though and hope the "timebomb" doesn't kill them off!
What the heck is this weaselly words about "FPS per clock"? And where is this 30 game tests suite? NO link means this just made up gibberish like fps per clock.
As a matter of fact from Techspot very own:
https://www.techspot.com/review/1348-amd-ryzen-gaming-performance/
You the i7-7700K is the definitive gaming king at this time. This fact is indisputable.
GeforcerFX
Posts: 1,091 +547
The power draw result was surprising to me, other reviews that throw them in to furmark to push the cards to the max have the 56 like 80-90 watts ahead of a 1070. But in a more realistic gaming scenario it's only 40 watts and still less power than the rx 580? Guess that shows there is still some potential performance that amd can tap out of that chip, where as the rx 580 has had the last year and half for driver optimization.
I'm sorry dude, but you clearly are just being silly. The server industry doesn't care about what you just said. You are not making sense at all with the whole "best lap times". Since when did a company care about gaming performance of their servers?
I understand if you dislike it for not being a great gaming product but hating it's compute performance is just weird. I also can't seem to find any of that "deceitful marketing" that you mentioned. Did you imagine it?
And what the hell do you have against miners? I've done mining myself a while ago. It's something that very few can actually do properly and also requires investing huge amounts of money to buy the hardware and run it 24/7. Are you jealous? Is that why you are so salty?
I think he was talking about this: https://www.techspot.com/review/1450-core-i7-vs-ryzen-5-hexa-core/
the OCed 7800x 6 core Intel chip was just equal in gaming compared to the R7 1600. the 4.8GHz 7700K was also just 9% faster than the 4.0GHz 1600.
there's no denying that the 7700k is the best gaming CPU at the moment. Value wise most consider the 1600 to be the winner since you save over 100$ for a much better GPU.
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