AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 official specs and pricing are out

[Evernessince]

He's digging deeper than the Cinebench results everyone keeps drooling over.

Totally reminds me of what AMD did with AoTS and Async Compute, so forgive me if I keep my excitement down until more 3rd party real world tests come out.

I'd have to agree. We definitely need more testing. Since even AMD is only putting Vega against the 1080 I won't be expecting more.

 

[NightAntilli]

So basicly if the performance rumor is true, their highest Card is going to be the AMD equivalent of GTX1080 but consume more power? oh and the GTX1080 is over a year old now bare in mind.

AMD will have to be a good bit cheaper to be appealing, why else would you buy something that consumes more power and has worse Drivers..

Can't that nonsense of AMD having worse drivers die already? They do not have worse drivers.

It's always interesting, the power consumption part... Compare AMD's recent FX CPUs with Intel. Everyone was raving about the oh so huge power consumption and lackluster performance. In comes Ryzen, way more efficient than Intel, and yet, everyone is dead silent on the higher power consumption of Intel. Everyone instead starts focusing on the one thing where AMD is slightly behind; single thread performance, and all the rest is ignored.
The same is true for the GPUs regarding nVidia and AMD. AMD is held to unrealistic standards and nVidia gets a free pass for everything.

 

[CaptainTom]

Can't that nonsense of AMD having worse drivers die already? They do not have worse drivers.

It's always interesting, the power consumption part... Compare AMD's recent FX CPUs with Intel. Everyone was raving about the oh so huge power consumption and lackluster performance. In comes Ryzen, way more efficient than Intel, and yet, everyone is dead silent on the higher power consumption of Intel. Everyone instead starts focusing on the one thing where AMD is slightly behind; single thread performance, and all the rest is ignored.
The same is true for the GPUs regarding nVidia and AMD. AMD is held to unrealistic standards and nVidia gets a free pass for everything.

I would say the apex of Nvidia-review hypocrisy was the GTX 500 and 600 series. People called the 560 Ti "The hero of our times" even though it was just a less efficient HD 5870 launching a year later lol.

Then let's talk about how everyone fawned over Kepler's "Amazing efficiency" even though AMD had been more efficient than Nvidia for 3 straight generations, and in fact GCN was still more efficient than Kepler (Especially as the cards aged).

 

[hahahanoobs]

I would say regardless of how Vega64 ends up, Vega56 will be an excellent card at the very least:

-$399 ($50 cheaper than 1070's)

-At least 10-15% stronger than the 1070

-Freesync is way cheaper (That matters in this price range)

-Sure it uses more energy than the 1070, but 220w is perfectly fine. No one will care.

You're right, the wattage difference is not an issue with this card.
You can't assume a monitor, let alone a FreeSync monitor will be purchased to go with this card.
I'll have to say I'm going to wait for the official reviews before I say anything more about its performance.

 

[Flebbert]

Not really. Most people won't notice the few extra dollars off their power bill. Yeah, it could be better but it most certainly isn't the deal you make it out to be.



There's a couple assumptions in your post. First, HBM2 is cheaper to produce than HBM. All your thoughts on HBM2 yield and costs are nothing but that, thoughts. That is, unless you have an industry source none of us have access to. Your second assumption is that AMD only releases cards for gaming when in fact a large portion of Vega is focused on compute and professionals. It's worth noting that HBC is huge for many professionals.

So yes while Vega isn't the Messiah of gaming let's not boiling everything down to "this card sucks if it can't game better then everything else".

But it does suck. Vega RX uses more power for the same performance as the tried and true GTX 1070 and 1080. There is absolutely no reason to buy Vega in any form. Period.

As for the professional side, even Linus said Vega FE was a "bad product." He may have even called it hot trash.

I don't disagree with you this time about Vega but I will say it is just not designed for a gaming market.

Reading a few reviews online Vega is a powerhouse when it comes to deep learning and beats a Tesla P100 in a lot of scenarios.

Problem with making a card that is meant to do everything where gaming was the last thing on that list.

 

[Flebbert]

Is it just me or the prices don't look amazing and those power consumption numbers don't help?

At the end of the day, we still don't know the performance. It seems like Vega64 Air will be like <10% stronger than a stock 1080 for a tad less money (Remember 1080's are still a little inflated due to crypto). It will also effectively have double the VRAM capacity due to how HBM2 stores data. I would say that will make it sell alright. Many people would trade some efficiency for double the VRAM and access to Freesync.


The problem is there still are a ton of unknowns:

-Some info says the LE was compared to the 1080, but other stuff says it is actually the air version being compared.

-It is confirmed by AMD that Tiled Rasterization is STILL NOT ENABLED, but that it will be by launch day. This could add a decent amount of performance. However it still seems like AMD is having trouble programming it.

The tiled Rasterization not being enabled is interesting and could make a considerable difference but this is a whole new design so how much difference that would be.

 

[Johnnyblaze1957]

Me thinks AMD will have a greater battle in the graphics card area to beat Nvidia or equal them than they did with Intel in the cpu battle.

 

[Evernessince]

Me thinks AMD will have a greater battle in the graphics card area to beat Nvidia or equal them than they did with Intel in the cpu battle.

Nvidia hasn't been sitting on it's hands the last decade. It's thanks to the Nvidia AMD rivalry that graphics cards have come so far compared to CPUs. The difference between Intel and Nvidia is that Intel bribes and threatens to control the market, Nvidia actually releases good product. Intel would have never had reigned over the market for as long as it did if it's massive "rebate" program didn't force OEMs into selling Intel only. In fact, there was a point in time where more than half of Dell's profits were from Intel "rebates" alone. This was when AMD actually had a better architecture then Intel, so Intel essentially spiked AMD's best years with a boatload of cache and illegal tactics.

 

[Boilerhog146]

AMD is quite literally kicking intel in the ol nut-sak, when it comes to the cpu, the gpu OTOH, will just be ok .I see major shortages as the miners grab them up as well the few fanboy preorders .but no need to upgrade from a 1070 0r 1080 with this run.but the ati fan in me, may just grab one when prices start to drop ,which would be pretty soon after launch,Rysen price is dropping allready.though imo vega is little more than a mid-range card using high-range power and price .an upgrade indeed ,from their last generation.

 

[hood6558]

Nothing has changed - AMD still enjoys their much-deserved underdog status in the CPU and GPU markets, for the same reasons as always - they ARE the underdog, as in the competitor with the worse chance of winning. Even if Ryzen could beat Intel in IPC and single-core, and Vega could beat a 1080 Ti in gaming, AMD would find a way to lose money, market share, or both. Because their products are marketed by geeks who have zero business sense, aimed at gamer/geek customers who think somehow that a capitalist corporation cares deeply about them and has their best interest at heart.

 

[Forebode]

Not really. Most people won't notice the few extra dollars off their power bill. Yeah, it could be better but it most certainly isn't the deal you make it out to be.



There's a couple assumptions in your post. First, HBM2 is cheaper to produce than HBM. All your thoughts on HBM2 yield and costs are nothing but that, thoughts. That is, unless you have an industry source none of us have access to. Your second assumption is that AMD only releases cards for gaming when in fact a large portion of Vega is focused on compute and professionals. It's worth noting that HBC is huge for many professionals.

So yes while Vega isn't the Messiah of gaming let's not boiling everything down to "this card sucks if it can't game better then everything else".

But it does suck. Vega RX uses more power for the same performance as the tried and true GTX 1070 and 1080. There is absolutely no reason to buy Vega in any form. Period.

As for the professional side, even Linus said Vega FE was a "bad product." He may have even called it hot trash.

The only way I'd upgrade to this generation.. If, for whatever reason, there was some massive gains with a full amd cpu/gpu configuration. I'm actually surprised this isn't the case. I'm not saying they make 2 versions of a cards.. but just a bonus element that could help amd cpu/gpu combiniations.

 

[CaptainTom]

You're right, the wattage difference is not an issue with this card.
You can't assume a monitor, let alone a FreeSync monitor will be purchased to go with this card.
I'll have to say I'm going to wait for the official reviews before I say anything more about its performance.

Absolutely. None of us really know the performance.

My gut tells me that (on launch day) Vega64air will be on average 5-10% above the 1080, and then the Liquid version will be ~10% stronger than that (So ~7-10% weaker than the 1080 Ti). After that Vega56 should be 16% weaker than Vega64, and that would place it easily 15%+ stronger than the 1070 (It will likely be within 10% of the more expensive 1080, and hence why I think it will be a great card).

Now of this talk is just assuming AMD optimizes it's drivers a bit, but that TBR is still not enabled (Or makes no difference). If TBR really isn't enabled yet, I believe it will bring a further 20-30% performance increase. However this will likely not be fully realized until at least the December Crimson drivers. Keep in mind that it took AMD the majority of a year to optimize GCN's memory system, and when they did the 7970 crushed the 680.