Radeon RX Vega GPUs are next to impossible to buy: Is AMD hitting pause or simply prioritizing...

[Eddo22]

I'm first gonna say that I'm a die hard AMD fan. I don't like Nvidia cards and would never buy them.

Now, AMD has really screwed with gamers this round. They have screwed with us so badly that I'm practically willing to buy Nvidia if there happened to be a fairly high end card available for a decent price.

This is a really dirty scam Software city is running. https://www.softwarecity.ca/item/ROG-STRIX-RXVEGA56-O8G-GAMING.html

"This manufacturer is not committing to any estimated delivery date nor are they guaranteeing pricing. Softwarecity.ca will continue to accept backorders for this product, and will continue to fulfill orders as stock becomes available. It is our understanding that price increases will be coming from this manufacturer. We reserve the right to advise of any price increases prior to shipping. You will have the option to cancel your order at this time."

So they are telling me that the $8xx price I paid for a Vega 56 is going to actually be attemptedly sold to me for $12xx+. They should work for the Government. Scam artistry at it's finest.

For the record this isn't only for Asus cards, it's for all cards from AMD and Nvidia.

 

[yRaz]

There was no significant problem until a few months ago. People have bought pretty much any GPU they wanted for the past 5 years. Perhaps availability wasn't always great, but certainly we never had this inflation of prices or total inability to buy GPU's.

that right there is absolute BS, the shortages began with the 400 series 2 years ago where, when it was difficult to find AMD GPUS months after launch and if you did they'd be over priced for what they were. It didn't make sense for gamers to go with them but the hash rate of AMD GPUS was still higher than similarly priced nVidia GPUS. 500 series rolled around and it actually became very hard to find them in stock with the 400 series selling out almost entirely. Now I remember mid 2017 was when the actual shortages started. you couldn't find either amd GPU so people had to move to nVidia. People found the price:hash ratio of the 1060/1060ti very compelling so amature miners started to pick them up. As those started to go out of stock miners eventually moved up to the 1070's and eventually 1080ti's like I had to.

Nobody plans on widespread insanity, and unfortunately the mining craze hit people hard.

no, they didn't, but a steady increase in demand over a number of years is enough time to atleast ease into the craze. Now we are hear and I would put money on the fact that both GPU manufactures will not make places to increase production and the miners will scoop up all the cards leaving gamers empty handed, again.

I read and understand quite well. And I don't know if it's lucky that you don't respond. I do want you to respond to that other post, because if you really can answer those questions satisfactorily, then I might reconsider what I think about mining, but until then I'll continue to think that you're terribly naive, ignoring the facts, and trying not to see all the drawbacks of crypto mining (which are a lot bigger than the benefits).

Rest and feel well. I'll be waiting for the answers.

I don't remember which post you're talking about in particular, link it to me. I will say that there are draw backs to everything, but after weighing the risks and already getting a return on my investment I plan on investing more money in GPU's.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Radeon has been on life support since Polaris.
Too little too late has been their motto. If AMD can afford to hit pause, then their next GPU better be freaking amazing!

 

[Evernessince]

I wasn't expecting AMD to offer a good supply of Vega64/56 from the first Frontier card benchmarks. For two reasons. First AMD wasn't seem to be making any profits and second, gamers would still prefer an Nvidia card, offering the same/better/or even much better performance at the same price and with lower power consumption. Vega was a card to put AMD closer to the top places of benchmark charts, as Titan was created from Nvidia for the same reason and also to create new higher price points.

Mmm, Vega 56 was better performing than the 1070 and was significantly more power efficient than the 64. Vega is a very efficient architecture, as evidenced by all it's mobile wins. It just doesn't do well at all at higher clocks, just like Ryzen.

I'm first gonna say that I'm a die hard AMD fan. I don't like Nvidia cards and would never buy them.

Now, AMD has really screwed with gamers this round. They have screwed with us so badly that I'm practically willing to buy Nvidia if there happened to be a fairly high end card available for a decent price.

This is a really dirty scam Software city is running. https://www.softwarecity.ca/item/ROG-STRIX-RXVEGA56-O8G-GAMING.html

"This manufacturer is not committing to any estimated delivery date nor are they guaranteeing pricing. Softwarecity.ca will continue to accept backorders for this product, and will continue to fulfill orders as stock becomes available. It is our understanding that price increases will be coming from this manufacturer. We reserve the right to advise of any price increases prior to shipping. You will have the option to cancel your order at this time."

So they are telling me that the $8xx price I paid for a Vega 56 is going to actually be attemptedly sold to me for $12xx+. They should work for the Government. Scam artistry at it's finest.

For the record this isn't only for Asus cards, it's for all cards from AMD and Nvidia.

AMD has nothing to do with the current pricing. Both AMD and Nvidia cards are 2 - 3x their retail prices. You could switch to Nvidia but you'd still be paying massively marked up prices.

 

[dj2017]

Mmm, Vega 56 was better performing than the 1070 and was significantly more power efficient than the 64. Vega is a very efficient architecture, as evidenced by all it's mobile wins. It just doesn't do well at all at higher clocks, just like Ryzen.

And you need that higher frequency to compete with Nvidia's top cards today. Making it a necessity to push the frequency where the architecture loses any efficiency advantage it has. The same happened with Fiji, where the Nano cards where performing beautifully compared to the Fury cards at much lower power consumption. But at least in that case, Fury X was competing with the Ti model.
As for Vega56 against 1070, well... Nvidia easily counter it with 1070 Ti and at the same time AMD couldn't sell an 8GB HBM2 card at such a low price and at very high quantities anyway. I think they realized at the end that Vega was not for gamers. Will have to wait until Navi. And even then we can't be sure that AMD will come back in the hi end market to challenge Nvidia's best. But it will take away market share thanks to the new APUs and the collaboration with Intel.

 

[Evernessince]

And you need that higher frequency to compete with Nvidia's top cards today. Making it a necessity to push the frequency where the architecture loses any efficiency advantage it has. The same happened with Fiji, where the Nano cards where performing beautifully compared to the Fury cards at much lower power consumption. But at least in that case, Fury X was competing with the Ti model.
As for Vega56 against 1070, well... Nvidia easily counter it with 1070 Ti and at the same time AMD couldn't sell an 8GB HBM2 card at such a low price and at very high quantities anyway. I think they realized at the end that Vega was not for gamers. Will have to wait until Navi. And even then we can't be sure that AMD will come back in the hi end market to challenge Nvidia's best. But it will take away market share thanks to the new APUs and the collaboration with Intel.

Just a heads up, after the recent Major drive update, Vega 56 beats the 1070 Ti in a 26 game average. Even before the update the 1070 Ti only tied it. Not like you can buy either right now anyways though.

 

[Lionvibez]

Worth a search on newegg Canada website, they have a gigabyte vega 56 and 64 in stock ,they ship from the u.s. the vega 56 is priced currently at $1249.00 and the vega 64 is sitting at $1489.00 cdn.. Hurry.

As I posted above you can get a Vega 64 in Canada for $950.

Why would anyone buy it from Newegg canada for $1489??

lmao hurry!

 

[Shadowboxer]

You would have to be pretty Naive to believe that AMD haven’t jacked up the prices to retailers. AMD have clearly given up on the gamers market. They are even spending money developing better drivers and software for miners. Miners don’t fanboy like pc gamers do, cards are a tool to them, it’s a business, they won’t start filling comments sections with angry comments if the price is a little higher than they would like. If anything, all that’s happened over the last few months just tells me that AMD are no different to any other money grabbing corporation. And good for them, Vega would have been a poor seller in the gaming space, at least this way they can please their shareholders and survive.

Personally I can see AMD becoming a mining card company. There is far more money for them to do so.

Also, to anyone calling me a fanboy I would happily pick up a Vega 64 at MSRP right now. I’m unlucky enough to be using 4K with a 5 year old graphics card with 3gb of RAM, I am desperate for a card and anything at MSRP is tempting. I might even buy that Star Wars Titan XP, it’s £999 off Nvidia direct which makes it cheaper than Vega and about the same price as a 1080ti!

 

[Evernessince]

You would have to be pretty Naive to believe that AMD haven’t jacked up the prices to retailers. AMD have clearly given up on the gamers market. They are even spending money developing better drivers and software for miners. Miners don’t fanboy like pc gamers do, cards are a tool to them, it’s a business, they won’t start filling comments sections with angry comments if the price is a little higher than they would like. If anything, all that’s happened over the last few months just tells me that AMD are no different to any other money grabbing corporation. And good for them, Vega would have been a poor seller in the gaming space, at least this way they can please their shareholders and survive.

Personally I can see AMD becoming a mining card company. There is far more money for them to do so.

Also, to anyone calling me a fanboy I would happily pick up a Vega 64 at MSRP right now. I’m unlucky enough to be using 4K with a 5 year old graphics card with 3gb of RAM, I am desperate for a card and anything at MSRP is tempting. I might even buy that Star Wars Titan XP, it’s £999 off Nvidia direct which makes it cheaper than Vega and about the same price as a 1080ti!

Well first AMD nor Nvidia sell directly to retailers. Before calling other people naive you should make sure to check your facts.

The rest of your comment is ridiculous, like AMD becoming a mining company. There's no basis to suggest that AMD have even remotely considered this and that's a good thing. Mining is far from consistent.

"Also, to anyone calling me a fanboy I would happily pick up a Vega 64 at MSRP right now"

No one has even called you out on being a fanboy. You're like the guy who knows he's done something wrong and states that he clearly didn't do that very specific thing wrong. This is more or less an admission that you do favor a side. I have never heard a person considering buying a product to use this line, ever. Not that it matter, if you favor a side just come out and say it. It isn't illegal to like Nvidia or AMD. It's only a pain when people refuse to admit it.

 

[ET3D]

I mean this post.

I will say that there are draw backs to everything, but after weighing the risks and already getting a return on my investment I plan on investing more money in GPU's.

I know, and that's the thing. Crypto fans are in it for the 'free money'. At this level, sure, it works. That doesn't make it conceptually good, and, in fact, it ensures that all the greedy *******s flock to it. The problem is that said people then try to argue that crypto is good.

It's not that I'm against crypto in general. Blockchain is certainly an interesting and useful technology, and there are some interesting ideas in crypto itself, like what Ether has done. It's just that mining has proved to be a terrible idea, and I find it baffling that people still defend it.

 

[shark975]

I have an issue with this:

"Let's be honest, on the gaming front, AMD is being bested by Nvidia at almost every price point."

Huh? that's factually incorrect. Vega 56 is usually as fast or faster than 1070/1070Ti at the same/lower MSRP, same goes for Vega 64 vs 1080, same for 580 vs GTX 1060, etc. At least, if we ignore the whole crypto thing and pretend cards were available, which there's no accounting for.

Maybe you meant the heat/power issues of Vega? IMO it's only a dealbreaker for Vega 64 (and that's speaking only for myself, some may not have an issue with Vega 64 heat/power, and factually power draw is not the main factor in a video card, performance is (actually you can say AMD is more efficient in power draw at mining, FLOPS, etc for example, for each watt of power drawn, AMD is more efficient at those tasks). It's just Nvidia has more money to pay off developers so it's architecture is somewhat faster in games so AMD had to ramp Vega 64 clocks too high to be competitive.

But yeah I'd be fine with a Vega 56 or below for gaming, they are reasonable in heat/power and that's all that matters.

 

[Athlonite]

Found only one retailer here in New Zealand with Vege 56 but they wanted $1399 for it buggar that

on another note I did find a place that had 30+ RX580's in stock

 

[hahahanoobs]

Looks like Ms. Su is ramping up production and blaming the lack of GDDR5 and HBM for the shortages.

I'm not sure I believe that quite yet. We'll see how many SKU's are available in the next 3-4 months.

 

[Shadowboxer]

Well first AMD nor Nvidia sell directly to retailers. Before calling other people naive you should make sure to check your facts.

The rest of your comment is ridiculous, like AMD becoming a mining company. There's no basis to suggest that AMD have even remotely considered this and that's a good thing. Mining is far from consistent.

"Also, to anyone calling me a fanboy I would happily pick up a Vega 64 at MSRP right now"

No one has even called you out on being a fanboy. You're like the guy who knows he's done something wrong and states that he clearly didn't do that very specific thing wrong. This is more or less an admission that you do favor a side. I have never heard a person considering buying a product to use this line, ever. Not that it matter, if you favor a side just come out and say it. It isn't illegal to like Nvidia or AMD. It's only a pain when people refuse to admit it.

Sounds like I touched a nerve mate. Are you ok? It is naive to believe AMD arent trying to make money out of huge demand for their products, if AMD can sell their products to the retailers for more then why wouldn’t they?

And AMD becoming a mining company? Why not? Currently 19 out of 20 home GPUs are made by Nvidia according to the steam survey, so they aren’t doing very well at all at making graphics cards. So why not enter a new market where they have the edge, there is less competition and the customers are willing to pay more?

I haven’t done anything wrong, I’m just very aware that there are some very militant AMD fanboys on here like yourself, who react like you just did whenever anyone ever implies that AMD might have not have acted in the complete interests of gamers.

Personally I would respect AMD less if they didn’t markup their products to the retailers in this environment, they are there to make money you know. Not to please fanboys like yourself.

 

[Evernessince]

Sounds like I touched a nerve mate. Are you ok? It is naive to believe AMD arent trying to make money out of huge demand for their products, if AMD can sell their products to the retailers for more then why wouldn’t they?

And AMD becoming a mining company? Why not? Currently 19 out of 20 home GPUs are made by Nvidia according to the steam survey, so they aren’t doing very well at all at making graphics cards. So why not enter a new market where they have the edge, there is less competition and the customers are willing to pay more?

I haven’t done anything wrong, I’m just very aware that there are some very militant AMD fanboys on here like yourself, who react like you just did whenever anyone ever implies that AMD might have not have acted in the complete interests of gamers.

Personally I would respect AMD less if they didn’t markup their products to the retailers in this environment, they are there to make money you know. Not to please fanboys like yourself.

lol, so you reply to my comment by making an assumption. Brilliant, deflect and avoid. I guess I expected too much.

 

[Shadowboxer]

lol, so you reply to my comment by making an assumption. Brilliant, deflect and avoid. I guess I expected too much.

Lol, whatever pal. I understand that you are upset because AMD might not be acting in the best interest of its gaming consumers.

And whether AMD directly sell to retailers or not is irrelevant. This is you trying to deflect from my point, it’s splitting hairs. AMD have final control over the price of their chips right now, nobody else makes graphics silicon that can hash as efficicently as AMD. My point was that they would be foolish not to mark their prices up in the face of demand. Or in other words, it would be naive to assume they wouldn’t or that they can’t. Of course I have no doubt that you probably believe that AMD arent making any extra money out of this. Despite the fact that there is fishy stock shortages of Vega compared to frontier edition, not to mention the strong financial results AMD have just posted. You probably genuinely believe it’s all evil retailers putting the markups on the products and hoarding profits. Because your darling AMD would never try and capitalise on demand, especially if it trod on the toes of their relatively small gaming market share and gave them strong financial results.

Do I really need to remind you that AMD are a for profit limited corporation who have shareholders to please? They aren’t a gamers charity, these guys are out to make as much money as they can. And if they were stupid enough to ignore the massive opportunity of current serious demand for their products then if I were an investor I’d most certainly look elsewhere. And it certainly wouldn’t bode well for AMDs future.

 

[Jimster480]

This has happened because AMD cards are so good for mining. In the world of crypto we need many graphics cards!
Since crypto is becoming more and more mainstream people are buying GPU's to support cyrpto but also because if your graphics card mines crypto and you aren't even into crypto you can still recoup the cost. Well AMD's KW/Hash ratio is very good (much better than Nvidia in most cases) and therefore people will deal with less FPS in certain titles (because even the Vega 64 has caught up to the 1080 in most everything now) to have a essentially "free" GPU.
Meaning that these GPU's are now appealing to average people aswell who can see that they can recoup their costs over night.
But big mining operations are interested in buying as many of these as possible.

 

[Evernessince]

Lol, whatever pal. I understand that you are upset because AMD might not be acting in the best interest of its gaming consumers.

And whether AMD directly sell to retailers or not is irrelevant. This is you trying to deflect from my point, it’s splitting hairs. AMD have final control over the price of their chips right now, nobody else makes graphics silicon that can hash as efficicently as AMD. My point was that they would be foolish not to mark their prices up in the face of demand. Or in other words, it would be naive to assume they wouldn’t or that they can’t. Of course I have no doubt that you probably believe that AMD arent making any extra money out of this. Despite the fact that there is fishy stock shortages of Vega compared to frontier edition, not to mention the strong financial results AMD have just posted. You probably genuinely believe it’s all evil retailers putting the markups on the products and hoarding profits. Because your darling AMD would never try and capitalise on demand, especially if it trod on the toes of their relatively small gaming market share and gave them strong financial results.

Do I really need to remind you that AMD are a for profit limited corporation who have shareholders to please? They aren’t a gamers charity, these guys are out to make as much money as they can. And if they were stupid enough to ignore the massive opportunity of current serious demand for their products then if I were an investor I’d most certainly look elsewhere. And it certainly wouldn’t bode well for AMDs future.

When you are making false claims about who is raising prices, yes it does matter.

"AMD have final control over the price of their chips right now"

Once again, another completely false claim. There are redistributors, AIBs, and Retailers that all take a bite after AMD.

Your assumption that AMD is my "darling" couldn't be more funny. Vega sucked, I own a 1080 Ti, and AMD haven't been good in the GPU market since the 200 series, and that's just good, not top dog.

But please continue to shoot off names and assumptions to try to cover up obvious bias. It is amusing.

 

[JMike]

Today the video cards are the way to go to crypto mine. Tomorrow something else, somewhere, will become the new "cool kid in town". Everbody on the planet will want to switch to that and replace their obsolete video cards. That day, there will be more video cards for sale on eBay than gamers to buy them on the whole planet. Today you are paying a video card 3x it's real msrp but tomorrow you might get 3 of them for the price of one while the sellers will be desperate to sell them...

 

[Boilerhog146]

Worth a search on newegg Canada website, they have a gigabyte vega 56 and 64 in stock ,they ship from the u.s. the vega 56 is priced currently at $1249.00 and the vega 64 is sitting at $1489.00 cdn.. Hurry.

As I posted above you can get a Vega 64 in Canada for $950.

Why would anyone buy it from Newegg canada for $1489??

lmao hurry!

it was sarc. but I guess you didn't get that ,who in their right mind would even pay 950.00? I paid 729.00 for my Extreme Gaming 1080. I can sell it for 1100.00 ,but I wouldn't...I guess I'm just not a very good capitalist.

 

[Lionvibez]

it was sarc. but I guess you didn't get that ,who in their right mind would even pay 950.00? I paid 729.00 for my Extreme Gaming 1080. I can sell it for 1100.00 ,but I wouldn't...

Anyone with a dead gpu that won't wait for prices to be stable.

 

[Boilerhog146]

Anyone with a dead gpu that won't wait for prices to be stable.

Any miner with a dead GPU that can't wait for prices to stabilize.there fixed that.
most that have a GPU, have an older GPU for just such an occasion. but a miner needs that gpu back in service..now.

 

[BadThad]

Good article, fun to read. The situation is beyond ridiculous. I'm patting myself on the back for picking up an MSI RX 480 Armor a few days after release for $150 (after rebate)! They're selling used on ebay for $400+ today!

 

[Evernessince]

Good article, fun to read. The situation is beyond ridiculous. I'm patting myself on the back for picking up an MSI RX 480 Armor a few days after release for $150 (after rebate)! They're selling used on ebay for $400+ today!

Heck, that is a good deal even before this whole fiasco.

 

[Mango2Go]

It doesn't matter if it far behind, or close to the competition. It's behind and gamers also like to benchmark and show off where they spend $500-$700. So if they are not big fans of AMD, they will go with the Nvidia option. AMD knows that and as a company that tries to make money, it will not start giving away hardware at single digit, or zero, or even negative profit margins. They are not Intel to start throwing billions in an effort to maintain a market share, or get into a new market.

Vega was meant for professionals. Koduri probably was hoping to get 1.7GHz or more out of it, without first getting in the "extremely bad efficiency" territory. It couldn't be done, so it wasn't the gaming card many where hopping to be. Not being fast enough meant "1080 price range" not "1080 Ti price range". And that was the end of it. The only way to promote it was as a package with a Freesync monitor against an Nvidia card and the much more expensive GSync version of the same monitor.

As for Vega's technologies. Not going to happen. When you don't feel/want/need to sell cards to gamers, you don't throw money into Vega's specific technologies. At least not as much as you should. And even then, if Vega needs special programming to beat Nvidia GTX 1080 without Gameworks and stuff, that's bad. There where articles a few weeks ago about primitive shaders support getting canceled. Also if you see how badly RX 400 series and Fury cards are getting beaten from RX 500 series cards, it's obvious that AMD is starting to follow Nvidia's manual here." Optimize only for the latest series".

AMD will sell to miners and professionals because they don;t have to invest more money to do so. They can't sell to gamers and they aren't going to try selling to gamers because it is too expensive(low price for the cards, plenty of dollars to developers to optimize their games for GCN).

You are NOT going to believe this, but I am FULL AMD. Just prefer to be realistic when expressing an opinion. You have to realize that you own phrase "a Vega over a 1080" shows the problem. There is NO "Ti" in that phrase.

I don't bother if you are AMD or Nvidia fan (but I don't doubt what you say), but I also believe that people wouldn't buy AMD cards if they were better.... (They refused to buy the 290x cards which stomped the 7xx series into the ground). And actually is Vega at 1080 Niveau no problem at all... as long as it isn't more expensive than the 1080 (which sadly is the case atm). Not everyone is looking for an enthusiast GPU, buying a Vega for UVP is fine for a lot of people I think. But to be honest, 1080ti and Titan xyz are the only enthusiast GPUs around at the moment because of the low usage of Vega features. 1080 and Vega are high end chips, and as far as I mind to remember there is even a bigger Vega chip on the way. Well, I actually start to get off topic again,the only thing I wanted to express with my previous post was to point out that it's not fair to brand RX Vega the slower card anyway since it has shown that it got the potential to get to 1080ti niveau for a 1080 UVP. I never wanted to pursue someone Vega would be better than a 1080ti or something similar. I am just tired of reading posts like Nividia card A/B/C/D is just faster than Vega because this kind of attitude is the reason why AMD won't stand a chance anyway. If the first argument about a new AMD GPU feature will be "won't be used anyway", developers don't even got a reason to implement it since we show that people don't want them to.... And primitive shader aren't canceled, the "driver2go" support is canceled. but that's the same as excpecting Nividia to implement Voxel Based Lighting on driver level... but primitive shaders will come as an API which actually should be fine since it is fine for most of the Nividia features.

And last but not least, I am totally fine with AMD making money with miners and professionals instead of wasting money on products which the retailers sell for double of the intended price. I totally see that AMD can get more out of the Frontier Editions due to their higher UVPs and honestly I think I would do the same in their situation.