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AMD Unveils Radeon RX Vega Series Consumer Graphics Cards Starting At $399 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. Initially, there are four cards in the Radeon RX Vega line-up, the standard air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, a Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition with stylized metal fan shroud, the liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, and the lower-cost Radeon RX Vega 56. At the heart of all Radeon RX Vega series cards is the Vega 10 GPU which is comprised of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process. Vega 10 can reliably reach the 1.7GHz range, whereas AMD's previous gen Fiji hovered around 1GHz. The base GPU clock speed of the air-cooled Vega 64 is 1,247MHz with a boost clock of 1,546MHz. There is 8GB of HBM2 memory on-board that offers up peak bandwidth of 484GB/s. All told, the Radeon RX Vega 64 is capable of 25.3 TFLOPs (half-precision) of compute performance. The Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid-Cooled Edition has the same GPU configuration, but with higher base and boost clocks -- 1,406MHz and 1,677MHz, respectively. The lower cost Radeon RX Vega 56 features the same Vega 10 GPU, but 8 of its CUs have been disabled and its clocks are somewhat lower. Although AMD touts a number of efficiency improvements, the Vega RX series requires some serious power. Vega 56 board power is in the 210 Watt range, while the top-end liquid-cooled card hits 345 Watts. AMD claims top-end Vega cards will be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 series of cards. AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards are expected to ship on August 14th.
When their "low-end" graphics card requires low-end gamers to buy a bigger power supply as the first step, something is wrong.
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I for one will wait for the discount prices to be expected at the end of the current mining hype.
Lots of AMD GPUs will then be sold on the second-hand market, also putting pressure on the prices of new GPUs.
Remember when advertisements for graphics cards talked about what the card could show you rather than how many transistors it had and the processor speed?
What I want to know about a new card is what picture it can put out and to how many monitors of what connection type.
This sounds more like it's advertising a CPU than a graphics card.
That's not a "Consumer Graphics Card". That's a gaming enthusiast card. Consumer cards top out at $150 or so, and do not draw 210W. Hell, most "Consumer Grade" PCs don't even have 8GB of RAM.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The power supply alone makes me think it is
Ive always wondered why spend as much if not more on a PC graphics card as a complete game system will cost (Xbox PlayStation...ect)? I can understand people who do a lot of video rendering and such, but it seems silly to spend that much for gaming with the dedicated systems being cheaper.
also $550 THREADRIPPER quad channel ram and 64 pci-e intel can't touch that.
and shouldn't have. If only I had known that their (nvidia) driver now comes with telemetry, I would have waited for these to be available. AMD clearly has the more serious and more honest product. Even if gaming performance is probably a bit lower.
Mind that "unveils" in this case means a paper launch and the actual video cards will be released after August, 14, 2017. Or even later considering the number of delays to this point.
Given everything that we already know about this AMD's GPU generation one can only wonder why they release these GPUs at all. Underpowered, consuming twice as much power as the nearest competition (~350W vs 180W), costing too much to produce (HBM2) and most likely resulting in a huge write off when the company desperately needs successful competitive products to stay afloat. Consumer Vega is anything but.
I still want to believe that Vega to AMD is like Fermi to NVIDIA and AMD's new generation of GPUs will be actually competitive.
So these cards are near 1080 speeds? Not the 1080 ti's but the slower, older 1080. When can we expect flagship cards from AND that compete with Nvidia's flagship devices?
A year late, and AMD has a part with key specs identical to its two year old Fury chip. The new chip isn't more power efficient than Fury, nor does it do more work per clock. And the two year old Fury chip itself was a disaster, compared to the earlier 290, considering die size and power draw and HBM memory stack.
AMD's new Zen CPU, on the other hnad, literally slaughters the current Intel competition in all key metrics.
Vega reminds us of 'bulldozer', AMD's horrible pre-Zen CPU architecture that cloned Intel's horrible CPU architecture, Netburst. After AMD made the world's first x64 (64-bit x86) CPU and the world's first true x64 dual core, AMD's management became very corrupt and chose to follow Intel's netburst as the simplest management decision that would maximise management bonuses and pensions. Intel, meanwhile, cancelled the putrid netburst, and copied the AMD x64 design- creating the highly successful Core 2 design.
When AMD's bulldozer CPU (very very late) finally appeared, its performance bore no relationship to the appaernetly good specs of the CPU. Later it transpired that all the key memory blocks of the chip were so terrible, it didn't matter how many pipes the core had or how powerful the ALUs were.
I think Vega's memory sub-systems are totally broken as well. On paper Vega is a 'maths monster' (shaders- the units used to give rendered triangles their advanced lighting and material properties). On paper the triangle rate matches Nvidia's best- memory bandwidth is as good- the ROP system (finished pixels) likewise. But in practice the massive die runs slower than Nvidia's much smaller 1080, and uses much more power when doing so. Synthetic benchmarks show the maths power is as advertised. So Vega has to be a horrible STALL monster like bulldozer (stall is when your work units are constantly starved of any work to do).
The saddest fact is that AMD's 480/580 polaris chip is really very good- and AMD could easily have added 50% more performance by building a polaris part with 50% more of everything. This chip would have cost next to nothing to design, could have been ready in 6 months, would cost little to build a card around, would use ordianry cheap memory, and would have been a little better than the Nvidia 1070 card. But the head honcho at AMD's graphic division knew such a project would make his personal Vega chip look like a terrible joke by comparison- so cancelled competing 'big' polaris designs.
AMD's recent GPU history has seen the pointless 285/380 chip, the terrible Fury chip and the terrible Vega chip. in the same time frame AMD delvered just one good chip- the above mentioned 480/580. That's a metric ton of wasted R+D from a company with little money to spend. Meanwhile Nvidia is on a killer streak- most recently with the 1070/1080 and 1080TI. While AMD goes for hopeless unrequired exotic new designs, Nvida just keeps refining a successful old one.
Until AMD sacks the engineers responsible for the broken blocks in Fury and Vega, these engineers will continue to screw up future designs.
A modern GPU from Nvidia or AMD can drive so many 4K displays at the same time (6 in the case of polaris/Vega), no ordinary user of the card would ever need anything close to the real capability. And the connector types are whatever is current and required. Older connectors need special cables and/or convertors. So these pointless specs are no longer front-lined, and more than the 2d 'blitting' capability of the GPU.
The 'CPU' like maths power/memory bandwidth IS the reason why people pay so much for a current GPU- so while YOU may be utterly clueless and haven't updated your graphics card understanding in decades, the real customers need this information.
Boasting about technical ignorance always gets a good 'score' on slashdot- which speaks volumes about many visitors. But then when I began with computers, losers boasted about their ignorance of transistor based RAM, because they thought it a badge of honour to believe magnetic core memory was still in common use a decade after it had become obsolete.
'advanced' games on even the best consoles have lousy framerates and refresh rates when the going gets hard. They lack mosue and keyboard. Their graphics settings are what we call 'low' or 'low-medium' on a PC and look noticably worse in many places. And consoles have much lower resolutions.
On the PC you can experience the best games as nature intended. You can 'mod' games like Skyrim and Fallout to remarkable degrees (and no, the lame limited modding on the consoles doesn't start to compare). And you can rejoice in the games market Steam offers.
If you are lazy, have little time, or are not very smart/technical, consoles are brilliant. If you are a stoner who experiences gaming through the haze of a fogged brain, consoles are brilliant. And if you are a coach potato with zero manual dexterity, consoles are brilliant.
But many gamers want to experience, suprise suprise, ever more amazing game design work at a much higher level. I mean you could watch an 'early' copy of Dunkirk on your phone, or pay more to go see it on an Imax screen. Same film, same story, etc- but are the experiences really comparible?
No thank you. Hell, even the 1060 is about as fast in 4 Honor!!
Face it AMD is done. They killed what was mediocre of ATI at the turn of the decade and never recovered. Drivers are shitty and it reaks of a cheap quality knock off. Not saying this as a troll, but realistically if you ask any ATI/AMD users where Nvidia drivers are uncrashable and just work at launch.
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