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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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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.
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.
Navi, so Q3/4 2018 at the earliest, might slip to Q1/2 2019 depending on 7nm process. That being said, for gamers who don't play twitch FPS's competitively or are rocking higher refresh rate 4k monitors, Vega looks to be a very good solution as the framerate band is narrower than the GTX 1080.
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.
'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?