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AMD Launches Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56, Taking On GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 (hothardware.com)

Posted by msmash on from the competition-heating-up dept.

MojoKid writes: AMD has finally launched its Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards today, based on the company's next generation Vega 10 GPU architecture. There are three base card specs announced, though there are four cards total, with a Limited Edition air-cooled card as well. Three of the cards have 64 NGCs (Next Generation Compute Units) with 4096 stream processors, while Radeon RX Vega 56 is comprised of 56 NCGs with 3584 SPs. Base clocks range from roughly 1150 to 1400MHz, with boost clocks from 1470MHz to 1670MHz or so. All cards come with 8GB of HBM2 and sport 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth, except for Vega 56, which has a bit less, at 410GB/s. They are power-hungry as well, ranging from the 345 Watt liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, to the 295 Watt air-cooled RX Vega 64 and 210 Watt Radeon RX Vega 56. Performance-wise, Radeon RX Vega 64 is neck-and-neck with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, winning some and losing some, with flashes of strength in DirectX 12-based games and benchmarks. Vega 64 also maintains generally better minimum frame rates versus GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 56 is a more credible midrange threat that handily out-performs a GeForce GTX 1070 across the board. In DX12 gaming, Radeon RX Vega 56 stretches its lead over the similarly-priced GTX 1070. Both cards, however, are more power-hungry, louder and run hotter than NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 64 cards will retail for $499 (Liquid Cooled cards at $699), while Radeon RX Vega 56 drops in at $399. All cards should be available at retail starting today.

9 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. only 15months late by arbiter1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Only took AMD 15 months to finally get out a gpu to compete. Which means nivida has had 15months to develop a new gpu to stomp on them.

    1. Re:only 15months late by aliquis · · Score: 2

      What's new? AMD has been playing catch up in the APU world for a long time. Who knows though, it might be that Nivida isn't quite ready to squash them with a new GPU offering just yet...

      No. AMD has been arguably leading in APUs.

      But these aren't APUs. These are GPUs. And AMD has up Polaris & Pascal (this gen) kept up. Their R9 290 card for instance used more power but it kept up in performance and offered a pretty compelling package for the price. With Polaris what AMD managed to do was to drop the power consumption and keep the performance but Nvidia already had the lower power consumption and upped the performance.

      The situation now though is that Nvidia Volta is likely near whereas AMD Navi likely isn't and as soon as Volta is out that will leave AMD still just competing in low and mid-range just as with Polaris vs Pascal.

      What AMD also managed to do during this time was to about catch up with Zen vs Intel and of course also develop their combined chips for gaming consoles and APUs.

      AMD don't seem to have been able to keep up with both Intel and Nvidia in respective field but that are also worth less and sell less of each of those products than their competitors and likely spend less R&D money into it. Of course AMD doesn't have to spend money in fabrication since they have branched off Global foundries so that part likely shouldn't be counted for Intel, then again AMD have to spend for it from someone else and don't earn from their manufacturing there either so .. Especially before I think they paid for chip manufacturing capacity they didn't use because of lack of demand on their products.

      I wish they were competitive since FreeSync monitors cost less but 6 dB more noise and 40+ more watt power consumption kinda matter too.

      Can't expect Navi "short" from now I guess since they are just launching Vega.

    2. Re:only 15months late by PIBM · · Score: 2

      Humm, the price I paid for my ti is inline with the announced price for the V64 wc edition. I had managed a pre-order at 100$ less for the strix OC editition so I really can`t complain for the price paid. Beside, if I decided to sell the BTC it generated on nicehash since my purchase, it would be more than paid back.

    3. Re:only 15months late by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yeah, the basic consensus seems to be...

      The 56 isn't a bad card. In theory a bit pricier than the 1070, but we'll see what the miners do to the respective prices when it actually hits the shelves. Performance is mid-way between the 1070 and 1080. Power consumption is high, but if you're not worried about that, then this is a gaming card that for certain given budgets will be the rational purchase.

      The 64 aircooled is in theory pricier than the 1080. It offers a very similar level of performance to the 1080, but with much higher power consumption. There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.

      The 64 watercooled looks like an absolute disaster. Prices are comparable to the 1080 Ti, but with a level of performance only very slightly better than the base 1080. In addition, various sites have reported issues with the sample cards they were sent. PCGamer's had nasty coil-whine. Eurogamer reported that their card was overloading a 1000W PSU and that they had to switch to a 1200W to keep it stable. God only knows why anybody would want to pay almost as much as you pay for a 1080 Ti for a card with significantly lower performance and possible "issues".

      Nvidia's Volta cards probably aren't coming out tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the first wave of consumer cards in 6 months time.

    4. Re: only 15months late by PIBM · · Score: 2

      I'm mining altcoins, some autoselling to BTC. A 1070@60% power yields 32MH/s ETH, selling those at 0.11 BTC per was great too :) The 1080TI has mostly been doing LBRY and equihash, some decred and lyra2.. Best days I have recorded were yielding 25 USD on the 1080TI, not too long and the card was paid off.

      I haven`t tried any asic as reselling them is not good at all, while video cards prices were only going up, now down so it was an easy way out should I have wanted to.

  2. Efficiency? by yoink! · · Score: 2

    Is it reasonable to discuss computing performance without the inclusion of efficiency?

    RX Vega 64: 345 Watts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:AMD_Radeon_RX_Vega)
    1080 (Titan XP): 250 Watts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_10_series)

      I have no skin in the game other than competition is necessary in this market and I'd love to see ATI, oops, AMD, perform better than it has recently.

    1. Re:Efficiency? by Jeslijar · · Score: 2

      If you're a gamer are you going to care about a few bucks on your electric bill or a difference of 30% in frames per second?

      With the way solar is trending... electricity costs are going to be a null factor in the future. The best use for ultra-efficiency is mobile gaming. Inefficient, powerful and cheap is perfect for desktop gaming... which is the point of these big GPUs.

      AMD is obviously behind in tech, this round of CPUs and GPUs are the best they can do and to be honest it might be the best move they've made since the AMD boom in the late 90s / early 2000s IIRC

  3. Miners already bought them up by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    You can buy one on ebay for $1200

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  4. Re: After the AMD 7970 and id Software's Rage... by Type44Q · · Score: 2

    I hated Nvidia because they killed 3DFX

    3Dfx killed 3Dfx through a slew of bad decisions, though primarily their disregard for T&L ("Transform and Lighting" - essentially polygon acceleration in hardware).