PCWorld Vega FE demo.

[ravenshrike]

And here...we...go...

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3202659/components-graphics/hands-on-amds-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-vs-nvidia-titan-xp.html

 

 

Pretty interesting. In pro applications, the Vega FE appears 25-50% slower depending on application than the P6000 but the P6000 costs 5-6 times more. Given the ubiquity of PCI-E lanes on Threadripper, they seem to be extending their plan of knocking out the low-to mid end use cases in the CPU territory directly to the GPU territory. It's actually quite elegant.

 

 

There should be info on the gaming side of Vega at Siggraph 2017.

 

 

[WereCat]

So EPYC with its 100+ lanes with multiple VEGA FE cards for the price of single P6000?

 

I mean, it makes sense for AMD to go this route but I am really interested mainly in the gaming VEGA cards.

[leadeater]

It's also worth saying that in the professional usages the Vega FE was significantly faster than the Titan Xp, good choice if that is the work loads you do but don't go buying one of these to play games on wait for the gaming cards.

[ravenshrike]

Just now, leadeater said:

It's also worth saying that in the professional usages the Vega FE was significantly faster than the Titan Xp, good choice if that is the work loads you do but don't go buying one of these to play games on wait for the gaming cards.

It's actually pretty interesting in that he wasn't able to tell the difference between the Vega and Titan. Figure there can't be more than a 20 FPS difference or so there if that's the case. Well within card and driver optimization territory.

[TonyKramer]

I am incredibly excited for this launch. Specifically the Radeon Frontier Edition. I am, however worried that the Frontier Pro Duo will have the same problems that the launch of the R9-295X2 had. (These being poor support for crossfire gaming, overall driver adoption, what to do about CrossFireX when you had two of them, just a lot of little things that turned out to be a huge problem) 

 

However, I think for workstations, AMD has taken a good step in the right direction, (personally owning two FirePro cards, I may be a little bit biased) but they are still behind Nvidia in terms of capability. Nvidia has two selling points that AMD has no answer for, CUDA and NVLink. Now I know what you may be thinking, AMD has OpenCL, everything is fine. Will, from an adaptability standpoint, CUDA is orders of magnitude easier to work with. I will however, give the benefit to OpenCL because in applications I work with (Caffe-OpenCL, Torch, Theono on Ubuntu), OpenCL is just as fast as CUDA and scales better to 2+ GPUs. 

 

So I really hope this launch goes well for AMD, as I am really looking forward to happily replacing my FirePros if these cards turn out to be any good. 

[leadeater]

Just now, ravenshrike said:

It's actually pretty interesting in that he wasn't able to tell the difference between the Vega and Titan. Figure there can't be more than a 20 FPS difference or so there if that's the case. Well within card and driver optimization territory.

Vega gaming GPUs will also be cheaper so unless you are desperate to get one it's still better to wait. What I find more interesting is just how bad the Titan Xp is as it supposed role as a workstation card, I mean I know it's not one but it still gets referred as one.

[NumLock21]

Gordon Muh Ung is the best. Used to be with MaximumPC. 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, TonyKramer said:

I am incredibly excited for this launch. Specifically the Radeon Frontier Edition. I am, however worried that the Frontier Pro Duo will have the same problems that the launch of the R9-295X2 had. (These being poor support for crossfire gaming, overall driver adoption, what to do about CrossFireX when you had two of them, just a lot of little things that turned out to be a huge problem) 

I'm still using my dual 290X's and the number of games that have actually had problems where I've had to disable crossfire is about 2-3 that I have come across. I also don't think buying dual GPU cards is a great idea unless you need more than 2 GPUs and for that you aren't/shouldn't be gaming.

 

Edit:

Mine are ASUS reference I've had them since launch.

 

4 minutes ago, TonyKramer said:

Nvidia has two selling points that AMD has no answer for, CUDA and NVLink.

I much prefer the crossfire link over PCIe than NVLink, I don't see that as a positive in any way. As for the server use cases for NVLink that is IBM exclusive so meh just wait for Gen-z to make NVLink obsolete since it has industry wide backing and NVLink doesn't.

[TonyKramer]

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's also worth saying that in the professional usages the Vega FE was significantly faster than the Titan Xp, good choice if that is the work loads you do but don't go buying one of these to play games on wait for the gaming cards.

That being said, the Titan Xp is kind of an afterthought Changeling between the GTX Line and the Quadro Line. I am not surprised that the Radeon card beats the Titan Xp as the Titan has no business being in a purely professional workstation. I absolutely hate this term, but the Titan is the most accurately defined as a prosumer card. Has more bells and whistles than a 1080, but is not meant for pure scientific usages.

[leadeater]

Just now, TonyKramer said:

That being said, the Titan Xp is kind of an afterthought Changeling between the GTX Line and the Quadro Line. I am not surprised that the Radeon card beats the Titan Xp as the Titan has no business being in a purely professional workstation. I absolutely hate this term, but the Titan is the most accurately defined as a prosumer card. Has more bells and whistles than a 1080, but is not meant for pure scientific usages.

The original Titan cards use to be much more in line with workstation, still lacked the driver support for it but they have gotten worse over time and are now just cash spending statements.

[tom_w141]

15 minutes ago, TonyKramer said:

being poor support for crossfire gaming

If they do produce a dual GPU card didn't they say it would be connected by infinity fabric and therefore recognised by the system as a single card?

 

Very Interested that the unoptimied FE edition came close to a Titan X in the "feels" department I might have to up my expectations for Vega (I had it pegged at 1080 like performance for a lower price point), not that I can buy one even if they are amazing (damn you g sync monitor)

[Masada02]

I have to say, that anodized blue looks fantastic on that card. Now I want to see the gold water cooler version.

[JuNex03]

1 minute ago, tom_w141 said:

If they do produce a dual GPU card didn't they say it would be connected by infinity fabric and therefore recognised by the system as a single card?

Oh boy if they could pull that off...

[TonyKramer]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I much prefer the crossfire link over PCIe than NVLink, I don't see that as a positive in any way. As for the server use cases for NVLink that is IBM exclusive so meh just wait for Gen-z to make NVLink obsolete since it has industry wide backing and NVLink doesn't.

That's the point, the 160GB/s link that multiple GPUs can share is a wonderful thing when it comes crunching all of the numbers. Crossfire is not heavily supported in any Unix distro, while NVLink is hardware based and very supported by Nvidia's proactive driver development. Let's be completely clear, I love AMD, but I do not see this card overtaking the server market. I think it will crack a dent into the workstation market, however. I know I'm getting at least two. 

[tom_w141]

Just now, JuNex03 said:

Oh boy if they could pull that off...

Raja said it was possible.

[TonyKramer]

1 minute ago, tom_w141 said:

If they do produce a dual GPU card didn't they say it would be connected by infinity fabric and therefore recognised by the system as a single card?

That would be absolutely wonderful. However, it still comes down to driver support regardless of how many GPUs is recognized by a system. And AMD is not doing too well in the driver department. (For Linux, they do not have a workable driver for my cards. At all. I had to break another driver into working from an older Ubuntu release)

[Dabombinable]

I swear I'll lose my shit if the fucking miners end up exhausting the supply of consumer level Vega cards when I get around to finally replacing my dodgy GTX 970.

[HKZeroFive]

Quote

While AMD didn’t want to reveal any gaming performance, it agreed to give us a taste of how Radeon Vega Frontier Edition performs in gaming. So we switched out the 8K Dell panel for a pair of Acer 34-inch, wide-aspect 3440×1440 panels, and AMD let us play games on both the Titan Xp and the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

 

To show it wasn’t just an API advantage, AMD let us play Doom using Vulkan, Prey using DirectX 11, and Sniper Elite 4 using DirectX 12. All of the games were set to their highest game settings, and we played at the native resolution of the panels. Although the identical panels were FreeSync-based, FreeSync was switched off on the AMD GPU.

 

From what we’ve seen, that concern may be misplaced. It appears to be plenty fast and, at least for the settings and the games we played, indistinguishable from the competition. Our original estimates after seeing Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with Sniper Elite 4 at Computex still hold: The cards appears to be faster than Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and close to that of a GTX 1080 Ti card.

Okay, so it looks like they're on the right track. Then again, sort of expected when the competitor's cards have been out for so long.

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, TonyKramer said:

That's the point, the 160GB/s link that multiple GPUs can share is a wonderful thing when it comes crunching all of the numbers. Crossfire is not heavily supported in any Unix distro, while NVLink is hardware based and very supported by Nvidia's proactive driver development. Let's be completely clear, I love AMD, but I do not see this card overtaking the server market. I think it will crack a dent into the workstation market, however. I know I'm getting at least two. 

V100 is actually double that speed now across the NVLink. I wouldn't expect to see any of these in a server, not when the MI25 exists. As for crossfire itself that's not even used on servers since you address the cards individually, you still have to hunt for a use case where the AMD card makes sense to use over Nvidia though since they have total support and optimization and AMD essentially has none in this area.

 

I really don't expect to see Vega making any headway in to the server market but I do see it as being at the forefront of legitimizing AMD's existence in that market for the next generation. Server people tend to be woefully behind in following technology news and developments some times, most people I know don't even know EPYC and Vega are even a thing. 

[Valentyn]

1 hour ago, ravenshrike said:

And here...we...go...

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3202659/components-graphics/hands-on-amds-radeon-vega-frontier-edition-vs-nvidia-titan-xp.html

 

Pretty interesting. In pro applications, the Vega FE appears 25-50% slower depending on application than the P6000 but the P6000 costs 5-6 times more. Given the ubiquity of PCI-E lanes on Threadripper, they seem to be extending their plan of knocking out the low-to mid end use cases in the CPU territory directly to the GPU territory. It's actually quite elegant.

 

 

It's slower because it's not a Radeon Pro card with certified professional drivers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-pro-wx-7100,4896.html

http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/vega-frontier-edition/

Vega FE (£1200)
Catia = 135.75
CREO = 83.94
SolidWorks = 114.88

Radeon Pro WX 7100 (£660)
Catia = 104.34
CREO = 82.08
SolidWorks = 111.55

Titan Xp (£1200)
Catia = 107.29
CREO = 65.2
SolidWorks = 67.75

 

https://exxactcorp.com/amd-professional-graphics-solutions/vega_solutions.php

 

Quote

Developers, and creators working with design tools who want the superior performance and are fine with not having application certification. Those who wish to have certified app support can turn to the “Vega” versions of Radeon™ Pro WX coming Q3, 2017

 

[TonyKramer]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

you still have to hunt for a use case where the AMD card makes sense to use over Nvidia though since they have total support and optimization and AMD essentially has none in this area.

You're very correct here. However, AMD makes the most sense in brute force applications on workstations. They also make much more sense for budgeted PC builds and workstation builds where a wackton of monitors is preferred. I don't know man, it's just something about AMD that hopes they do really well. Competition means less here to me vs. the CPU market because Nvidia is still heavily driving innovation into the future while Intel became complacent at the top imo.

[leadeater]

Just now, TonyKramer said:

Competition means less here to me vs. the CPU market because Nvidia is still heavily driving innovation into the future while Intel became complacent at the top imo.

I think the entire CPU market dropped the ball, you don't have to go back far in history to when supercomputers didn't have GPUs and you'd be laughed at for suggesting it.

[Valentyn]

42 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It's also worth saying that in the professional usages the Vega FE was significantly faster than the Titan Xp, good choice if that is the work loads you do but don't go buying one of these to play games on wait for the gaming cards.

 

Sad thing is, it's barely 5-10% faster than $660 Radeon Pro WX 7100.
So depending on your needs, and the price of Radeon RX Vega, you could buy that gaming Vega card and the WX 7100 for barely the price of the Frontier Edition; and get better gaming, and better workstation use.

FE Doesn't have certified application drivers.

[leadeater]

Just now, Valentyn said:

Sad thing is, it's barely 5-10% faster than $660 Radeon Pro WX 7100.
So depending on your needs, and the price of Radeon RX Vega, you could buy that gaming Vega card and the WX 7100 for barely the price of the Frontier Edition; and get better gaming, and better workstation use.

FE Doesn't have certified application drivers.

Yea, I'd wait for launch just in case there is some extra stuff that needs ironing out and those performance figures raise a decent amount. Vega WX should be interesting to compare to FE when that comes out, how much better is the WX and how much has FE improved over time.

[leadeater]

Wish someone would ask AMD if FE will support SR-IOV or not, I really want to know.