80% of AMD's driver team are working for Vega

[YoloSwag]

According to bitsandchips

Quote

According to our sources, almost 80% of AMD driver team is working on VEGA drivers. This means that AMD is working hard to offer a good product “out of the box” from the beginning.

 

Well we do know that AMD has been serious about their drivers for a very long time now and it's time for the "AMD has bad drivers" jokes to die a slow death surrounded by the people who love to use those jokes so much.

 

Not discrediting the fact that Polaris RX 480 improved after a couple of months vs the GTX 1060 which means that there were things to improve on vs day 1 drivers. Again, still not bad drivers.

 

This means AMD will focus heavily on delivering really good performance on Vega starting day 1 of its release. This may also mean that people will expect less of the surprise performance boost from new drivers for AMD GPUs moving forward

[Starelementpoke]

If it works, sweet.

[Wolther]

"According to our sources" Wow, thanks.. Very reliable man. 

[Scruffy90]

I really hope this hype train with zen/vega amounts to something because we need competition.

[The Sloth]

i really hope the gpus are good, the 480 is an amazing card especially for the price. the 1060 and 480 is not a fair comparison entirely the 1060 is a 4.4 tflops card so Nvidia is optimizing it while the 480 is a 5.5 tflops card, in the future as dx12 and vulcan takeover the 480 will be much better than the 1060. The new amd gpus are shown to perform bit better than the 1080 without optimized drivers but we have to wait and see for the final product. 

[TheRandomness]

1 minute ago, Scruffy90 said:

I really hope this hype train with zen/vega amounts to something because we need competition.

It's hyped so much you're bound to be disappointed even if the RX 580 outperforms the Titan XP. Because hype trains are really, really stupid.

[Mr.Meerkat]

Kinda expected I guess as the RX480 has now caught up to the 1060 6GB performance wise in DX11 titles so it makes sense that they would dedicate almost their whole driver team to Vega   

[Guest Kloaked]

According to my sources™ AMD has employees working on Vega drivers that will launch with the Vega video card.

[ivan134]

@YoloSwagdon't post anything from that site again. They're an AMD fanboy site and have made up a lot of shit on the past. This is more of a common sense thing that AMD would be working on drivers for their upcoming GPUs. They have no "reliable sources."

[Humbug]

Well this is believable cause it's a new architecture and there must be a lot of work to do to get everything working stable and fast within the next few months. So many new features as well...

[Misanthrope]

How many AMD coders does it takes to make a fucking decent launch driver for once?

 

Apparently 80%

[NumLock21]

inb4 gpu driver comes in at 1PB.

 

PCWorld did a interview during CES with Raja and he said something along the lines that with DX11, they have to add the fixes through their drivers, and with so many games, it's the reason why the file size are so large. With DX12, the coding is thrown back to the game developer, so games talks directly with the hardware. This might lead to gpu drivers that's much smaller in file size.

 

 

[xAcid9]

80%? So 4 peoples working on Vega driver. Cool

 

 

 

 

/s

[Fetzie]

6 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Oh look more AMD news. More bad news.

Why is this bad news?

[Humbug]

4 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

inb4 gpu driver comes in at 1PB.

 

PCWorld did a interview during CES with Raja and he said something along the lines that with DX11, they have to add the fixes through their drivers, and with so many games, it's the reason why the file size are so large. With DX12, the coding is thrown back to the game developer, so games talks directly with the hardware. This might lead to gpu drivers that's much smaller in file size.

This is true. The driver layer in Vulkan and DX12 is thinner. This is a good thing as far as game overhead, performance and maintainability is concerned.

 

however NVidia and AMD ship a single installable driver for people to install which supports all the old DX and openGL versions in addition to dx12 and Vulkan. So don't expect to saving on your hard drive space or downloads anytime soon...

[bigneo]

Probably off topic a bit here but still, one guy from work couple days ago goes on about how he spend loads of money on a new build, latest intel i7 CPU and 1080 and all the liquid cooling. I goes would you not wait a bit for ryzen and vega around the corner? Fuck that I'm all team green. I was thinking to myself, fair enough, I was young once too  But then I asked what resolution is your screen that you play games on? When he said 1080p, after a moment of silence I walked away.

 

I never owned AMD CPU or GPU but I really hope that AMD is gonna come up with something competitive.

[Coaxialgamer]

13 hours ago, nerdslayer1 said:

i really hope the gpus are good, the 480 is an amazing card especially for the price. the 1060 and 480 is not a fair comparison entirely the 1060 is a 4.4 tflops card so Nvidia is optimizing it while the 480 is a 5.5 tflops card, in the future as dx12 and vulcan takeover the 480 will be much better than the 1060. The new amd gpus are shown to perform bit better than the 1080 without optimized drivers but we have to wait and see for the final product. 

Be careful when making those assumptions. FLOPS only refer to capabilities for floating point math. That is just one aspect.  It doesn't mean it is the better performer no matter what. Keep in mind the gtx 1060 has more ROP's, a higher pixel fillrate, better face detection capabilities, geometry performance etc.

Flops is just a function of ALU count * frequency *2. 

It is far from the only determining factor for performance, compute or otherwise, and saying the rx 480 would necessarily blow it out of the water because of its higher FP performance is just plain wrong. The only thing it will for sure beat the gtx 1060 is floating point compute. 

 

Btw, the gtx 1060 is actually 3.85TFlops, at base clocks. 

[NumLock21]

5 hours ago, Humbug said:

This is true. The driver layer in Vulkan and DX12 is thinner. This is a good thing as far as game overhead, performance and maintainability is concerned.

 

however NVidia and AMD ship a single installable driver for people to install which supports all the old DX and openGL versions in addition to dx12 and Vulkan. So don't expect to saving on your hard drive space or downloads anytime soon...

 

Got plenty of hdd space, so it isn't a issue. What i find, ridculous is the driver download size, not only for gpu, but for everything else. Last time I was downloading a touchpad driver for a laptop, and it that driver comes out to nearly 500MB! 

[AresKrieger]

6 hours ago, Fetzie said:

Why is this bad news?

Bad as in quality of the info/sources I would agree with if they meant it that way (its a grand total of 5 sentences so not that much info that matters)

 

I think they need to enforce the verified info clause this subforum has as the amd "leaks" are a constant stream of bs.

[BuckGup]

12 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

How many AMD coders does it takes to make a fucking decent launch driver for once?

 

Apparently 80%

Which is probably 8 out of the 10.

[GunzPT]

This is great news!

 

In my opinion I agree that AMD has improved a lot in terms of drivers support.. I'm curious to see whether they'll keep it up on the long run.

 

VEGA Is a really important architecture for them to bring back some of the high end GPU fans from NVIDIA.

 

 

[YoloSwag]

15 hours ago, ivan134 said:

@YoloSwagdon't post anything from that site again. They're an AMD fanboy site and have made up a lot of shit on the past. This is more of a common sense thing that AMD would be working on drivers for their upcoming GPUs. They have no "reliable sources."

I didn't like the first rumours I read from that site which was like EVGA and AMD. Cool VEGA anagram ~ EVGA, but yeah no.

 

I reported it with the "hype train" tag to add to the intensity

 

Also, a reason I reported this, whether or not 80% is legit, it was good enough to state that AMD does have improved their drivers so that Nvidia fanboys can shut up on first day launch trash talks. I'm no AMD fanboy (been rocking intel systems for a long time now, my last two GPUs were Nvidia cards).

[alamox]

good because it's getting old, for AMD to release a good card but that doesn't show the real performance untill few months later.

so they need to make sure the drivers are ready and performance is optimal, the other thing is the reference cooler, i really hope AMD does like with 300 series, just skip reference and let AIBs launch custom cards at release.

these are basicaly the 2 things that kills every GPU launch of AMD, crappy cooler + rushed up drivers

[Misanthrope]

27 minutes ago, GunzPT said:

This is great news!

 

In my opinion I agree that AMD has improved a lot in terms of drivers support.. I'm curious to see whether they'll keep it up on the long run.

 

VEGA Is a really important architecture for them to bring back some of the high end GPU fans from NVIDIA.

 

 

Umm no. If you mean that they eventually got it right for Hawaii and Fiji and Polaris, yes they eventually gained quite a bit. However it took long enough that a lot of initial sales that they could have snatched from Nvidia where lost.

 

I believe this strategy is better (though not completely: They shouldn't need to focus the team on the launch they should be able to handle existing and new products simultaneously) because launch sales do count a lot: Most people where not tech saavy enough to call it like most of us here do saying "Oh well the 480 is behind the 1060 but as more compute games drop and driver improve it will pay off". Most people at most looked at Polaris vs Pascal and said "Oh, 1060 is faster on most games give me one of those" and forget about it.

[YoloSwag]

3 minutes ago, alamox said:

good because it's getting old, for AMD to release a good card but that doesn't show the real performance untill few months later.

so they need to make sure the drivers are ready and performance is optimal, the other thing is the reference cooler, i really hope AMD does like with 300 series, just skip reference and let AIBs launch custom cards at release.

these are basicaly the 2 things that kills every GPU launch of AMD, crappy cooler + rushed up drivers

Good on you dude for recognizing these things. Lot's of crap out there, people really should look where they're going before they make a step. Simple really.

 

Good of AMD to improve CPU coolers, they look a lot better than intel now. I also want them to improve on GPU coolers, as Nvidia reference cards already have good and well performing coolers.