Vega Frontier Edition officially launched $999

[Humbug]

1 minute ago, Valentyn said:

Scalabile small cores on an interposer. Raja was actually speaking to PcPer about it in 2016.

 

That's the end goal; as AMD moves back to their old, but fantastic small die strategy. When they were their strongest was during that period.

I remember him talking about this for a while but didn't understand how visionary it was at the time. Until Zen launched with infinity fabric...

I thought it was a nice concept, but didn't know that they had actually solved the technical hurdles involved. I was afraid that the move away from large dies is going to mean a move away from competing with Nvidia at the very high end. In reality it was just the opposite. It's their plan to try and beat Nvidia at the very high end and with better margins.

[DXMember]

2 hours ago, Valentyn said:

It's also worth noting the drivers used at CES are the same ones currently available for the Frontier Edition. 17.20

 

So I would expect more improvements to come. Especially for the gaming side, as noted before there are issues switching between pro and gaming. This could impact performance of either. 

It appears Frontier edition has two sets of drivers - Gaming mode and Pro mode

also AMD is still pushing this card for professionals and their response to "how does it do in gaming benchmarks" seems to be - "it's able to pass them without crashing"

[PCGuy_5960]

27 minutes ago, DarkBlade2117 said:

Someone made an album of various color schemes. Can't go wrong

I want an all blue version

[PCGuy_5960]

6 minutes ago, DXMember said:

 "how does it do in gaming benchmarks" seems to be - "it's able to pass them without crashing"

So in other words: "We can't match the 1080 Ti, we hope that we can match the 1080"

[Humbug]

1 minute ago, DXMember said:

It appears Frontier edition has two sets of drivers - Gaming mode and Pro mode

also AMD is still pushing this card for professionals and their response to "how does it do in gaming benchmarks" seems to be - "it's able to pass them without crashing"

It seems like two issues

(1) They know that frontier edition is expensive (compared to gaming cards), so they do not want to show fps numbers. It makes perf per dollar look bad compared to gaming cards.

(2) They are still doing major driver work on the gaming performance. Therefore they want to delay the benchmarks as long as possible. I firmly believe this because vega is such a radical new architecture. It means that they have to go in and redo all their micro-optimizations in the driver which are architecture specific. An RX 580 one year from now will only be a bit faster than today. But an RX vega in the next one year will improve in bigger strides.

[Valentyn]

23 minutes ago, DXMember said:

It appears Frontier edition has two sets of drivers - Gaming mode and Pro mode

also AMD is still pushing this card for professionals and their response to "how does it do in gaming benchmarks" seems to be - "it's able to pass them without crashing"

It's actually single Hybrid drivers.

 

It'll "switch" between them depending on what it detects. It's in the OP, with a link and quote to a current issue related to the switching as well. 

 

Worth noting that Frontier Edition is Not a Radeon Pro card, it's not application certified for drivers. If you want that, long with the performance it brings, you need to wait for Q3 2017 for Radeon Pro Vega cards.

 

 

https://exxactcorp.com/index.php/product/prod_detail/2565

 

https://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Edition-Air-and-Liquid-Cooled-GPUs-Now-Available-Pre-Or

Quote

Before you pre-order, however, there’s one big caveat. Although AMD touts the card as ideal for “innovators, creators, and pioneers of the world,” the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will lack application certification, a factor that is crucial to many who work with content creation software and something typically found in high-end professional GPUs like the Quadro and FirePro lines.

For those hoping for Vega-based professional cards sporting certification, the Vega Frontier Edition product page teases the launch of the Vega-powered Radeon Pro WX in Q3 2017.

 

 

Vega Frontier is a TRUE Prosumer card. It'll give you stellar double rate FP16 compute that beats the Tesla P100, and will smash the Titan Xp in professional work loads.

 

What remains to be seen is the gaming performance for this $999 GPU.

 

Radeon Pro is pure Professional optimization, Radeon RX is pure gaming. Instinct is Pure Machine Learning and Compute.

[RagnarokDel]

4 hours ago, Valentyn said:

 

It's supposed to be competing with the 980Ti, but AMD does horribly in VR Mark it seems.

They dont have Simultaneous multi reprojection or whatever the fuck Nvidia calls it. Basically they render a frame for each eye.

[ZestyJalapeno]

Let's get mining boios

[RagnarokDel]

3 hours ago, DnFx91 said:

am i the only one that hates that shroud ? it just looks so, bleh

Yes you are

[Taf the Ghost]

19 minutes ago, Humbug said:

I remember him talking about this for a while but didn't understand how visionary it was at the time. Until Zen launched with infinity fabric...

I thought it was a nice concept, but didn't know that they had actually solved the technical hurdles involved. I was afraid that the move away from large dies is going to mean a move away from competing with Nvidia at the very high end. In reality it was just the opposite. It's their plan to try and beat Nvidia at the very high end and with better margins.

 

13 minutes ago, Humbug said:

It seems like two issues

(1) They know that frontier edition is expensive (compared to gaming cards), so they do not want to show fps numbers. It makes perf per dollar look bad compared to gaming cards.

(2) They are still doing major driver work on the gaming performance. Therefore they want to delay the benchmarks as long as possible. I firmly believe this because vega is such a radical new architecture. It means that they have to go in and redo all their micro-optimizations in the driver which are architecture specific. An RX 580 one year from now will only be a bit faster than today. But an RX vega in the next one year will improve in bigger strides.

Apparently the Frontier Edition uses a completely separate Driver setup, so it's not really being optimized for Gaming.  It just needs to run things.  It's different from the relationship that the Titan cards have to the GTX cards.  The Titan is the full die that's not sold at that price.

 

 

As for Infinity Fabric, Zen and the multi-package approach, at some level it's the logical place for a Fabless Manufacturer to head.  You need to find a way so your designs aren't constrained wholly by a Fab process out of your control.  However, getting to that point is the hard part.  It seems a lot easier for CPUs than GPUs, as there's an entire driver process that had to be created, along with new interconnects in the memory architecture.  The GPU system simply required more of AMD than the CPU one did.

[Valentyn]

8 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

They dont have Simultaneous multi reprojection or whatever the fuck Nvidia calls it. Basically they render a frame for each eye.

For VR NVIDIA "cuts out/ curves" the edges/corners and sides you won't usually see with VR, as opposed to a monitor. So less "work", more FPS.

 

[cj09beira]

14 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

They dont have Simultaneous multi reprojection or whatever the fuck Nvidia calls it. Basically they render a frame for each eye.

i saw that they added that in their api 

[ravenshrike]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Frontier Edition is a "tweener" for certain workstation use cases. For as much as it's Vega, it's not the really interesting stuff.

It's pretty much the perfect card if you're a single contractor doing design and prototyping work on your personal computer and don't want to shell out for the more expensive models.

 

12 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

For VR NVIDIA "cuts out/ curves" the edges/corners and sides you won't usually see with VR, as opposed to a monitor. So less "work", more FPS.

 

Are there any gaming consumer VR sets that are GPU bound at this point in time, especially if the gaming version of Vega is near or at the performance terms of the 1080ti?

[Valentyn]

20 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

It's pretty much the perfect card if you're a single contractor doing design and prototyping work on your personal computer and don't want to shell out for the more expensive models.

 

Are there any gaming consumer VR sets that are GPU bound at this point in time, especially if the gaming version of Vega is near or at the performance terms of the 1080ti?

That VR Mark and a new Unigine test are both very GPU bound. 

 

Although we don't know how a gaming Vega will perform in those yet. It's another month before those launch sadly. 

[ravenshrike]

19 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

That VR Mark and a new Unigine test are both very GPU bound. 

 

Although we don't know how a gaming Vega will perform in those yet. It's another month before those launch sadly. 

Yes, but my point is are any actual usage cases GPU bound in the sense that the user would notice anything for the Rift or Vive? At this point in time as I understand it you're peripheral bound instead of CPU/GPU bound.

[Lord Nicoll]

TITAN SLAYER

too obvious or just bad?

[3DOSH]

Raja was not lying when he said developing drivers for new arch is hard.

Quote

Known Issues

• When running ReLive Pro, the cursor is not visible. The cursor is only visible when the user has switched to gaming mode
• When switching between Pro Mode and Gaming Mode, Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDRs) have been observed with multiple display configurations
• When numerous displays are used, there is an unlikely event where the driver does not complete installation
• During sleep and resume, after multiple instances, a blue screen hang has been observed
• Specific to Linux users, infrequent system hangs have been observed with 2015 Formula One
• During sleep and resume, a user may experience a TDR when instant replay is enabled
• Intermittent stuttering has been observed with Unigine Heaven in extreme cases
• System hangs have been observed in stressful situation in some applications when in CrossFire mode
• When using 8K displays, occasional situations with no display have been observed during sleep and resume
• Infrequent hangs have been observed during wake from sleep and resume states
• When resume from sleep, OpenGL applications have experienced TDRs
• In CrossFire configurations, blue screens have been observed during stressful ACPI testing
• When rendering using Blender cycles, users may encounter infrequent iterations of poor performance
• With 10 bit displays, users may encounter anomalies in display results
• On Z170 chipsets, users may experience infrequent hangs from sleep states. Frequency may depend on system configuration.
• In extreme cases with stressful applications, the user may experience performance throttling in thermally stressful situations
• When running express install with multiple GPUs installed, the user may experience anomalies, including unexpected system reboots

HOLY SHIT.

[Valentyn]

12 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Yes, but my point is are any actual usage cases GPU bound in the sense that the user would notice anything for the Rift or Vive? At this point in time as I understand it you're peripheral bound instead of CPU/GPU bound.

No idea, there's almost no VR testing outside of the few benchmarks for it.

[Valentyn]

16 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

TITAN SLAYER

too obvious or just bad?

 

[Drak3]

5 hours ago, DnFx91 said:

am i the only one that hates that shroud ? it just looks so, bleh

For me, the color choice is shit. Makes for an ugly card, and it'd be the first that I would void the warranty to paint.

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, Valentyn said:

That VR Mark and a new Unigine test are both very GPU bound. 

 

Although we don't know how a gaming Vega will perform in those yet. It's another month before those launch sadly. 

it will be very interesting as unige has for some time been using way too much tessellation which favors nvidea (to the point were a stair case is a plain and using tessellation to do the steps) so because vega has more geometry output per flop it might do well and level the plain field on that benchmark

[Valentyn]

4 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

it will be very interesting as unige has for some time been using way too much tessellation which favors nvidea (to the point were a stair case is a plain and using tessellation to do the steps) so because vega has more geometry output per flop it might do well and level the plain field on that benchmark

 

Aye, it might explain why the Fury X is barely faster than RX 480 as well. Lots stil to see in regards to Vega.

[MadyTehWolfie]

4 hours ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

This will probably be the case

An for under 450 as well.

[cj09beira]

5 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

 

Aye, it might explain why the Fury X is barely faster than RX 480 as well. Lots stil to see in regards to Vega.

the fury had too much compute in relation to its shader and other effects (same rops as 290x), it also suffered from bad utilization due to how amd processes the image (they divide it in 4 quadrants )

doom works so well on the fury x probably because it uses compute based effects so it can utilize its capabilities to the max.

vega improves on this by dividing it in 8 parts which should help improve utilization.

 

[Not_Sean]

Just a round of applause for everyone here. So nice to see a topic discussed and not break out in a giant flame war. 

 

anyways.. As you were