[Updated with final Review] Vega FE Benchmarking by PCPER

[Maxxtraxx]

31 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Ugh I mean who cares, can we wait for RX proper card targeted at proper software and drivers. I get the early results is nice to see, but don't be impatient and calm down and wait to see RX Vega with proper clocks and cooling and definitely drivers.

Anyone who was holding out for Vega, they are the ones who care.

 

This is the exact same chip and memory that will launch with RX Vega. Thusly everything about this card will be the same as the RX Vega

 

The only things that will change are:

 

1: Drivers (And if AMD launched a professional card that is designed (as advertised) to be for creators who game and gamers who create without proper driver support... that would be both stupid and contemptuous towards those who are spending $1000 to $1500 for this card.)

 

2: clock speed: with an AIO water cooler they MIGHT see another 100-150 Mhz, AMD aimed for 1600Mhz, normal clocks are 1400-1500 Mhz on air so 1600-1700 seems resonable under water.

 

 

My Thoughts:

 

150Mhz more will not make this card a 1080Ti competitor, it will make it a 1080 competitor... which means it needs over a 30% performance increase from drivers alone or this card will not be a high end competitor.

 

This card feels like it should have been out 1 year ago but... I'm guessing that

1: AMD was having trouble hitting their desired clock speeds and

2: HBM2 is still a very questionable choice for this card, it's very expensive, doesn't have a speed benefit over GDDR5X and is also in short supply because of production difficulties.

 

HBM isnt a good feature if it limits your chip production, doesn't provide a performance benefit and increases your production costs when you're part of a company that is dealing with massive debt and the pure and simple need to just HAVE product available for people to buy.

 

disclosure: I own AMD stock, I do not own Nvidia stock (makes the last 12 months look like a dumb choice right?)

 

[Nup]

Vega... ahh what a shame. For pro workloads it does ok. But for games it looks like big Polaris, not vega. And I doubt that what we saw was 680-690.

I bet it was the hbm that kept them back too long and made the pricing less aggressive. (Side note, goes to show how impressive gddr5x is) 

Also pcper does some top notch stuff. 

[Hunter259]

From my understanding, you can't just switch rasterization modes on the fly which would shows a massive issue in Vega's marketing and actual final architecture.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, jman629 said:

That's the thing though, if they devote themselves to mid range they will eventually fall behind. Cause what's high end now eventually trickles down to mid and then low end. They have to keeping shooting for the top. Right now Nvidia's on top of a mountain with a beer and a lawn chair working one handed while AMD is scraping and clawing trying to make it to the top.

Absolutely, every company has to aim to be the biggest and best.  Half my point is actually just that, it's just that AMD seem to be, for all intents and purposes, only managing the middle ground.  I know it's hard for them with such a restricted budget to manage better hardware sooner, but they could at least manage their PR and marketing at that end better.

[othertomperson]

1 hour ago, Maxxtraxx said:

This card feels like it should have been out 1 year ago but... I'm guessing that

1: AMD was having trouble hitting their desired clock speeds and

2: HBM2 is still a very questionable choice for this card, it's very expensive, doesn't have a speed benefit over GDDR5X and is also in short supply because of production difficulties.

 

HBM isnt a good feature if it limits your chip production, doesn't provide a performance benefit and increases your production costs when you're part of a company that is dealing with massive debt and the pure and simple need to just HAVE product available for people to buy.

 

disclosure: I own AMD stock, I do not own Nvidia stock (makes the last 12 months look like a dumb choice right?)

 

I think this is entirely HBM2 related. It was a gamble that blew up in their face. A year late to market, a core that is barely better than Fiji, and to make matters worse it has worse bandwidth than the Titan's GDDR5X at the moment. For all the shit Nvidia got about only putting HBM2 in the P100, it was clearly the right choice.

 

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Absolutely, every company has to aim to be the biggest and best.  Half my point is actually just that, it's just that AMD seem to be, for all intents and purposes, only managing the middle ground.  I know it's hard for them with such a restricted budget to manage better hardware sooner, but they could at least manage their PR and marketing at that end better.

Their marketing is fucking everywhere. I've commented a lot about how their marketing is overwhelmingly negative compared to their competition. When Nvidia have a new product all of their slides are about how much of a performance gain they have against their old stuff -- "look how good we are". AMD's marketing is always a direct comparison with their competition. Whether it be Ryzen against the 6900k, or Fiji against the 980 Ti.

 

Then there's their names. "EPYC" for professional servers and workstations, seriously!? Then there's the out and out smoke and mirrors. Under-clocking Intel by 1 GHz below its boost to hide the fact that IPC is only half of the equation -- and they don't have the other half, "overclockers dream", "FineWine (aka shit launch drivers)". The straight numbers games (all of the GHz for Bulldozer, "eight" "cores", again for Bulldozer, Hawaii extreme memory bandwidth, ignoring the complete lack of compression that makes this necessary, 390X "all of the vram, we NEED 8GB in 2014", which blew up in their face when they then tried to sell a Fury X with only 4. But you didn't need much because HBM! Which was a lie, as it happened, bandwidth does not make up for amount when you need amount). They have good products, putting Threadripper (again for shite names) across multiple dies is brilliant, but holy crap they are a difficult company to like.

[Morgan Everett]

It's almost as though the hysterical hype that surrounded this product wasn't quite justified.

 

Who'd have thunk. 

[Doobeedoo]

1 hour ago, Maxxtraxx said:

Anyone who was holding out for Vega, they are the ones who care.

 

This is the exact same chip and memory that will launch with RX Vega. Thusly everything about this card will be the same as the RX Vega

 

The only things that will change are:

 

1: Drivers (And if AMD launched a professional card that is designed (as advertised) to be for creators who game and gamers who create without proper driver support... that would be both stupid and contemptuous towards those who are spending $1000 to $1500 for this card.)

 

2: clock speed: with an AIO water cooler they MIGHT see another 100-150 Mhz, AMD aimed for 1600Mhz, normal clocks are 1400-1500 Mhz on air so 1600-1700 seems resonable under water.

 

 

My Thoughts:

 

150Mhz more will not make this card a 1080Ti competitor, it will make it a 1080 competitor... which means it needs over a 30% performance increase from drivers alone or this card will not be a high end competitor.

 

This card feels like it should have been out 1 year ago but... I'm guessing that

1: AMD was having trouble hitting their desired clock speeds and

2: HBM2 is still a very questionable choice for this card, it's very expensive, doesn't have a speed benefit over GDDR5X and is also in short supply because of production difficulties.

 

HBM isnt a good feature if it limits your chip production, doesn't provide a performance benefit and increases your production costs when you're part of a company that is dealing with massive debt and the pure and simple need to just HAVE product available for people to buy.

 

disclosure: I own AMD stock, I do not own Nvidia stock (makes the last 12 months look like a dumb choice right?)

 

I'm holding out for Vega myself too. 

 

Proper drivers can be big difference, it's not focused gaming card but just for creators to be able to test it and all not really pushing performance on that part.
As far as clocks we've yet to see with RX Vega though.

 

But compared to Fury X it should be significantly faster though, can't see it be just slightly or worse as far as per stream processor but higher clocks. Doesn't make sense really.

Custom board partners already have the GPU that will end up RX Vega so we just need to wait bit more. AMD did said that drivers for it do need extra time due to architecture.

 

I'm in no rush of an upgrade, but definitely plan soon though. I'm interested to see it.

[JoeCoke]

Soo... Most likely Vega will be meh. Maybe the actual RX cards'll do better, but I'm doubting it. So, unless nothing changes it looks like my upcoming system will be a 1700x and gtx 1070. Well, if the fucking mining prices ever come down...

[cj09beira]

11 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Soo... Most likely Vega will be meh. Maybe the actual RX cards'll do better, but I'm doubting it. So, unless nothing changes it looks like my upcoming system will be a 1700x and gtx 1070. Well, if the fucking mining prices ever come down...

they will soon, as ethereum is going away from gpu mining

[cj09beira]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Raja said the RX ones will be faster, but that could be anywhere on the map like 1%.

they have a full month to focus on gaming drivers, this is the biggest chance in the architecture since gcn was born, there will be great improvements

 

[laminutederire]

I don't understand their emphasis on gaming. It's like they're trying amd to look as bad as possible. The card fares very well against quadros and destroy the Titan in most tasks except rendering with pipeline similar to renderer closet gaming ones. That was a wrong call for amd to make to release it in this state since now everyone think they have bad cards overall, when there are still odd things to understand. 

 

[Valentyn]

MSI Marketing Director (The guy who made the comment about power draw) says "please don't compare this card too much with RX Vega"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/commen...ng_director_dont_compare_vega_fe_too/djmlkk3/
https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/51759395#51759395

AMD staff on twitter: "I think it’s premature to worry about a product’s gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming."
 

 

Well people where hoping that AMD would say something. I guess this is close enough, but no official statement yet.

[Nicnac]

Sometimes you reallyhave to wonder what the actual f*** is going on at AMD.

[DisguisedDemise]

I have been pretty disappointed with Vega and the setbacks, if we had this card last year man would it have been good, probably not incredible but would still put them somewhere in the market. Though im still going to buy RX Vega, because I'm sick of all my Blue Green Builds. 

[PCGuy_5960]

Even if it gets a 15% performance boost with optimized drivers, it will be able to match the 1080. So IMO, Vega is too little too late

[Valentyn]

7 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Even if it gets a 15% performance boost with optimized drivers, it will be able to match the 1080. So IMO, Vega is too little too late

That's just drivers, tiled rasterization is still not working either. The "magic sauce" that helped Maxwell slap Kepler.

It's a huge thing for AMD, and can really help performance; yet nothing's working. No one even tested to see if HBCC or the discard accelerators are working either.

You know me, rather open minded for tech, but even I'm a bit jaded at this launch. AMD staying silent on it all bar one marketing dude on twitter doesn't help in the slightest. PcPer haven't even heard back from them about those major features either. I doubt they will over the weekend as well.

This is the type of shambles that should get people their walking papers.

[Trixanity]

This thing is straight up broken. Nothing else to say. The performance does not at all match the specifications. It's barely faster than a Fury X while having 60% higher clock speeds, 4 times the memory, the biggest architecture change since GCN (7000 series) with a host of new IP blocks including tiled rasterization (which appears to not work hence broken).

 

AMD dropped the ball. Even if firmware and drivers are a complete mess, it doesn't excuse this at all. You don't launch a broken product. Ryzen worked but had some kinks but otherwise performed admirable. This is a shit show.

 

I hope the software just isn't ready to make the card function correctly (not just talking about gaming performance) and that further down the line it actually starts showing the performance it's supposed to and we're not talking just 10-15% off the mark like the RX 480 was at launch.

 

But perhaps the silicon itself is broken but that would be a setback that AMD will have, not a hard time, but an impossible time recovering from within the next couple of years. It is clear that their budget and resources are spread too thin. They don't have the resources to simultaneously do CPU and GPU to their full extent to compete properly so it ends up favoring one or the other. First it was GPUs propping up the company during the Bulldozer days and now it seems they'll have to use Ryzen to make the company stay afloat while using their semi-custom business to make the ledgers look good as they've done for years. Always one part of the company falling behind due to financial constraints.

 

An embarrassing launch. And the radio silence doesn't help. They need to at least show some hard numbers coming from internal testing on the RX Vega that shows a different picture or they might as well hand Nvidia the keys.

[3DOSH]

I keep seeing that HBM 2 was not the right choice or ill advised, AMD dose not have Nvidia R&D budget. They have to make single die that covers Consumer/PRO Consumer/Enterprise. Nvidia on the other hand can make multiple of dies to cover multiple segments of the market. HBM2 is must  now days when it comes to machine learning and that sorts of workloads.

[Red Hardware]

On 6/30/2017 at 11:28 AM, xAcid9 said:

Workstation use FirePro card, no? Vega FirePro is coming as well.

 

This Vega FE is similar to Nvidia Titan imo.

I know

Titan is a workstation/gaming card.

[othertomperson]

2 hours ago, 3DOSH said:

I keep seeing that HBM 2 was not the right choice or ill advised, AMD dose not have Nvidia R&D budget. They have to make single die that covers Consumer/PRO Consumer/Enterprise. Nvidia on the other hand can make multiple of dies to cover multiple segments of the market. HBM2 is must  now days when it comes to machine learning and that sorts of workloads.

You're talking as if Nvidia don't reuse the same die as well though. There are Quadros and Teslas that use P102 and 104, just like the GeForce Cards. Only the flagship P100 and V100 haven't seen a gaming variant and that's because they are the halo products. Unless you're Pixar or Elon Musk, you're not buying those.

 

There is a Radeon Pro Duo using the same Polaris GPU in the RX 580. Polaris has multiple dies. The rumours are that Vega will have multiple dies. I don't buy this argument at all.

[Red Hardware]

On 6/30/2017 at 4:01 PM, Maxxtraxx said:

Name one person that said that very thing about any of the Titan X cards when they came out... They're both "workstation" cards and the Titan X has (for all that matters) Identical performance to the GTX 1080Ti. Will RX Vega not have the same exact chip in it as the FE?

Hi there

I'm mostly talking about drivers, they spent a lot of time on this thing and if it's the performance that it has for that price , then VEGA is a big FAIL!!! but i don't think so, we should wait and see how RX Vega performs in games but again as i said , it seems to be a driver problem

Have a nice day

[ravenshrike]

15 hours ago, Morgan Everett said:

It's almost as though the hysterical hype that surrounded this product wasn't quite justified.

This is actually a VERY good card for game developers as it can do everything they need on the rendering side and then turn around and play the game at 1440p+ all for a thousand dollars. Grab 2, and it gives you the perfect setup for designing a game in DX12/Vulkan and then playing it.

[Red Hardware]

10 minutes ago, othertomperson said:

You're talking as if Nvidia don't reuse the same die as well though. There are Quadros and Teslas that use P102 and 104, just like the GeForce Cards. Only the flagship P100 and V100 haven't seen a gaming variant and that's because they are the halo products. Unless you're Pixar or Elon Musk, you're not buying those.

 

There is a Radeon Pro Duo using the same Polaris GPU in the RX 580. Polaris has multiple dies. The rumours are that Vega will have multiple dies. I don't buy this argument at all.

Hi

You made a small mistake here:

Quote

Unless you're Pixar or Elon Musk, you're not buying those.

You should've added Linus too 

[ravenshrike]

6 hours ago, Valentyn said:

Well people where hoping that AMD would say something. I guess this is close enough, but no official statement yet.

If you go watch the PC world vid I posted every time Gordon mentioned gaming you could tell the AMD guy wanted to facepalm.

 

15 minutes ago, Red Hardware said:

I know

Titan is a workstation/gaming card.

The first Titan was a serious attempt at a prosumer gaming workstation hybrid. The subsequent Titan's were pretty much just top end gaming cards with very minor alterations to be able to function in the workstation environment when nVidia didn't see a sustainable market. Whereas AMD is pretty much basing their entire product stack for Gen1 Ryzen/Vega launch in an attempt to tear into the low to mid end of every available market they can compete in. For the indie to mid level gaming devs along with a large amount of businesses who render prototypes for physical objects this card is pretty fucking badass. Especially combined with Threadripper and it's 64 PCI-E lanes.

[3DOSH]

51 minutes ago, othertomperson said:

You're talking as if Nvidia don't reuse the same die as well though. There are Quadros and Teslas that use P102 and 104, just like the GeForce Cards. Only the flagship P100 and V100 haven't seen a gaming variant and that's because they are the halo products. Unless you're Pixar or Elon Musk, you're not buying those.

 

There is a Radeon Pro Duo using the same Polaris GPU in the RX 580. Polaris has multiple dies. The rumours are that Vega will have multiple dies. I don't buy this argument at all.

You just made my arrangement My friend, EXACLY THAT, AMD cant afford two dies with two different memory controller. Show me the last time AMD did that ??? 
Nvidia on the other can P100, GTX line, Different Core configs,GDDR5 dies,GDDR5X dies ...
What dose AMD have Vega 10 and 11 ?