Vega FE Hybrid Mod - Passing the 1080 but 400W+ Power Draw

[VagabondWraith]

2 hours ago, bomerr said:

Based on what data do you predict AMD will be able to deliver these high-end cards? Look at history, AMD hasn't released cards that are competitive to Nvidia high-end since like R9 290x. 

That's the complete opposite. You are rewarding AMD for developing mediocre cards/

Ikr? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It's one thing if you just like AMD products better (FreeSync and such), but "support" them by buying a shittier product makes no sense. HAHAHA 

 

I mean, seriously... I'd have more joy in watching my money being ripped to shreds in the garbage disposal than give my money to a company with a crappier product. After all, I want to "support" them for giving me a lesser product compared to the competition. ? How about no. How about I give my money to a company who has a better product and is continuing to innovate and actually shows life.

 

If AMD makes a better product, people will buy. But I would never support mediocrity for the sake of "supporting" them.

 

AMD is a business. Their job is to convince ME to buy their product, not me giving my money for an inferior product. If nobody buys AMD products, it's probably a sign you need to restructure and improve.

[bomerr]

28 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Nvidia makes far more money selling 1060's than selling to enterprise. Also Vega FE is not an enterprise card, at all, look at Radeon Instinct for that which does have a Vega card in it's line up passively cooled and less than 300W TDP. Not that it really matters at all since no matter how good the performance is, how little the power draw is, how cool it runs 90% of datacenters won't be switching to AMD this generation as it not possible to on the software side. VDI is the only real use case for AMD cards and in that respect they do actually have superior technology to do it, SR-IOV capable GPUs.

 

If you want to make money sell as many mid range as you can, those typically get sold by having the best high end card as that gives brand appeal. The whole form is living proof of how brand appeal works . There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a bit silly when people end up buying a worse card at a certain price point because of it.

The high-end products today become the mid-range products tomorrow. So if you aren't winning on high-end today then you won't be winning on mid-range tomorrow. At that point you'll be losing on both high-end and mid-range. It's a death spiral. One that AMD has been in for a few years now. As an investor or a consumer, I would be extremely worried about this performance figures from Vega because it shows that AMD doesn't have anything in the pipeline and that they made a mistake by investing so heavily in HBM over their core architecture. 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Just do what all the AMD fanboys are doing and say that the card is amazing and future driver updates will make it better than Nvidia.

It is impossible to disprove so you can make the claim however much you want, nobody can argue against it.

At the release of the GeForce 1080 how about you get that card and put it through all the tests of a professional workstation card then compare it to an AMD certified workstation card. Then as a result of that testing declare that the Pascal architecture is terrible for workstation/professional usage, which we know due to proper analytical testing on actual hardware is not the case.

 

I can say with pretty good confidence that a few things would have happened, many would say that it's not a Quadro and doesn't have optimized drivers, , and that many features are not available on that card which is applicable to those use cases.

 

There is a lot of accusations of assumptions being thrown around, what those are and what they might mean on both sides being writing on off just as easily as the other without much care.

 

Nvidia Quadro and GeForce perform the same in games:

You can not compare the difference of Nvidia Quadro and GeFroce then use that as complete fact and truth that this is globally true to everything, that is an assumption.

 

Vega FE performs badly in games:

You can not use that to declare it fact that up coming Vega gaming cards will be identical in performance, that is an assumption.

 

The only time something is a fact or a truth about a product is when you are looking at a review of the actual thing, not something like it or similar.

 

Is Vega FE running release ready gaming drivers? Probably not and that is my assumption based off of no actual gaming Vega cards being released. Is Vega FE running Fiji gaming drivers? Don't know that's what the rumor mill says but it is very interesting that if you clock down Vega FE to Fiji card frequencies it performs equivalently, is that not in itself interesting. Fiji drivers giving Fiji levels of performance.

 

There is nothing wrong with assumptions and discussing them, this is the whole point of the forum. Discuss away, have a debate, present your arguments and evidence, declare your assumptions, that is all fantastic and why we are here.

 

Personally I'll continue to discuss the topic and hopefully enjoy doing so but I'll reserve my final judgement on Vega gaming cards to when I can see the reviews on them and not a different card.

[Ekst4zy]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Just do what all the AMD fanboys are doing and say that the card is amazing and future driver updates will make it better than Nvidia.

It is impossible to disprove so you can make the claim however much you want, nobody can argue against it

But, but... I'm not a AMD fanboy I'm a fanboy of "good value for money". That's why I bought a 970 in 2017 (it was 120 USD, okay?)

[leadeater]

25 minutes ago, bomerr said:

The high-end products today become the mid-range products tomorrow. So if you aren't winning on high-end today then you won't be winning on mid-range tomorrow. At that point you'll be losing on both high-end and mid-range. It's a death spiral. One that AMD has been in for a few years now. As an investor or a consumer, I would be extremely worried about this performance figures from Vega because it shows that AMD doesn't have anything in the pipeline and that they made a mistake by investing so heavily in HBM over their core architecture. 

In the majority of markets GPU generations do not trickle down like that for sales, once a new generation of cards come out old stock is sold and then that is the end of that product generation.

 

GPU manufactures do take previous generations of GPUs and refresh or re-badge them yes and sell them where they are price competitive, this isn't always the case. AMD Polaris is an example of that, a new architecture designed specifically for the mid range market and mining aside delivered good performance and was an overall success. Nvidia does much less re-badging and refreshing than AMD does but their R&D budge shows this and they have the money to do it, 1060's sell very well and is not a resultant of high end becoming mid-range,

 

On the high end of the market GPUs are never refreshed and reused, you can't take a top end GPU and make it more top end you actually have to do something.

 

You have a legitimate concern about AMD GPUs, one I also share but I'm less worried about it myself. While for the gaming community I do not like it but Polaris has been an extremely good selling product architecture, it would be hard to assess how well they would have sold without the mining craze but it would have been significantly less.

 

HBM in hindsight probably was a mistake, something not fully under the control of AMD. It might have been better to do a later GPU refresh for the high end card and at that point used HBM2 i.e. Vega Fury (GDDR5X) vs Vega Fury X (HBM2). Vega FE had to be HBM2 due to some of the target market they were after that would require it.

[234285_1454181771]

35 minutes ago, leadeater said:

In the majority of markets GPU generations do not trickle down like that for sales, once a new generation of cards come out old stock is sold and then that is the end of that product generation.

 

GPU manufactures do take previous generations of GPUs and refresh or re-badge them yes and sell them where they are price competitive, this isn't always the case. AMD Polaris is an example of that, a new architecture designed specifically for the mid range market and mining aside delivered good performance and was an overall success. Nvidia does much less re-badging and refreshing than AMD does but their R&D budge shows this and they have the money to do it, 1060's sell very well and is not a resultant of high end becoming mid-range,

 

On the high end of the market GPUs are never refreshed and reused, you can't take a top end GPU and make it more top end you actually have to do something.

 

You have a legitimate concern about AMD GPUs, one I also share but I'm less worried about it myself. While for the gaming community I do not like it but Polaris has been an extremely good selling product architecture, it would be hard to assess how well they would have sold without the mining craze but it would have been significantly less.

 

HBM in hindsight probably was a mistake, something not fully under the control of AMD. It might have been better to do a later GPU refresh for the high end card and at that point used HBM2 i.e. Vega Fury (GDDR5X) vs Vega Fury X (HBM2). Vega FE had to be HBM2 due to some of the target market they were after that would require it.

Both AMD and Nvidia reuse the same architecture down the road. For instance Pascal is based on improvements Maxwell made. Similarity the 580 series use the same architecture as the 480 series + fab improvements, which was the same case between the R9 290 and 390, fab improvements allowed them to increase the frequency. 

[ravenshrike]

4 hours ago, bomerr said:

Based on what data do you predict AMD will be able to deliver these high-end cards? Look at history, AMD hasn't released cards that are competitive to Nvidia high-end since like R9 290x. 

Because if the rumors of a MCM GPU setup at 7nm for Navi using Vega architecture are true, AMD is probably going to crush nVidia when it's released given the ability to slap together multiple dies to increase performance while taking advantage of the 60% decrease in power draw of the current architecture. Given that nVidia is only now looking into MCM tech, it's going to take them at least 5 years to introduce a competing product.

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, 234285_1454181771 said:

Both AMD and Nvidia reuse the same architecture down the road. For instance Pascal is based on improvements Maxwell made. Similarity the 580 series use the same architecture as the 480 series + fab improvements, which was the same case between the R9 290 and 390, fab improvements allowed them to increase the frequency. 

There is a difference between slight die improvements or minor architecture improvements and literally taking a GPU and re-branding it or selling it in a new product range as a lower model card though.

 

There difference between Maxwell and Pascal is much more than what is being implied.

[LAwLz]

24 minutes ago, leadeater said:

At the release of the GeForce 1080 how about you get that card and put it through all the tests of a professional workstation card then compare it to an AMD certified workstation card. Then as a result of that testing declare that the Pascal architecture is terrible for workstation/professional usage, which we know due to proper analytical testing on actual hardware is not the case.

Your analogy doesn't make any sense though because:

1) I am not claiming to have any knowledge of how the card will perform. The people I am referring to as AMD fanboys however, do. They (for example a lot of people on the /r/AMD subreddit) are convinced that there will be big improvements with driver updates and all I am saying is that we do not know.

2) I did not say product X is terrible for purpose Y.

3) All I did was point out that saying that an imaginary future update will do X or Y is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Nobody can argue against the statement that a future update will make my 7850 as powerful as a 1080 Ti. Nobody can give me any evidence or fact that will disprove that statement, nor can anyone disprove the performance gains of this imaginary Vega update.

That's why I think it is a silly argument to begin with. It's like talking to religious people. Of course it's fair to speculate, but when you start claiming things as fact and try to persuade people to spend their money on brand X over brand Y based on speculation that doesn't have a solid foundation then that rubs me the wrong way.

(and before you respond please note that I did not specify anyone in particular when I made the comment you were referring to. I can't control whether or not someone associates themselves with the term "AMD fanboy")

 

 

34 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Nvidia Quadro and GeForce perform the same in games:

You can not compare the difference of Nvidia Quadro and GeFroce then use that as complete fact and truth that this is globally true to everything, that is an assumption.

Not sure if this is aimed at me or not but I'll respond anyway.

If the core is the same, and the memory is roughly the same, then you can make a very safe bet that it will perform about the same. Of course you can not say with 100% certainty that will be the case, but it will be with 95% certainty. If I had those odds at the lottery then I'd play all day every day, and live the good life.

Also, the same has been true for Radeon vs FirePro as well, so it's not just GeForce vs Quadro. It's been this way for as long as I can remember (which is a statement I can make very lightly since I generally have really shitty memory).

It's not an assumption since assumption implies that there is no proof. In this case we have years of history and countless of examples to base our theories on.

 

42 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Vega FE performs badly in games:

You can not use that to declare it fact that up coming Vega gaming cards will be identical in performance, that is an assumption.

You can not declare it a fact, but you can make that assumption with the utmost confidence since you will most likely be correct.

 

44 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The only time something is a fact or a truth about a product is when you are looking at a review of the actual thing, not something like it or similar.

Well, that's not really a sensible position to hold. Are you going to say that my decision to buy a Ryzen chip was not based on facts (such as benchmarks) because while I had seen reviews showing great performance, the chips those reviewers used were not the exact one I ended up with? They were merely similar.

Would you say that I can't say it's a fact the 1700 will perform worse than the 1700X out of the box? Since they are the same chip but with different clock speeds I think it is safe to say the 1700X will perform better out of the box (everything else being equal).

Of course there is the possibility that gaming Vega will not use the same core as Vega Fe, but if it does then "guestimates" can and will most likely be very accurate.

 

59 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Is Vega FE running release ready gaming drivers? Probably not and that is my assumption based off of no actual gaming Vega cards being released. Is Vega FE running Fiji gaming drivers? Don't know that's what the rumor mill says but it is very interesting that if you clock down Vega FE to Fiji card frequencies it performs equivalently, is that not in itself interesting. Fiji drivers giving Fiji levels of performance.

"Fiji drivers giving Fiji levels of performance" implies (or assumes rather) that performance is entirely tied to drivers and hardware is quite irrelevant. That's silly and you know it. The same driver on different hardware can have widely different results.

Vega running a "Fiji gaming driver" (do you understand how silly that entire concept is?) resulting in Fiji-tier performance, once you do things like change clock speeds of the Vega card, might just be a coincidence.

 

Drivers does not work that way. Drivers translate system calls to commands tailored for the hardware. If the Vega driver were translating "gaming system calls" to a structure intended for Fiji then things would be crashing left and right. Try installing a 1 year old driver package from AMD on a system with a Vega Fe GPU and see how well that will work. That's essentially what you are saying is happening when you are strongly implying that Vega is using "Fiji drivers for gaming".

That's just not how drivers work. Period.

If the driver works with Vega then it's a Vega driver. It is not a Fiji driver because that would simply not work. It would crash. Different hardware architectures needs different drivers and you can not interchange them.

[ravenshrike]

1 hour ago, VagabondWraith said:

It's one thing if you just like AMD products better (FreeSync and such), but "support" them by buying a shittier product makes no sense.

It does if you're paying attention to the long term health of the market.

[234285_1454181771]

11 minutes ago, leadeater said:

There is a difference between slight die improvements or minor architecture improvements and literally taking a GPU and re-branding it or selling it in a new product range as a lower model card though.

 

There difference between Maxwell and Pascal is much more than what is being implied.

You are completely missing my point. If you have a better architecture right now that gives you and advantage in terms of designing a future architecture. 

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

-snip-

Correct most of it wasn't directly aimed at you, your post was more of a catalyst to bring up some talking points about how this and other threads having been playing out.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If the core is the same, and the memory is roughly the same, then you can make a very safe bet that it will perform about the same. Of course you can not say with 100% certainty that will be the case, but it will be with 95% certainty.

In the case of professional use workloads and applications this is not how it works out. There can be as much as 80% difference in performance between the Quadro drivers and GeForce drivers and some things outright will not work and cause errors. Gaming drivers are mine fields of hacks and tweaks to work around poor programming or issues in game engines, I'd link a video of a GPU driver developer I saw a while ago but I can't find it.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

You can not declare it a fact, but you can make that assumption with the utmost confidence since you will most likely be correct.

Agreed but others are saying it as fact or how it will exactly play out.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Well, that's not really a sensible position to hold. Are you going to say that my decision to buy a Ryzen chip was not based on facts (such as benchmarks) because while I had seen reviews showing great performance, the chips those reviewers used were not the exact one I ended up with? They were merely similar.

That is still making an informed decision on a purchase. You made an assumption based on input information about how a product will perform but without looking at an actual review of it you don't know. You couldn't state the exact performance of the product, there however have been comments that Vega gaming is going to be exactly the same as Vega FE which is different which was my point, which you understood, see above quoted comment by you.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

"Fiji drivers giving Fiji levels of performance" implies (or assumes rather) that performance is entirely tied to drivers and hardware is quite irrelevant. That's silly and you know it. The same driver on different hardware can have widely different results.

Vega running a "Fiji gaming driver" (do you understand how silly that entire concept is?) resulting in Fiji-tier performance, once you do things like change clock speeds of the Vega card, might just be a coincidence.

Drivers along with firmware plays a huge part in performance. It's not entirely tied to drivers but it plays a very big part. The different performance on different hardware is due to the hardware yes, I mean duh why even say that? The performance scales across the number of stream processors, frequency etc with the driver. That was the point, Fiji driver on hardware with the same number of Compute Units, Stream Processors, TMUs, ROPs and similar memory bandwidth performs pretty much equivalently to a product with the same makeup.

 

NCU is still GCN based so that is no surprise. If some features are locked out by either drivers or firmware and the frequency is the same the performance should be the same that is why Gamers Nexus did the test, to see if that held true and it did. So either the architecture improvements didn't work or are not functioning and the only performance increase is coming from the increase in clock rate which right now is the case.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Drivers does not work that way. Drivers translate system calls to commands tailored for the hardware. If the Vega driver were translating "gaming system calls" to a structure intended for Fiji then things would be crashing left and right.

GCN is a common and scalable architecture, it wouldn't take much to get a Fiji driver working on Vega without implementing any new features or performance optimizations etc. Edit: It was even stated in a video by AMD that they were using a Fiji driver at that show, I'll be lazy and let someone else link that if they want to.

[234285_1454181771]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

GCN is a common and scalable architecture, it wouldn't take much to get a Fiji driver working on Vega without implementing any new features or performance optimizations etc.

Exactly my point. The architectures both companies use scale. That means if AMD has less performance per watt today, then that disparity will grow even larger with a die shrink. . 

[leadeater]

25 minutes ago, 234285_1454181771 said:

You are completely missing my point. If you have a better architecture right now that gives you and advantage in terms of designing a future architecture. 

Yes an advantage I agree, doesn't mean that if AMD is behind it is therefore impossible to surpass. That also ignores other factors that might be limiting the industry like no fabs being able to product a GPU chip below 28nm for a very long time.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, 234285_1454181771 said:

Exactly my point. The architectures both companies use scale. That means if AMD has less performance per watt today, then that disparity will grow even larger with a die shrink. . 

Yes but my original point way at the start is people are assessing that from a product that may not represent the product they are trying to apply it to or has everything working yet. This doesn't really apply to you though since you haven't been saying it, just keep those final judgement until after the release of the gaming products.

 

AMD has present information claiming to have increased architecture performance and some of the technologies they used to do it and some independent reviewers/testers have shown how some of those are not functioning on Vega FE.

 

I know this sounds exactly like the complaint about "wait for drivers" etc etc but really what I'm saying is just wait for the gaming cards then make your mind up, don't pre make it up.

[VagabondWraith]

27 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

It does if you're paying attention to the long term health of the market.

The company should make a superior product. It is then THEIR job to earn your money by having a better product than their competitors. You shouldn't give money to AMD to "support" them when you know their product is inferior in hopes they'll use that money to make better products. That's a stupid mindset. If someone wants to just toss money away, why not just donate your next 10 paychecks to AMD? See how stupid that is? And who in the hell settles for an inferior product when there's a better one readily available? That's fanboy behavior. That's all there is to it. 

[234285_1454181771]

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yes an advantage I agree, doesn't mean that if AMD is behind it is therefore impossible to surpass. That also ignores other factors that might be limiting the industry like no fabs being able to product a GPU chip below 28nm for a very long time.

I never said its impossible to surpass. AMD has been behind Nvidia for at least 3 years at this point. , its not a good sign

[234285_1454181771]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

 

 

I know this sounds exactly like the complaint about "wait for drivers" etc etc but really what I'm saying is just wait for the gaming cards then make your mind up, don't pre make it up.

The problem is 2 fold. 1 is the same architecture so that means performance will be in the same ballpark. 2 the RX series are lower price points so it would be logical to conclude that they would weaker in performance. 

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Yes but my original point way at the start is people are assessing that from a product that may not represent the product they are trying to apply it to or has everything working yet. This doesn't really apply to you though since you haven't been saying it, just keep those final judgement until after the release of the gaming products.

 

AMD has present information claiming to have increased architecture performance and some of the technologies they used to do it and some independent reviewers/testers have shown how some of those are not functioning on Vega FE.

 

I know this sounds exactly like the complaint about "wait for drivers" etc etc but really what I'm saying is just wait for the gaming cards then make your mind up, don't pre make it up.

I have to go with this.  I'm planning a new GPU in November and I'm not sure what it will be then.  Vega will be out then and I'll have access to meaningful, objective, third party reviews of both AMD and nVidia products and I can just judge their merits against their price points.  I don't see the point in fighting over something when it's not even released.

[leadeater]

Just now, 234285_1454181771 said:

The problem is 2 fold. 1 is the same architecture so that means performance will be in the same ballpark. 2 the RX series are lower price points so it would be logical to conclude that they would weaker in performance. 

Not according to AMD who said all Vega gaming products will be faster than Vega FE.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, 234285_1454181771 said:

The problem is 2 fold. 1 is the same architecture so that means performance will be in the same ballpark. 2 the RX series are lower price points so it would be logical to conclude that they would weaker in performance. 

I wouldn't conclude that.   Isn't the 1080ti faster than the titan but cheaper?

[Misanthrope]

So everybody is still hoping for the magical drivers that will make these turds worth it when they release for gamers?

 

How exactly does one decrease like 150 watts from just "optimized drivers" AMD fans?

 

So many of you are so deeply delusional, put your money where it's actually worth it

 

I'll just sit here and continue to wait for my mobo and Ryzen 1600 to arrive instead.

[234285_1454181771]

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Not according to AMD who said all Vega gaming products will be faster than Vega FE.

Do you remember when the 750 Ti was released and it had crazy good performance per watt and cudacore so people deduced that the 900 series would be monsters and they were? This is the opposite situation. Even if the performance is better on the RX line (maybe because of fab improvements?) It's not realistic to expect that it'll give 1080 TI + performance improvements. Vega is repeating the exact same release coverage the Fury got at launch, 

 

9 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I wouldn't conclude that.   Isn't the 1080ti faster than the titan but cheaper?

That's a slightly different situation. 1080 Ti is faster because Nvidia clocks it higher, not because it's better HW wise. Essentially what Nvidia is doing is giving the high-end customers the privilege of buying a 1080 Ti 6 months earlier and for an extra $500 to squeeze out additional revenue from people. It's a marketing situation rather than a hardware situation. 

[Misanthrope]

10 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Not according to AMD who said all Vega gaming products will be faster than Vega FE.

Yeah AMD also hyped Bulldozer, they're about the least trust worthy around for an industry of common misrepresenters and outright liars.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, 234285_1454181771 said:

Do you remember when the 750 Ti was released and it had crazy good performance per watt and cudacore so people deduced that the 900 series would be monsters and they were? This is the opposite situation. Even if the performance is better on the RX line (maybe because of fab improvements?) It's not realistic to expect that it'll give 1080 TI + performance improvements. Vega is repeating the exact same release coverage the Fury got at launch, 

 

That's a slightly different situation. 1080 Ti is faster because Nvidia clocks it higher, not because it's better HW wise. Essentially what Nvidia is doing is giving the high-end customers the privilege of buying a 1080 Ti 6 months earlier and for an extra $500 to squeeze out additional revenue from people. It's a marketing situation rather than a hardware situation. 

Last I looked everyone is saying the RX is going to be clocked higher too. And gain performance from rasterization and stuff.  Still doesn't make sense to assume it will be worse because it might be cheaper.