AMD's response to Vega price hikes

[Zodiark1593]

6 minutes ago, Phate.exe said:

YAAAASSSSSS.

 

The number of people I've had tell me that I'm insane if I think a Fury (or a 1070 for that matter) is a 4K-capable card is annoying.  Yeah, if I just launch the game and move all the sliders to the right, of course it might run like shit (realistically, that means it's actually just running at 35fps or so), but there really is hardly any discernible difference between high/ultra (usually low looks okay, medium looks decent, PS4/Xbone are somewhere between medium/high, high looks very good, and ultra basically looks like high).

 

@Zodiark1593 As far as "older machines that can't run CS:GO" how old are you talking about there?  Because CSGO ran very nicely with my old Phenom II X6 (even before I overclocked it) and R9 270X (aka 7870, a card for 2012).

Laptops exist too and are hardly upgradable. My old laptop had a dual i5 and a Radeon 5470. Kind of the exact opposite of speed demon.

[Loot]

13 minutes ago, ltguy said:

Anyone? I was wondering the same.

 

2 hours ago, Badly Browned said:

What the heck is "SEP"?

 

I've heard of MSRP and SRP, but never SEP. A quick google search doesn't seem to yield anything useful. 

I believe it to be a typo of SIP or special introductory price

[AHaskin14]

With no acknowledgement of the "we lied through our teeth about the pricing and packages"

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

Disappointing. Such high hopes the pricing would undercut the competition. I might as well wait for a 1070 to go on sale. Or even buy one now outright since it's going to be the best price for performance anyways. 

[NumLock21]

3 hours ago, Badly Browned said:

What the heck is "SEP"?

 

I've heard of MSRP and SRP, but never SEP. A quick google search doesn't seem to yield anything useful. 

 

50 minutes ago, ltguy said:

Anyone? I was wondering the same.

 

Suggested Exclusive Price

 

I hate acronyms!

Does this gpu come with a bp?

No, this gpu does not come with a banana pudding!

[Teddy07]

2 hours ago, Terodius said:

Of course I know since you're German you probably earn a good living

1

I don't know where you got your news but you are totally wrong. Rents increase way faster than the salary. Most jobs give you an ok wage but it is not like you can buy every month a gtx 1070 or other shit. Sure there are good paying jobs like in every other country too.

[System Error Message]

theres more demand for the card itself than bundle.

[Bananasplit_00]

3 hours ago, Princess Cadence said:

I still think use HBM2 was nothing but a failed marketing thing, it is expensive and difficult to make, gives no real benefits but make stocking it harder and cost more.

 

I really like Ryzen but when it gets to Graphics; nVidia all the way.

 

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

I agree: AMD wanting to be innovative is one thing, but forcing tech that's just not ready like HBM and HBM2 is just hurting them too much. There's no reason why they should insist on HBM2 for consumer products those RX Vega cards would be just fine with just gddr5x and they can still push HBM2 on the Frontier edition and other non-consumer products.

it cuts the VRAM power in litteraly half or more for them. thats not really "no benefit" for AMD. haveing their cards rated at 400W TDB figuers would be REALLY bad for them.

 

2 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I may be wrong but I've seen indications that Vega is memory bandwidth starved and memory overclocking is therefore better than core overclocking, so if that is the case then Vega would be even worse unless they go for a 384/512 bit bus which might be cheaper (although I'm guessing not as cheap as 256 bit) but run hotter and using more power. So the only advantage I see is price at the cost of performance.

yes, Vega is memory starved under overclocking and overclocking the HBM costs you quite litteraly unnoticable amounts of power to do.

 

2 hours ago, Terodius said:

I play esports type games like Dota and CS:GO at 1080p. My PC does more than well enough with those kind of games, pushing 100fps or so. You've been brainwashed by marketing into believing you need the latest components to be able to play just like the retards that buy a new iphone every year. Unless you're playing very recent AAA titles at 4K on a high-refresh rate monitor you do not need a 500+USD GPU and enthusiast components. 

 

All I do on my PC is play games that are not that hard to run, watch youtube, and write code and it works perfectly for that kind of application so by any stretch of the imagination I have a reasonable PC. And I'm willing to bet a lot of people are in the same situation as me, where the PC they have works just fine for the things they use it for. Therefore, keeping a PC that\s working fine for you now is actually it's great advice.

 

Of course I know since you're German you probably earn a good living so you can spend a bunch of money on a bleeding edge PC, and since that's not possible for 99% of people on the planet you wanna rub it in and show off your great PC, but we don't care, we're fine having fun with whatever games our PCs can run. So you can go shove your German superiority complex up your ass.

yep a GTX 660 is basically the same as getting a RX 560, still works fine for 1080p. the 600 series of cards are all ok 1080p cards, the problem becomes power consumption vs current cards.

 

1 hour ago, Phate.exe said:

YAAAASSSSSS.

 

The number of people I've had tell me that I'm insane if I think a Fury (or a 1070 for that matter) is a 4K-capable card is annoying.  Yeah, if I just launch the game and move all the sliders to the right, of course it might run like shit (realistically, that means it's actually just running at 35fps or so), but there really is hardly any discernible difference between high/ultra (usually low looks okay, medium looks decent, PS4/Xbone are somewhere between medium/high, high looks very good, and ultra basically looks like high).

 

@Zodiark1593 As far as "older machines that can't run CS:GO" how old are you talking about there?  Because CSGO ran very nicely with my old Phenom II X6 (even before I overclocked it) and R9 270X (aka 7870, a card for 2012).

can confirm it dosent run nice on C2Q 6600 and 8800GT 1080p atleast

 

1 hour ago, Misanthrope said:

Yet the 1080ti is fine with it, killing it on any tests and with far lower power consumption.

 

No, GDDR5X isn't the problem, AMD's poor architecture is. This is akin to taking a Bulldozer CPU and try to squeeze a tad more performance out of it with a 120watt TDP chip under water at 5.5ghz and DDR4 3600mhz support.

 

Would it improve it's performance? Probably quite a bit. Yet is not at all practical if the problem is the damn architecture of the chip itself, not the memory.

the problem is that whenever they make a memory system it eats shitloads of power compared to NVIDIA, the R9 390's draws over 40W while this HBM2 implementation draws under 20W and draws basically no more power  once overclocked

[Bananasplit_00]

45 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

 

 

Suggested Exclusive Price

 

I hate acronyms!

Does this gpu come with a bp?

No, this gpu does not come with a banana pudding!

id buy Vega if there was a banana pudding included in that $399 MSRP for the 56 and you could, you know, flash it  

[DragonTamer1]

I really like Vega, I would love to have one for my system. AMD has done a few things that I don't like though with their cards. Pricing, restricting power, limiting modding potential.

 

I may still get one, but definitely not until the board partners release their models.

[Dietrichw]

GamersNexus got a little bit more information out of AMD in response to the official statement. 

 

Quote

GN:

       “I have a point of clarification on the official statement: The statement notes ‘initial launch quantities’ and attaches prices to those initial quantities. What is not clear -- to me, at least -- is whether the RX Vega 64 cards will be restocked at a specific price. The statement works around that. Can you confirm for print whether RX Vega 64 single cards (non-bundles) will be restocked at $500?”

 

AMD responded:

       “Because we can’t control pricing, I can’t say that.”

GN tried to ask what level of control AMD has over final retail price and the representative was not authorized to give that sort of information. 

http://www.gamersnexus.net/industry/3025-amd-statement-on-vega-pricing-retailers-fault

[PillowSmoke]

14 hours ago, Terodius said:

Moving to HBM was a great decision from a technical standpoint, the memory technology offers significant advantages over traditional GDDR but the manufacturing processes were just not mature enough to release a consumer card using it. It doesn't help that the memory industry as a whole is in a transition period and we're going through the GMD17 (Great Memory Drought of '17) which further constrains the supply chain. My advice would be stick with whatever you have for now and wait till 2018 to buy/upgrade your PC. All the component shortages + mining boom makes it incredibly expensive to build a PC right now.

Honestly though I'm really in the market of upgrading from my slow grandpa 7950, but I suppose I could wait a little bit longer.

[Grinners]

Very deceptive practice. 

 

AMD should have just been honest and allowed the price to be set by demand. Charge high early on but be honest about it. No point allowing the profit to be skimmed by the retailers alone. 

 

AMD should take their cut of the miner crazy money but be upfront about it. 

[MMKing]

I cannot shake the feeling that when the Fury and the Fury X hit a couple years ago, as sort of a pre-sample of the HBM technology. They always intended that the next HBM graphics card, on the next die shrink should have four HBM2 memory chips as opposed to the two on the current Vega graphics cards.

 

The Vega core may be significantly more powerful than the Fury core, but the effective bandwidth has been reduced and the more we hear about the shortcomings of Vega. The more we hear about the difficulties and the expenses of putting the HBM memory chips on the Vega GPU. The buss width has been halved, but the clock speed has quite been doubled from 1000mhz to about 1900 mhz on the Vega 64. The Vega 56 is worse off at 1600mhz. The only significant improvement the HBM2 has brought over HBM1 is double the Vram for half the HBM chips. Even the 390x is competing with the Vega 56 in terms of bandwidth.

 

Had the GPUs stuck at the original MSRP, they would have been fairly competitive keeping the G-sync extortion in mind. Now i'm not so sure, and i will probably wait a few months for prices to settle down, if i don't wait for the Navi. If it has four HBM2 chips at slightly higher clock speeds, the rumored 1GB/s bandwidth on the Vega cards may become reality in a year to a year and a half.

 

Here is an image concerning AMD developments released 4th quarter 2016.

 

There was definitely intended to be two Vega releases. One as early as the 1st quarter with two HBM2 chips at about 500GB/s bandwidth, then another a few months later at about 1TB/s bandwidth.

 

The memory issues may have hit significantly harder than even AMD anticipated in internal communications as late as Q4-2016. At this point, i doubt there will be a second Vega with four HBM2 chips if they are struggling with delivering GPUs with two HBM2 chips almost half a year later than their first intended release date.

 

However, here is to hoping that the problems only reach as far as HBM2 memory. And that the Navi iteration will follow as soon as the memory issues are solved with four HBM2.

[Jito463]

8 hours ago, Dietrichw said:

GN:

       “I have a point of clarification on the official statement: The statement notes ‘initial launch quantities’ and attaches prices to those initial quantities. What is not clear -- to me, at least -- is whether the RX Vega 64 cards will be restocked at a specific price. The statement works around that. Can you confirm for print whether RX Vega 64 single cards (non-bundles) will be restocked at $500?”

 

AMD responded:

       “Because we can’t control pricing, I can’t say that.”

Technically, they're correct.  Manufacturer's have never directly controlled the retail price.  They can have some influence over it, but ultimately the retailer sets their own price.

[Ezio Auditore]

Hey, how does this sound?

Buy a vega, mine and make up all your spent money.

[luckydog32]

On 8/18/2017 at 0:15 PM, Badly Browned said:

What the heck is "SEP"?

 

I've heard of MSRP and SRP, but never SEP. A quick google search doesn't seem to yield anything useful. 

Suggested E-tail price if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: I was mistaken.

[ltguy]

Well they found a way to keep the rx vega 64's in stock... the price is now $699 everywhere. What are they thinking? Except for compute users and miners... this is a insane price. Who would pay $699 for a card that struggles to beat a 1080 in games, when 2 Rx580's in crossfire @ $229 a pop can easily beat a 1080. I know amd wants to get some of the cash of the inflated mining card prices vice just the etailers... but the PR surrounding this will haunt them for weeks.

[Doobeedoo]

Still don't see any cards in retail where I am though. Though I will wait custom cards and their price. 

While they did wait to gather more stock it's quite possible demand was higher than expected. 

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, ltguy said:

when 2 Rx580's in crossfire @ $229 a pop

Where are you finding 580's at even remotely close to that price?  Their price got jacked way up even before the 1060/70's.

[Guest]

I understand why everyone is having a cow over this, but AMD would be stupid to not modulate pricing based on demand. The board partners/retailers do - why not let the company putting mass amounts of investment into R+D benefit from the product they are offering? Future products will only be better because of it. 

[JoeCoke]

Poooooooooooor Vegaaaaaaaaaaaa.

[goodtofufriday]

23 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Poooooooooooor Vegaaaaaaaaaaaa.

This is very true in the workstation/developer space when using a vega Instinct card. It crushes nvidias offerings. 

[System Error Message]

its wrong to set prices based on demand, based on demand, people cant afford homes and some basic necessities. Think food for example, food shortage and pricing increase kills those that cant afford food while retailers get to walk away with lots of money.

 

Rather than pricing for demand why not release mining cards seperately. If miners want a GPU for mining have a seperate line for it that differs from the normal cards. For example mining cards could come preconfigured undervolted with better cooling, something that'd attract miners away from the normal cards and would give AMD profit from the high demand rather than one camp not getting cards and the other getting loads.

 

I would not say that AMD is against modding, It took time to figure out whether or not you could flash the bios to unlock stuff. on the CPU level you couldnt unlock cores from fx onwards and i would not put it against AMD for that. Infact from GCN2 onwards AMD artifically restricted DP performance on their consumer cards and with vega they didnt strip anything. you say AMD is restricting power and i say thats not true. Vega was set to 300W by default and needs more power. But you have only the PCie port and 2 8 pin. This gives 150W+150W+75W so vega can only use 375W on a normal board. On higher end boards it can use more since the PCIe slot will provide power up to 150W on the slot itself so you get a total of 450W on higher end boards. As a manfuacturer its hard to put more PCie power ports on a single card because you want your card usable by as many as possible and 300W was a set max target by both nvidia and AMD (4870x2, gtx 295, full pascal tesla).

 

With vega AMD has actually done better than with previous cards which is to not artifically restrict anything. Sure you cant unlock the card in the sense of the HD 7950 but thats not important. Whats important is that you get the full hardware to use with some things locked only because of yields. If you think about it, a silicon wafer is round but cores are square, so how do you think the end of the circle is used eh?

 

Pricing for GPUs right now is bad all around the world. Its not just supply problems.

[JoostinOnline]

I have some AMD stock.  This was so sleazy that I'm not even upset about their stock dropping.