RTG Raja's going on a break, Lisa Su is stepping in for the next few months

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, MechPilot524 said:

If it's causing an absence this long, then it can't exactly be the common cold.

I was talking about something serious, like cancer.

[Trixanity]

5 hours ago, MechPilot524 said:

Hmm. Nvidia is very deeply entrenched in mobile products. AMD APUs have always been good because Intel integrated graphics have always been trash (I think someone ran a 1080p benchmark and a 4790k on IGPU was about the same as an A10 APU)*.

You had the 940M and now the 940MX, to which there was never really an alternative. And the 10X0 series desktop cards have been in laptops these days - no way Vega will be a good mobile card and Polaris can't touch a 1080 in a laptop.

 

AMD has a better chance on desktops, where you have things like FreeSync. AMD's had some good entries there - RX 4/580 were fundamentally good, it's just data mining got 'em. And my first true GPU was a Hawaii, an R9 290 I keep around to this day.

 

*Edit: Trivial but found it. Gamers Nexus tested a new Athlon chip and in their benchmarks included a 4790k running IGPU and an A10-7870k. The 7870k handily beat the 4790k in general, titles I noticed were GTA 5 Normal at 1080p and GRiD Medium at 1080. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxukB3GZyMg

 

I'd say Vega is better off in the mobile segment than desktop. By reigning in the clock speeds there is a huge improvement in power consumption.

We should see it in particular on Raven Ridge but it isn't out of the question to see a Vega chip for mobile (Vega 11 perhaps?). I think the biggest hindrance is HBM and the cost associated with it.

 

FreeSync is possible on mobile, so I'm not sure why this is mentioned.

[Mr.Meerkat]

5 hours ago, MechPilot524 said:

nd AMD was trying to sell them to compete with the i7 K-SKUs on price, though they eventually shifted it to match an i5.

And near the end of its life, i3s

[Mihle]

6 hours ago, MechPilot524 said:

Maybe so, but RTG is in a better position now vs Nvidia (they can actually sorta compete across the market) than what AMD had when Intel dropped Devil's Canyon (Haswell refresh with improved TIM and binning). AMD had the FX-9590, only capable of competing in heavily multithreaded applications, and overclocked in gaming (difficult to do because Vishera was a space heater!) couldn't even match an i5. And AMD was trying to sell them to compete with the i7 K-SKUs on price, though they eventually shifted it to match an i5. So yeah, compared to that market where you really were only gonna pick AMD processors on a budget and snag an 8350 instead of a pricier i5, Ryzen is a miracle and RTG can at least compete.

RTG Is in a much worse position now than they have been before.

[Vode]

I don't think he's getting axed.

 

It's probably just vacation or a PR move to get him away from the heat.

 

Also Vega might still be a success for AMD. They probably just gave up on gaming and focused on just making money with a high end graphics card for a change, which the probably didn't in forever. (Fury X sold not very good, 290X sold well but then Bitcoin and overstock etc.)

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Mihle said:

RTG Is in a much worse position now than they have been before.

I'd say the HD2000/HD3000 series was worse, mostly for the fact that even now AMD/RTG are still actually selling GPUs. Back then those were terrible, very terrible and resulted in most of what they are stuck in now, those cards had a really bad stigma and ruined their reputation.

[Mihle]

9 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'd say the HD2000/HD3000 series was worse, mostly for the fact that even now AMD/RTG are still actually selling GPUs. Back then those were terrible, very terrible and resulted in most of what they are stuck in now, those cards had a really bad stigma and ruined their reputation.

When you say its its probably correct becasue you are smarter than me.
But RTGs GPUs have majority of the time been better compared to Nvidia than they are now.

 

Well, even then the gpus was just plain better than Nvidia at one point, Nvidia still sold more cards...

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Mihle said:

When you say its its probably correct becasue you are smarter than me.

More of a case I was a X800GTO owner and can remember just how disappointed we all were when ATI released the HD2000 turd lol.

 

5 minutes ago, Mihle said:

But RTGs GPUs have majority of the time been better compared to Nvidia than they are now.

 Yea other than those two generations ATI faired extremely well to Nvidia and sometimes had the fastest card on the market, while not as often as Nvidia certainly much better than what can be said now days.

[Sniperfox47]

Stupid question, but Lisa Su is an existing exec with AMD right?

And AMD's just pushing to ramp into APU production with Zen and Vega for Q4 right?

And Raja is supposed to be back Q4 right?

 

Couldn't this just be a case of her moving across temporarily to help coordinate the RTG and AMD teams for the last steps of finalizing the APUs for production? If she's been working with the AMD guys and gals for a while now, moving her over to work with the RTG guys and gals could help to bridge the two groups and facilitate communication as they finish up their products.

 

Correct me if I have a misunderstanding in there somewhere.

[Misanthrope]

41 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Stupid question, but Lisa Su is an existing exec with AMD right?

And AMD's just pushing to ramp into APU production with Zen and Vega for Q4 right?

And Raja is supposed to be back Q4 right?

 

Couldn't this just be a case of her moving across temporarily to help coordinate the RTG and AMD teams for the last steps of finalizing the APUs for production? If she's been working with the AMD guys and gals for a while now, moving her over to work with the RTG guys and gals could help to bridge the two groups and facilitate communication as they finish up their products.

 

Correct me if I have a misunderstanding in there somewhere.

No that's mostly accurate and plausible, but it would still kinda mean admitting defeat on Vega: There's still promised features that are flat-out not active in Vega so at the very least the engineers should be working hard at driver support at this point.

 

So if what you say turns out to be accurate it means Su thinks Vega is not salvageable and that they can just move the current stock to miners and workstation clients (who obviously do not need the missing features) which is worrisome.

 

Actually the entire situation with Radeon Group is fairly worrisome to me: for them to "fix" things we'd be talking very long term development of a brand new architecture from the ground up (like Zen) and that's 4 to 5 years in the making before it'd be ready.

[VanayadGaming]

9 hours ago, YongKang said:

I just hope Vega gets better with the drivers and Lisa's leadership.  

Again with the drivers ?:)) Amd's drivers are fine ...and have been for years.

[JediFragger]

42 minutes ago, VanayadGaming said:

Again with the drivers ?:)) Amd's drivers are fine ...and have been for years.

You do know the amount of bugs that the Vega drivers have had so far right? Very very many!

[TidaLWaveZ]

Oh... I was under the impression that AMD's entire GPU division had been on break for over a year or so now.

[DocSwag]

10 hours ago, MechPilot524 said:

Maybe. As pointed above though if they were gonna dismiss him wouldn't they just hire an interim director and dismiss him? And I guess the whole HBM2 situation wasn't pretty - Linus did point out in his Vega review that there were and still are supply issues on HBM2, like there's only one supplier. Maybe that doesn't explain some of Vega's other downsides. But he did good on the 480 and 580, the miners ruined it (no offense to miners).

I never said they dismissed him, just that maybe this will be good for RTG  

9 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

I looked into it and apparently he joined shortly after Vega development started. 

So he probably did do a lot for Vega  

[rattacko123]

22 minutes ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

Oh... I was under the impression that AMD's entire GPU division had been on break for over a year or so now.

Yeah they've been using 'Fury drivers' with Vega for almost a year, where are the real Vega drivers AMD? 
 

[TidaLWaveZ]

2 minutes ago, rattacko123 said:

Yeah they've been using 'Fury drivers' with Vega for almost a year, where are the real Vega drivers AMD? 
 

We laugh now but we'll be crying soon when nvidia can charge whatever they want for 80 level video cards. 

[samcool55]

1 hour ago, VanayadGaming said:

Again with the drivers ?:)) Amd's drivers are fine ...and have been for years.

The drivers work and get updates on a regular basis, but they are far from perfect.

There are hardware functions on Vega that are just completely disabled even tho they have the potential to give a boost of a few %.

The amount of raw compute power Vega has is difficult to utilize properly so the driver for it will take probably at least a year until it's somewhat capable of using Vega to its full potential. I mean it took about 6 months for Polaris and the GPU is much smaller so easier to optimize the drivers for that.

 

DX12/Vulkan would help a lot with this because the drivers wouldn't be as important anymore compared to today (DX11). However those games are still nowhere to be found and it wouldn't be unreasonable to think AMD hoped games with DX12/Vulkan support would start rolling out about now but that's not the case.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Vega people in 2-3 years time would say "see Vega was a much better option! F nvidia!" because by then the drivers are optimized, more hardware functions are enabled (hopefully all by then) and DX12/Vulkan is (finally) common. But then again that's not now so it's pointless.

 

It might be sad but the fact Nvidia has like a complete GPU design above the 1080 (1080ti, titan Xp) they are basically 1 full step ahead of AMD. 

 

In the CPU war it's AMD vs Intel and they are trading blows at the very top. Core wise AMD is after a long time king again.

 

However in the GPU war Nvidia has been king for a LONG time and it seems like there's nothing in the near future that will change that. I understand AMD wants to go with a modular design for GPU's like they did with Ryzen but i don't think that's going to be enough... 

Don't forget Polaris is already more than a year old now.

 

Also (quite long post but whatever :D) nvidia has been sitting on their lazy ass for YEARS. They can optimize the crap out of their drivers because they have plenty of time. Volta already exists and it's likely Nvidia is already optimizing drivers for it right now. If you compare that to AMD Navi is probably in a barely functioning state and are still working hard getting the Vega drivers ready.

[Lathlaer]

3 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Also (quite long post but whatever :D) nvidia has been sitting on their lazy ass for YEARS.

Yea sure, delivering huge performance gains from generation to generation is sitting on lazy ass ;-) What has AMD been doing in the meantime?

 

I am sorry but if we make the assumption that the competition in GPU department from AMD side was virtually nonexistent for last couple of years then I am fine with that. Unlike Intel, NVIDIA has been delivering steady and noticeable performance gains from generation to generation.

 

People are still sitting on CPU's from 4 years ago and are still fine for many tasks like gaming, whereas people who are still sitting on 700 series Geforce can feel quite the performance difference between their cards and Pascals.

 

Basically, unlike Intel, NVIDIA doesn't need competition to deliver good product. Sure, competition is always nice but in this case it's not like they would never have released Volta or made it only +10% stronger than Pascal. Judging from past patterns, Volta WILL come next year and will be at least 30% stronger than Pascals and that is regardless of what AMD will do.

[cj09beira]

14 minutes ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

We laugh now but we'll be crying soon when nvidia can charge whatever they want for 80 level video cards. 

They already are as the 1080 is actually a 60/70 class gpu

12 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

The drivers work and get updates on a regular basis, but they are far from perfect.

There are hardware functions on Vega that are just completely disabled even tho they have the potential to give a boost of a few %.

The amount of raw compute power Vega has is difficult to utilize properly so the driver for it will take probably at least a year until it's somewhat capable of using Vega to its full potential. I mean it took about 6 months for Polaris and the GPU is much smaller so easier to optimize the drivers for that.

 

DX12/Vulkan would help a lot with this because the drivers wouldn't be as important anymore compared to today (DX11). However those games are still nowhere to be found and it wouldn't be unreasonable to think AMD hoped games with DX12/Vulkan support would start rolling out about now but that's not the case.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Vega people in 2-3 years time would say "see Vega was a much better option! F nvidia!" because by then the drivers are optimized, more hardware functions are enabled (hopefully all by then) and DX12/Vulkan is (finally) common. But then again that's not now so it's pointless.

 

It might be sad but the fact Nvidia has like a complete GPU design above the 1080 (1080ti, titan Xp) they are basically 1 full step ahead of AMD. 

 

In the CPU war it's AMD vs Intel and they are trading blows at the very top. Core wise AMD is after a long time king again.

 

However in the GPU war Nvidia has been king for a LONG time and it seems like there's nothing in the near future that will change that. I understand AMD wants to go with a modular design for GPU's like they did with Ryzen but i don't think that's going to be enough... 

Don't forget Polaris is already more than a year old now.

 

Also (quite long post but whatever :D) nvidia has been sitting on their lazy ass for YEARS. They can optimize the crap out of their drivers because they have plenty of time. Volta already exists and it's likely Nvidia is already optimizing drivers for it right now. If you compare that to AMD Navi is probably in a barely functioning state and are still working hard getting the Vega drivers ready.

They have been selling more but I wouldn't say they have been having better products. 

[samcool55]

5 minutes ago, Lathlaer said:

Yea sure, delivering huge performance gains from generation to generation is sitting on lazy ass ;-) What has AMD been doing in the meantime?

 

I am sorry but if we make the assumption that the competition in GPU department from AMD side was virtually nonexistent for last couple of years then I am fine with that. Unlike Intel, NVIDIA has been delivering steady and noticeable performance gains from generation to generation.

 

People are still sitting on CPU's from 4 years ago and are still fine for many tasks like gaming, whereas people who are still sitting on 700 series Geforce can feel quite the performance difference between their cards and Pascals.

 

Basically, unlike Intel, NVIDIA doesn't need competition to deliver good product. Sure, competition is always nice but in this case it's not like they would never have released Volta or made it only +10% stronger than Pascal. Judging from past patterns, Volta WILL come next year and will be at least 30% stronger than Pascals and that is regardless of what AMD will do.

Yeah volta will eventually arrive, but at what price? Prices for high-end gpu's are rising with every new generation that gets launched. Also 30% is low, we used to see 50-60% performance increases. Don't forget the titan Xp costs 1.200 dollars, the most expensive a graphics card that could be used for gaming ever, even if you would look at older cards and looked at inflation no card ever was that expensive. (yes there was a titan Z but that was a dual-gpu card, an exception :p).

 

So be prepared that the volta-based Titan would probably cost 1.500 dollars, mainly because they can and there's no competition...

[Lathlaer]

22 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Also 30% is low, we used to see 50-60% performance increases.

That was just rough conservative estimation, obviously. I just watched a video comparing Witcher 3 where 780ti was pulling about 37 fps whereas 1080ti was doing 87-89. That is about 137% increase in performance. 980ti was doing almost double, a bit less than 100% increase. 

 

EDIT: ok, getting the averages it wasn't that much, still - about 50% increase from 780ti to 980ti and 100%+ from 780ti to 180ti.

 

22 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Yeah volta will eventually arrive, but at what price?

 

The MSRP price increase for high end NVIDIA gpus has been almost 0% from 780ti.

 

I am leaving Titans out because people who pay for Titans don't really care about stuff like that. They are either techtubers who get it for free or are willing to pay premium for the cool name and to be able to claim that they have the current fastest thing a consumer can get. 

[TidaLWaveZ]

17 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

They already are as the 1080 is actually a 60/70 class gpu

How do you come to that conclusion, the 1080 outperforms the entire 900 generation? A 70/60 class would be near the performance of a previous generations 80/ti.

[Doobeedoo]

Probably just vacation anyway. Vega is out and it is getting bought be it film indstry, miners or gamers that got their hands on it. Also in professional space, server and all. 

RX Vega just started to show up in retail where I am in all SKUs now. Though custom cards yet to come. 

And that info about next improved Vega flagship Vega 20 on 7nm just seems odd, not to mention rumored mid range Vega chip with HBM2 hmm. 

Also, isn't he mainly working on Navi though. 

[cj09beira]

2 minutes ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

How do you come to that conclusion, the 1080 outperforms the entire 900 generation? A 70/60 class would be near the performance of a previous generations 80/ti.

Gpus class is determined by die size not perf. And if you go back to older generations the 80 class chip is 450 mm2 or more. The 1080 Gpus is in the 300s

[cj09beira]

3 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Probably just vacation anyway. Vega is out and it is getting bought be it film indstry, miners or gamers that got their hands on it. Also in professional space, server and all. 

RX Vega just started to show up in retail where I am in all SKUs now. Though custom cards yet to come. 

And that info about next improved Vega flagship Vega 20 on 7nm just seems odd, not to mention rumored mid range Vega chip with HBM2 hmm. 

Also, isn't he mainly working on Navi though. 

Vega 20 will probably be Vega with fp64, so it will be really compute focused, also easy to see by the crazy amount of hbm2 on it