Vega/Navi Rumors (Updated)

[Magic Hate Ball]

Launching RX Vega at Siggraph eh?

July 30th-August 3rd.

 

[pcslookout]

Most disappointing launch ever!

 

[JDG1980]

That was a really terrible and underwhelming conference.

They spent most of their time talking about Vega as a compute card. When they did briefly demo the gaming card, they did so in Crossfire?! Unless they actually did manage to pull off some Infinity Fabric magic to make two GPUs appear as one, that is NOT good news. It means that one card doesn't provide competitive performance. We saw this same Crossfire crap when Polaris was demo'd.

June 27 release date for Frontier Edition. No pricing - why?
Gaming Vega to be released at SIGGRAPH near the end of July.

We hardly learned anything new except a handful of specific release dates. I wanted to see charts, specific SKUs, and pricing. Total disappointment. Worst Computex ever.

 

[Head1985]

end of july launch for vega.Still 3 months left lol..

 

[raghu78]

end of july launch for vega.Still 3 months left lol..

We are at the end of May now. so its 2 months left. Still its very disappointing to see RX Vega launch pretty much in early August 2017. This has been the longest time ever that ATI/AMD has been without a competitive GPU at the high end. 14 months to be precise. Given that GPU generations from Nvidia are now coming at breakneck pace at 18-24 months this kind of time to market lag is suicidal for AMD's gpu division.I think something has gone wrong with Vega. For a product which was supposed to launch in H1 2017 to land in early Aug 2017 is just poor execution. I think AMD Vega performance might be underwhelming and it will struggle to match 1080 Ti.

 

[JDG1980]

end of july launch for vega.Still 3 months left lol..

2 months. It's the end of May now.
But it will probably suck - the fact that they have been focusing almost all their promotional effort on GPGPU with only the occasional gaming demo here and there (and this one in Crossfire!) is not good news for competitiveness in the gaming GPU market.

 

[OatisCampbell]

So they have the ability to have software transparent mGPU, but they need developers on board? How counter intuitive!

Or how about Raja in the first Capsaicin saying that they will need to get developers on board with mGPU in games because monolithic GPU's become impractical?

Again, if they knew they could make software transparent mGPU, why would they invest the resources to have developers with DX12/VK develop mGPU options?

The dots don't connect

mGPU solutions will become better with IF and interposers, but it won't be software transparent.

What you say is what bothers me about the whole IF mythology. I don't code, but it would seem to me next to impossible for the IF to allow mGPU to act as one across apps not developed for it to do so.
You'd think efficiency would almost "have" to be lost and resources wasted without the apps being coded for the mGPU.

 

[richaron]

end of july launch for vega.Still 3 months left lol..

Threadcrapping sounds better when you don't make simple math errors. It's 2 months...

 

[tviceman]

AMD just demo'd Prey @ 4K with Threadripper and 2 Vega GPUs. No FPS counter of course. lol.

Shouldn't need two cards at 4k unless it's ~GTX 1080 performance. The 1080 TI averages 83 fps. Not a good showing at all for gaming Vega.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Shouldn't need two cards at 4k unless it's ~GTX 1080 performance. The 1080 TI averages 83 fps. Not a good showing at all for gaming Vega.

Yeah, this doesn't seem to bode well

 

[Face2Face]

Well at least this time we saw a demo. Last time we found out that Vega will be called Vega...

I almost felt bad for Lisa. You could hear the trembling in her voice. She didn't sound confident like she did when announcing RYZEN.

 

[Maverick177]

So we used to have crap AMD cpus and decent Radeon, now we have excellent AMD cpus and sub par Radeons. Lmfao.

 

[Paul98]

Looks like vega is going to be a disappointment for gaming. We would have seen side by side vs titan xp if it was a strong competitor. Only hope is that there are currently issues with drivers, and they don't want to show performance till better optimized drivers.

 

[tviceman]

Yeah, this doesn't seem to bode well

It seems more and more like Vega is AMD's top end Fermi (aside from the heat issues) - a big die capable of graphics rendering but a significantly heavy concentration on compute. Fermi wasn't a huge leap over GT200 when it was released and all signs point to Vega is going down this same road.

 

[JDG1980]

If Vega fails, then it will be hard for Raja to justify keeping his job.

 

[Karnak]

Shouldn't need two cards at 4k unless it's ~GTX 1080 performance. The 1080 TI averages 83 fps. Not a good showing at all for gaming Vega.

What about barely 60fps?

https://www.computerbase.de/2017-05/prey-benchmark/2/#diagramm-prey-3840-2160

Just stop picking random benchmarks without knowing what exactly was benched. A 1080ti can easily drop into the 40s if there's a lot going on - like in the Vega demo.

 

[tviceman]

If Vega fails, then it will be hard for Raja to justify keeping his job.

If Vega does well in the pro market, Raja will be just fine. The problem is Vega is late and big Volta is seemingly early.

 

[tamz_msc]

Shouldn't need two cards at 4k unless it's ~GTX 1080 performance. The 1080 TI averages 83 fps. Not a good showing at all for gaming Vega.

It is about time people stopped posting TPU charts lacking context.

 

[JDG1980]

I did some googling and found a video of Prey at 4K Ultra settings on a GTX 1080. FPS averages around 42, and fluctuates from the low 40s to the mid 50s.

If this is what a single GTX 1080 can do, then the fact that it takes two Vegas to run smoothly (I'm assuming 60 FPS) is bad news. Very bad news. It would seem to bear out the leaks showing a single Vega being down near 1070-1080 levels. Given the die size and TFlop count, it should be beating GP102, but it looks like it's not coming anywhere close. I wonder if AMD just decided to stop giving a crap about DX11 gaming altogether and cede the market to Nvidia. If so, look forward to $999 GV106.

 

[Udgnim]

time to wait for end of June for someone to benchmark the Vega FE

 

[JDG1980]

If Vega does well in the pro market, Raja will be just fine. The problem is Vega is late and big Volta is seemingly early.

In the pro market, AMD has a big obstacle due to Nvidia's CUDA lock-in. I know they've tried to come up with solutions for interoperability, but they need something that is plug-and-play and lets CUDA code be recompiled for AMD with zero changes.

Beyond that, if AMD gets a terrible reputation among gamers, that will dog them in the professional market as well. A lot of gamers work in the IT field and some of them will be making professional purchasing decisions.

 

[IEC]

With the constant screen tearing in that demo, vsync was obviously off and the FPS was assuredly above 60fps... but without a FPS counter no conclusions can be drawn.

Unless they've discovered some way to make mGPU possible for ALL games using IF scaling, having Crossfire RX Vegas doesn't make me optimistic about RX Vega's gaming performance.

 

[tential]

We are at the end of May now. so its 2 months left. Still its very disappointing to see RX Vega launch pretty much in early August 2017. This has been the longest time ever that ATI/AMD has been without a competitive GPU at the high end. 14 months to be precise. Given that GPU generations from Nvidia are now coming at breakneck pace at 18-24 months this kind of time to market lag is suicidal for AMD's gpu division.I think something has gone wrong with Vega. For a product which was supposed to launch in H1 2017 to land in early Aug 2017 is just poor execution. I think AMD Vega performance might be underwhelming and it will struggle to match 1080 Ti.

I had no idea when I skipped fury x I'd have to wait this long.
At least I know next time around amd isn't above shady tactics like a frontier edition to pretend as if they hit a deadline.

I'm holding my disappointment for the performance until we see the gpu at launch. This is amd... They've still got so much driver develop left to do.

Since we'll see the frontier edition soon though we'll know how good Vega is.

Edit : if Vega wasn't competitive why even bother? They would have scrapped it in the planning stage. It has to scale past Polaris better than simply expanding Polaris....

 

[guskline]

I watched the Livestream from AMD. Heard a ton about Threadripper. Heard next to nothing about Vega. UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since I just sold one of my RX480s I had running in CF, I'm content to wait until the end of July to see what Vega brings to the table. I really have no choice. The short demo of 2 RX vegas (or was that Frontier Vegas) was underwhelming to say the least.

Perhaps by then the GTX1080TI will drop a bit in price???

 

[railven]

So when do NDA's go up?

At least know roughly know what two Vega's can do!