Vega/Navi Rumors (Updated)

[crisium]

so RX Vega... I wonder how they plan on differentiating the product lineup?

Might as well triple down on the codename usage.

RX Vega 10
RX Vega 10 Cut
RX Vega 11
RX Vega 11 Cut

Not serious, but that would be comical.

 

[Head1985]

Vega must be still 3+months away from launch.No new info only name.
I bet NV already know everything about vega anyway thats why they launching today 1080TI

 

[Despoiler]

Few thoughts about the event. Products, and technology are great. Package, and the way you are serving it - is horrible.

It is like eating your favorite food straight from the floor. AMD must work on their presentations. And let Raja talk about hardware, but not try to "sell the hardware" on stage. He is an engineer, for god's sake.

IDK I like Raja. The fact that he is a genuine nerd and not a polished sales person, like JHH, is endearing to me. I identify with the "big kid" enthusiasm.

 

[Dygaza]

They promised quite interesting things about high bandwidth cache. +50% fps on average, +100% fps in minimums. These percentages are quite risky to promise as fps varies so much between different games. Ofc it shouldn't be read directly as raw percentages, but that's what you get when you promise hard numbers.

 

[Glo.]

IDK I like Raja. The fact that he is a genuine nerd and not a polished sales person, like JHH, is endearing to me. I identify with the "big kid" enthusiasm.

That is the whole point of what I have written. But when you look at how he struggles, when he has to say things the marketing team wanted him to say, rather than just letting him talk about this stuff in his natural way...

P.S. Radeon RX Vega? I suppose AMD Fanboys will be called Vegans from this moment on .

 

[crisium]

Actually, thinking about it, if they want to make codenames the new name, they can bring back Pro and XT which are still used internally. Might as well remind people of ATi's glory days of 9800 Pro and 9800 XT.

Then again, AMD has sort of botched bringing back things from the olden and golden days. FX was resurrected as the failure of Bullzdozer, and Fury was brought back for the underwhelming Fiji. Maybe it would jinx them to resurrect Pro and XT now.

 

[Glo.]

They promised quite interesting things about high bandwidth cache. +50% fps on average, +100% fps in minimums. These percentages are quite risky to promise as fps varies so much between different games. Ofc it shouldn't be read directly as raw percentages, but that's what you get when you promise hard numbers.

They have shown the difference between a situation when HBCC is on, and off. That is all and the benefits of HBCC. Not the absolute performance uplift.

 

[Bacon1]

Forward rendering being optimised.

Yeah they mentioned they got ~30% perf increase when using it which is massive for VR.

Nitro 2 engine 8 core 100% utilization.

Dan also mentioned about being able to use Async Compute to handle something (lighting?) separate from the rest which gave a big perf increase.

Async multi projection? No explanation so i take as similar nvidias tech.

Yeah, they also released this video yesterday:

 

[swilli89]

Vega must be still 3+months away from launch.No new info only name.
I bet NV already know everything about vega anyway thats why they launching today 1080TI

Well we've been expecting Q2 for a long time and if anything, with AMD's currently lacking budget for R&D, this is typically at the end of the "window" they gave us.

Zen was postulated by Lisa Su as possibly late Q4 for first release and it almost slipped into Q2 2017. They've been saying 1H 2017 so we are in all likelihood looking at late May, early June I think.

 

[crisium]

Well, they called it a sneak peak into the Summer of Radeon.

I interpret that as it will not launch before June.

 

[swilli89]

IDK I like Raja. The fact that he is a genuine nerd and not a polished sales person, like JHH, is endearing to me. I identify with the "big kid" enthusiasm.

I do too. So just let him come out and be an engineer, they're trying to cram him into being a sales person.

 

[french toast]

They have had silicon for months, no demos showing it against gtx 1080 or a titan? Very disappointing, there was some negative feedback in some quarters about the lower than expected performance vs pascal last time they demoed vega, i wonder if thats the reason?
You would think if they had something that could challenge 1080ti they would put a demo up to plant a seed in peoples mind to hold back with 1080ti purchase, i can only conclude they didt feel confident.

Hopefully they are just keeping their cards to their chest but i dont feel optimistic right now.

 

[Det0x]

i am pretty sure AMD already decided a long time ago for the top-end graphic card to be named "RX Vega", but that brings the question, what are these RX 580 leaks we have been seeing ?
Must make it Polaris update / Vega11 then ?

 

[Glo.]

For AMD 2017 appears to be brand reset year. If Vega and Ryzen were designed to bring extreme performance per dollar benefit to the market, AMD may want to cut loose from previous years, and very bad brand appeal. I do not know if this makes sense, from marketing point for you guys, but Using Radeon RX Vega name for brand new, from scratch architecture, according to Raja Koduri, himself, is good way for doing it. It shifts the perception people could have about Radeon brand to something new, fresh.

And Vega is very strong, very easy to remember, word.

 

[Mopetar]

IDK I like Raja. The fact that he is a genuine nerd and not a polished sales person, like JHH, is endearing to me. I identify with the "big kid" enthusiasm.

JHH isn't some kind of sales person or businessman or non-nerd. He's an electrical engineer and worked at AMD prior to starting NVidia. Just because someone is good at public speaking or likes presentations to be more professional doesn't make them non-nerdy.

 

[Mopetar]

They have shown the difference between a situation when HBCC is on, and off. That is all and the benefits of HBCC. Not the absolute performance uplift.

Well they didn't have HBCC before so there's an implication that it's a performance lift. The question is whether the baseline is no HBCC and this represents a huge increase, or its a replacement to something else that's say maybe 75% as effective as HBCC so in reality the gains aren't quite as good.

 

[Krteq]

Raja said that HBCC on/off video have been taken on system with "simulated" 2GB VRAM. With HBCC on it has been able to maintain playable min. FPS and so on.

 

[Mopetar]

Raja said that HBCC on/off video have been taken on system with "simulated" 2GB VRAM. With HBCC on it has been able to maintain playable min. FPS and so on.

So it's 100% more effective than a system that we've intentionally gimped by cutting the memory in half?

I suppose it hypothetically makes it less of a worry/issue if they ship a Vega GPU with only 4 GB of HBM2 if this effectively allows the GPU to act as though it actually had 8 GB, but at some point it becomes easier just to give it 8 GB of actual memory. I can understand not wanting to give out too many actual details or specifics until it's time to launch, but it's a pretty painful wait.

 

[Despoiler]

JHH isn't some kind of sales person or businessman or non-nerd. He's an electrical engineer and worked at AMD prior to starting NVidia. Just because someone is good at public speaking or likes presentations to be more professional doesn't make them non-nerdy.

I'm well aware of JHH's technical background. He is a glorified sales person at the moment. Promising the moon and misleading throughout his presentations just like a good sales person does. As far as professional...super professional when he yelled at his helper during the Pascal launch. The guy is egocentric and just a douchebag. He has no nerd cred with that stupid leather jacket and jeans outfit. Jobs did the signature outfit first. JHH the poser followed.

 

[imported_bman]

I'm well aware of JHH's technical background. He is a glorified sales person at the moment. Promising the moon and misleading throughout his presentations just like a good sales person does. As far as professional...super professional when he yelled at his helper during the Pascal launch. The guy is egocentric and just a douchebag. He has no nerd cred with that stupid leather jacket and jeans outfit. Jobs did the signature outfit first. JHH the poser followed.

I can understand frustration with the pricing segmentation strategy Nvidia has pursued, but when is the last time JHH failed to deliver outside of mobile SoCs (one would probably have to go back to the FX series)?

 

[HurleyBird]

HBCC looks like the real deal as opposed a marketing gimmick. Even though I think 8GB will be enough for awhile, it's good to know Vega GPUs will be fairly future proof when it comes to memory size, especially since the 1080Ti has more VRAM to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if Fury Vega ended up harder to saturate despite having less memory.

That said, with the exception of HBCC and a couple other things, it was a very fluffy event. Not a single indication of performance, unlike the recent Zen events where performance was demonstrated concretely. It doesn't exactly instil confidence. I think either performance is poor, or there are major issues (Drivers? Bugs in silicon?) that are currently depressing performance, or who knows, maybe they actually are sandbagging (but I still wouldn't count on it).

 

[JDG1980]

Not a single indication of performance, unlike the recent Zen events where performance was demonstrated concretely. It doesn't exactly instil confidence. I think either performance is poor, or there are major issues (Drivers? Bugs in silicon?) that are currently depressing performance, or who knows, maybe they actually are sandbagging (but I still wouldn't count on it).

There's also the lack of a release date, or even a concrete announcement of what products are coming. I wouldn't expect to see this hit the shelves until June 30 at the earliest, and it might potentially miss the Q1 deadline.

My gut feeling is that Vega was supposed to beat everything Nvidia has out there - what we know about the hardware indicates it should be capable of it (more TFlops and faster RAM subsystem than Titan X, and up-to-date GPU features that should match Pascal) - but for some reason it isn't there yet. That would correspond with the leaks that only put it on par with the GTX 1080. They can't release it like that, especially after tonight's price cut of the 1080 to $499. They need more time to fix the drivers - they may need to be rewritten almost completely for DX9/DX11 to take advantage of tiled rendering - and possibly even to fix some silicon errata with a respin.

I think (hope!) that AMD has learned its lesson about releasing not-quite-polished products. On the GPU side, they've gotten burned with this repeatedly - Hawaii and Polaris being two of the biggest examples. With Vega, I expect them to take the time to do it right. I could be wrong, but I don't think they are going to release the big Vega card until it can decisively beat Nvidia's best.

 

[tamz_msc]

Release date will be in the window of release of Prey - 05/05.

 

[railven]

Had to work a double today, but got to watch it during my break.

Pretty unimpressive. Again, they need to hire someone who can sweet talk the crowd. The audience wasn't even engaged. At one point only two people were clapping and it just felt awkward.

Welps, AMD is going to recover in the CPU side so hopefully some of that money gets funneled into their GPU section if only to give them a little more stage presentation.

 

[Dribble]

No tiled rendering?

I suspect this is the biggest thing that Nvidia has and AMD is missing, without that not sure they can catch Nvidia for efficiency.