Trying to guess a products cost by using nvidia's highly gouged prices is a very ill advised. Memory upgrades are one of the highest margin upsets in the history of computing devices.Vega will make it to market before Volta is announced. Officially unveiling the volta architecture in the first half of 2017, even without any specific product announcement would prevent Nvidia from releasing any more Pascal products. Too much money was spent on the development of Pascal for there to not be a refresh. The odds of Nvidia moving to Volta without ever offering a "Ti" Pascal to fill the gap between the $1200 Titan and $600 1080GTX are pretty much zero. That would leave way too much money on the table.
There will not be a 16GB HBM2 Vega product either. The price difference between the 12GB Nvidia P100 and 16GB is $1475. That's $1475 for 4GB of HBM2. Now, of course it doesn't cost anywhere near that much, but they would be hard pressed to charge that much for an extra 4GB of GDDR5. HBM2 is much more expensive than GDDR5, how is AMD going to make any money trying to sell a 16GB card for under $1000 while Nvidia is charging 50% more for just 4GB of the RAM and nothing else? AMD is not in a position where they can inflate product prices by adding really expensive superfluous features that won't improve performance like useless extra RAM.
It's plain capitalism in this case.Trying to guess a products cost by using nvidia's insanely inflates gouging prices is a very ill advised.
Pascal cards almost doubled the price nvidia is charging for equivalent die sizes.
I'm not going to get my hopes up with the 490. Considering how much of a disappointment Polaris and the Fury cards were out of the gate, I highly doubt that Vega will be as impressive as AMD makes it out to be. Even if the 490 manages to compete with the GTX 1080, it probably won't stand a chance against the incoming 1080 Ti.
All that matters to AMD now is Zen. If they can't deliver on that, then Vega will be even more meaningless in the grand scheme of things (even if Vega does manage to go above expectations).
I'm not going to get my hopes up with the 490. Considering how much of a disappointment Polaris and the Fury cards were out of the gate, I highly doubt that Vega will be as impressive as AMD makes it out to be. Even if the 490 manages to compete with the GTX 1080, it probably won't stand a chance against the incoming 1080 Ti.
All that matters to AMD now is Zen. If they can't deliver on that, then Vega will be even more meaningless in the grand scheme of things (even if Vega does manage to go above expectations).
The only disappointment I have seen is what we have had for so long vs what nvidia has had.Why was Polaris a disappointment? It sold very well and is a very capable mid range card. A true 1060 competitor.
The only people who were disappointed were the ill-informed few that were unable to do their own research and thus thought Polaris would be a high end enthusiast card.
Exactly what had happened to me.The only disappointment I have seen is what we have had for so long vs what nvidia has had.
With being stuck with only the rx 480 on amd's end vs the 1070 / 1080 being out for over 6 months already and by all accounts close to another 5ish months from what we have heard until high vega will be out even if this 490 gets released a bit earlier was the main issue.
This kills amd's market share by forcing people to switch to nvidia for mid-high / high performance cards plus can influence more people to get g-sync monitors thus forcing them once again to side with nvidia vs freesysnc as going over 1080p with only a 480 will be hard to do for more demanding games.
If they had the 490 out 4-5 months ago it would be great but with only some kind of sneak peak do you honestly think anything will change anytime soon for those that have already gone to one side?
So the question is will it be too little too late to recover in the next 6 months or will amd be able to release this out in time as with no actual official statement about it yet that means don't expect it to be out for the holidays and that can be a huge issue.
I'm not going to get my hopes up with the 490. Considering how much of a disappointment Polaris and the Fury cards were out of the gate, I highly doubt that Vega will be as impressive as AMD makes it out to be. Even if the 490 manages to compete with the GTX 1080, it probably won't stand a chance against the incoming 1080 Ti.
All that matters to AMD now is Zen. If they can't deliver on that, then Vega will be even more meaningless in the grand scheme of things (even if Vega does manage to go above expectations).
Trying to guess a products cost by using nvidia's highly gouged prices is a very ill advised. Memory upgrades are one of the highest margin upsets in the history of computing devices.
Pascal cards almost doubled the price nvidia is charging for equivalent die sizes. Nvidia is long past basing product prices on costs. They price them purely on a max profit motive.
Another textbook post of why AMD is in the financial shape they are in. When a company's customer base believes anything above the minimum level of profit margin is a "tax" or "price gouging", the company will always have to price their products below market value which will doom them in the long run. Exactly why AMD can't afford to release a 16GB Vega. If Nvidia had released the Titan XP as a 1080 GTX with 24GB of GDDR5x for $1200 with the exact same specs otherwise, no one would have bought it as the 2 cards would have performed exactly the same in games.
Regardless I don't want to derail further from the topic of this RX 490 rumor as this topic has been beaten to death. Both Nvidia "fans" and other consumers should be hoping with bated breath that Vega destroys the competition otherwise we are going to be stuck paying $600+ for second tier performance for a while now. Why anyone would hope that Vega doesn't perform well is beyond me. I guess getting to lord over some internet strangers on a forum is worth paying $$$hundreds more for your next video card purchase?
The only disappointment I have seen is what we have had for so long vs what nvidia has had.
With being stuck with only the rx 480 on amd's end vs the 1070 / 1080 being out for over 6 months already and by all accounts close to another 5ish months from what we have heard until high vega will be out even if this 490 gets released a bit earlier was the main issue.
This kills amd's market share by forcing people to switch to nvidia for mid-high / high performance cards plus can influence more people to get g-sync monitors thus forcing them once again to side with nvidia vs freesysnc as going over 1080p with only a 480 will be hard to do for more demanding games.
If they had the 490 out 4-5 months ago it would be great but with only some kind of sneak peak do you honestly think anything will change anytime soon for those that have already gone to one side?
So the question is will it be too little too late to recover in the next 6 months or will amd be able to release this out in time as with no actual official statement about it yet that means don't expect it to be out for the holidays and that can be a huge issue.
Another textbook post of why AMD is in the financial shape they are in. When a company's customer base believes anything above the minimum level of profit margin is a "tax" or "price gouging", the company will always have to price their products below market value which will doom them in the long run. Exactly why AMD can't afford to release a 16GB Vega. If Nvidia had released the Titan XP as a 1080 GTX with 24GB of GDDR5x for $1200 with the exact same specs otherwise, no one would have bought it as the 2 cards would have performed exactly the same in games.
What would the performance benefit be of adding 4GB of HBM2 to a 12GB HBM2 card? Zero, and that will be the case for a while. As is the theme here, AMD users don't want to pay the market value for products. So what financial sense does it make for AMD to add very expensive extra memory, compared to GDDR5x, that provides no performance benefit? Increasing the cost of a card by $150-200 without increasing the performance any will only lower the number of cards they will sell, and because AMD customers will not pay the "price gouging tax," AMD won't be able increase profit margins by enough to compensate for the lower volume in sales.
Because of their customer base, AMD can not inflate the prices of their cards by adding features that don't improve the user experience. The key to AMD beating Nvidia in the price performance war without committing financial suicide is for Vega to maximize the hardware it has and not tack on extra bells and whistles that no one except forum warriors care about (truaudio for example) or contain extra hardware that only adds to the cost but not the performance (extra RAM).
Could you please link to a source for your claim that HBM2 provides no performance benefit over GDDR5/X?
Thank you.
I think AMD got more market share by releasing the cards that they did. Not many people buy high end AMD GPU's. Only the enthusiasts that can clearly see when a product is superior. Even if AMD released a RX490 back in June which had more performance than a 1080, the 1080 would still outsell it. This is mainly due to NVIDIA loyalty/marketshare/word of mouth and "AMD = poor people" mentality.
Releasing the RX480 definitely got them more market share in the grand scheme of things, IMO at least.
Trying to guess a products cost by using nvidia's highly gouged prices is a very ill advised. Memory upgrades are one of the highest margin upsets in the history of computing devices.
Pascal cards almost doubled the price nvidia is charging for equivalent die sizes. Nvidia is long past basing product prices on costs. They price them purely on a max profit motive.
If you thought Polaris was disappointing, that's 100% on you and your expectations. I think it delivers solid performance at a solid price. We knew they were bifurcating the launch so if you still expected a full stack launch then of course you were going to be disappointed.I'm not going to get my hopes up with the 490. Considering how much of a disappointment Polaris and the Fury cards were out of the gate, I highly doubt that Vega will be as impressive as AMD makes it out to be. Even if the 490 manages to compete with the GTX 1080, it probably won't stand a chance against the incoming 1080 Ti.
All that matters to AMD now is Zen. If they can't deliver on that, then Vega will be even more meaningless in the grand scheme of things (even if Vega does manage to go above expectations).
My statements about Pascal are the historically high prices NV is now charging on a per mm2 basis. Pascal is basically a ported over Maxwell as evident by clock to clock comparisons and their margins, as evidenced by their record breaking profits, are proof of that. All time record high revenues while their costs are remaining flat.
AMD's customers aren't viewed as poor, they are viewed as cheap.
This is pretty much the conclusion I've come to. HD 7970 was too expensive. RX 480 will be 10% of GTX 1080 @DX12 and cost ~$200. Zen will have i7 5820K M/T and i7 6700K S/T performance but cost half the price.
If AMD ever has an advantage, it is their job as a corporation to exploit it and make money. But with the fans/supporters it seems they've cultivated over their years of hardships - good luck.
EDIT: I personally see the GTX 600 VS HD 7000 repeat itself. AMD will get something to compete with current GTX 1080, but NV will just drop that down to GTX 1170 for <$400 and slot GP102 in the new $600 price point. They can continue to milk Titan X for >$1000 if not work out something with GP100. [Prices before any gouging/mark-up]