AMD Vega is here...

While not destroying Nvidia, it is at least competitive with GTX 1070 and 1080. Hoping for a future iteration with lower power consumption and thermals and neck and neck or even one up Nvidia's 1080 Ti (or Volta's version of it). With Ryzen and a good performing AMD video card I'll gladly go with team AMD for my next desktop build (which I don't plan on for another 1-1.5 years).

 

As expected. Vega 56 is more powerful than the 1070 with about 50W more power draw whereas Vega 64 is on par with the 1080 but with 100W more power draw. Overall - 56 looks good, 64 looks meh.

 

I like Linus, but I feel like he sometimes misses a lot of stuff when it comes to AMD card reviews.

The guys on Level1Techs (one of them being former Tek Syndicate member Wendell) tend to give a lot more insight about a lot of the nuances of hardware. Linus doesn't mention at all how AMD cards usually fare better in the long run, how drivers have yet to be optimized, and how a lot of his benchmarking (games and synthetic) use proprietary software.

 

Ineed. If we look back at the 480 vs 1060 - the 1060 was originally 10% faster whereas now, the 580 is pulling ahead consistently by anywhere from 5-10%.

 

Meh they're 15 months late to the party, consume a heap more power and in most cases it's a total wash. Nvidia wins some AMD wins some. In certain titles AMD gets smashed such as GTA V and PUBG. Both of which are wildly popular and one of the most streamed games on twitch.

I don't see the appeal of Vega over the GTX. The MSRP prices have already been proven to not be actual retail prices. Microcenter had 3x Vega 64 near my places yesterday and all sold for $599 plus taxes. Newegg has an AIB 1080 Ti for $699 no tax. Buying Vega at those prices is just stupid and the mining craze will only keep the prices stupid high. Might even help GTX prices bounce back to normal. I also thought AMD was reducing power consumption and increasing perf per watt? Looks like they just threw as much power at it as it took to match the GTX series.

Either way they don't have anything hat even comes close to mah 1080 Ti perf which means the king lives on. Aside from Titan Xp of course.

 

50W over the 1070 is a far cry from "a heap more power" - and as we've seen, undervolting the Vega 56 card at stock brings that difference down to 30W. As for PUBG - we know Nvidia cards generally perform better in that game. It's like using Doom as a benchmark. Interestingly, from LTT's video, Vega 64 and 56 both smash the 1080 in CS:GO. If games running Source 2 like Dota 2 and CS:GO run at 80fps more on Vega, quite a few professionals or streamers may switch since going from 380fps to 450fps is no small jump. Especially when we now are about to have a 480Hz screen.

 

I highly recommend you watch the Level1Techs video. The point of these cards was not to take the performance crown, it was to compete with the 1070 and 1080, which they do pretty well. They are more future proof, do outperform the GeForce cards in several games, have way better compute performance and thrash the GeForce cards in basically anything not game-related, and plus the Radeon Red packages allow people looking to buy red products (e.g. a mobo, GPU, and CPU all at once) a significant discount.

 

Pretty sure 1070 and 56 are also on par with each other, judging by the video.

 

That's with launch drivers, though. We all know AMD's history of improving drivers over the course of 3-5 months post launch. Mark my words, Vega 56 will be at least 10% ahead of the 1070 by New Year's.

 

Perhaps not by New Year's, but by mid-next year or so I'd say it's quite likely.

 

Maybe, it is a whole new rasterization engine after all. But considering the absurdly good compute performance the numbers we see in Source 2 - I'd say it's very reasonable to expect the Vega 56 card to become closer related to the 1080 than the 1070 by the time Volta/Navi launch.

On a side note - Volta got pushed back with Nvidia taunting Pascal as "unbeatable". This means that Vega is actually relevant.

 

Looking at Paul's Hardware review your quoted 50W and 30W differences are way off. He is showing The OC 1070 and OC Vega 56 having a difference of much larger margins.

1070 Avg draw at 260W and Vega Avg draw at 386W. With peaks of 302W and 487W respectively.

Why would current owner of a 10 series card make the switch this late in the game? Nvidia will have Volta out not long after your mentioned driver improvements. Sure not this year as has been stated by Nvidia CEO himself,but sometime first or second quarter next year isn't unrealistic given their past release schedule.

There is also nothing stopping Nvidia from releasing driver updates to improve performance if they feel threatened. Look at what they did recently with a driver update for Titan Xp that improvement performance like 3 fold in certain applications.

 

When have I claimed owners of Pascal should switch? That would be a bad purchase. I'm saying anyone looking to buy a 1070-class card now has a better option. Also, OCing Vega 56 with overvoltage won't yield much in terms of performance, simply ruin efficiency. Paul's testing is also way off here since an OCed 1070 draws over 200W by itself. There's no way the rest of that test setup is drawing only 50W. Volta is coming summer 2018 at the earliest. That's close to a year from now. Are you going to be waiting a whole year only to then get told "Wait 3 months for Navi" and then "wait X amount more for X gen"? No, most people will buy now.

Performance improvements were not 300% - as with marketing, it's always got a bit of hyperboe. The real question is - if Nvidia could just update Titans to be vastly superior cards, why wait so long to do it? That's a bit anti-consumer if you ask me.

 

As @don_svetlio said, nobody is recommending that Pascal owners switch. Don't know where people are getting this idea from.

 

Evenly distributing the Win's and Ties, 2 ties, 11 Wins for Nvidia and 12 Wins for AMD, but that is at release with the raw drivers - Nvidia has had 1+ years to optimize, as RX Vega improves in performance that Win/Lose balance should shift to AMD RX Vega

It's a great out of the box first release showing, now if only AMD will tune for undervolt like Gamers Nexus in some kind of auto-mode alongside auto-OC, then everyone can benefit from lower power usage with RX Vega.

I look at it all as a great reason to finally build AMD only rig's again, oh, happy days!!

 

I can see a 10% increase in performance later on, but calling "more powerful" is a bit false.
Personally for me 56 is a bit disappointing given the price and performance, and their recent success with Ryzen. However glad to see AMD slowly moving in the right direction.
Luckily I'm still a couple of years away before I will think about upgrading the GPU, so hopefully by that time AMD has something interesting and I will be able to ditch nVidia.

 

Yes, that would be false, so please stop saying it, I sure didn't say it.

Re-read my post, I've conveniently included it above so you won't miss it this time.

Besides, I'm hoping for more than 10% improvement in RX Vega performance from drivers, we've already seen 25% - 30% improvement in games for RX 580, putting it over the top of 1060 in games.

So in the future, if you are going to make up things for me to have said, at least make it more believable with bigger numbers matching falser claims

 

I think he means my posts. But to be fair, even now with HU's video - it's 2% faster so I am technically correct.

 

Clearly it's higher power draw makes the RX 56 "literally" more "power *full*", as in full of more power

He's got a bad habit of not quoting what he is responding to, it's lazy of him and confusing to others.

 

Radeon RX Vega 56 vs GTX 1070 Review! The Best Vega In The Line-Up?

 

I mean, Vega 56 is the gem from this launch. 64 is just a "cause we can" thing. I really want to see what happens with a 10% downclock. Potentially under 120W and in a laptop? AMD please, Asus please, I want Vega + Ryzen laptops

 

Please, in the future, make sure I quoted you, before making up things and running to mods whoops, seems like it's not the case this time

WHOLE...TWO... PER... CENT...
POWAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

 

And for good reason too, with good results. Sorry your butt still hurts

Try quoting what you are responding to so there is no confusion, it's really not that hard and makes it much more interesting and far less confusing for people trying to figure out just what the heck you are complaining about this time

 

O man Vega just keeps disappointing..



https://www.eteknix.com/rx-vega-price-to-increase-significantly/

http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-rx-vega-64-could-get-more-expensive-as-introductory-pricing-ends

Apparently Vega's launch prices were simply introductory "early adopter" prices LOL. Vega is now $100 more than their announced MSRP. Putting them at $499 and $599 respectively. This is for the reference blower style cooler. Sad!

This does not put Vega 56 at 1070 comparison level, and Vega 64 at 1080 comparison level. A 1080 Ti can be had for $699 (( https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...5997&cm_re=gtx_1080_ti-_-14-125-997-_-Product)) , and it blows the doors off Vega both in performance and power consumption. I'm sorry but this launch of a new series of cards just continues to get more and more laughable. AMD failed hard here. Even one of the biggest AMD shills I've heard or seen on YouTube can't even manage to defend the card himself.



AMD did great with Ryzen and earned my respect on the CPU front, but their GPUs have a long long way to go in terms of price and perf per watt.

 

Alphacool Releases NexXxos GPX and Eiswolf 120 GPX Pro ATI RX Vega Coolers

 

This is cause of the cryptocurrency miners. Every shop already has them sold out in the UK. Apparently it took less than an hour for about 1000 cards to be bought in bulk multiple times. (according to LTT forums). Sigh, things on the GPU front are just going to remain even more expensive sadly.

 

#FakeNews

 

Update: Hmmm, Hardware Unboxed just pulled the video...
Vega Pricing $, Did AMD Just Bait-and-Switch?

 

If true then AMD nor the retailers are doing anything to stop scalpers and miners from scooping up the cards, and it was a bunch of false promises that they were going to make sure gamers got them.

A simple limit of 1-5 cards per purchase or per person or per day, or whatever other sane quantity limit per person if enacted would have done it.

I guess selling every card you made in the first 1 minute was just too good to pass up

 

Someone needs to run some Crossfire'd RX 64 LC tests in games / benchmarks that support Crossfire scaling, just like the 1080 SLI vs 1080ti, we need to see AMD Crossfire scores topple the 1080ti scores

RX VEGA 64 Liquid Cooled vs GTX 1080 Ti BENCHMARKS / 35 Game Tests & Review / 1080p, 1440p, 4K

 

As if making new shop accounts to buy 2 cards per account isn't something miners would do. Sadly, even with high prices, Vega mining performance is through the roof - close to double that of the 1070 IIRC even after efficiency tweaking.

 

Well, yeah, of course they'd do that, but would they make 1000 accounts with 1000 different emails? That should be enough of a limit to stop the most egregious offenders.

 

I mean if what people are saying that Vega 56 with an undervolt and slight underlock still doubles the mining capacity of the 1070 for similar power requirements is true - would you be surprised. The raw TFLOPs that Vega has are beyond most Pascal cards.

 

I bought my older 5750 considering its TFLOPS at unbeatable price. It OC'ed to 5770 and 5830 clocks. Even mined at 200kH/s-250kH/s LTC. Fast forward to present, TFLOPS doesn't determine real world performance but software level tweaks does the job IRL.

 

FLOPs do matter. Hence why even Vega 56 is crushing the 1080 in compute.

 

For compute performance, Vega destroys the competition. 25TFs on a consumer card, simply unbelievable. If AMD card is tweaked correctly with little hacks the gaming experience is smoother and lag free even with low FPS.

 

AMD Responds To Radeon RX Vega Pricing Outrage, Confirms More $499 Vega 64 Cards Available Soon
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-responds-radeon-rx-vega-pricing-more-499-vega-64-available-soon

"Earlier this week, we were a bit disappointed when we heard rumors that AMD would be dropping its standalone air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 SKU, effectively raising its price to $599 for the foreseeable future. If this was indeed the case, it would be the ultimate case of “bait and switch”, since AMD played up the attractive $499 price point for the Vega 64 and reviews recommending the graphics card (including ours) were based on this price point.

Rather than run with the story, which was originally posted by OC3D on Tuesday, we decided to reach out to AMD for further clarification. It took a few days, but the company finally contacted us with an official statement on the matter:

"Radeon RX Vega 64 demand continues to exceed expectations. AMD is working closely with its partners to address this demand. Our initial launch quantities included standalone Radeon RX Vega 64 at SEP of $499, Radeon RX Vega 64 Black Packs at SEP of $599, and Radeon RX Vega 64 Aqua Packs at SEP of $699. We are working with our partners to restock all SKUs of Radeon RX Vega 64 including the standalone cards and Gamer Packs over the next few weeks, and you should expect quantities of Vega to start arriving in the coming days."

Hopefully, this will clear up some of the confusion that has proliferated over the past few days. Yes, Vega 64 is undoubtedly in short supply, and retailers will most certainly try to “adjust” their pricing to take advantage of the incredible initial demand. However, this is not some grand scheme by AMD on its end to kill off the standalone Vega 64 and push for higher prices. Rather, it’s simply a matter of not being able to meet launch demand, which can happen with any new high-profile hardware launch."

AMD issues official statement regarding Radeon RX Vega 64 pricing
https://videocardz.com/72123/amd-issues-official-statement-regarding-radeon-rx-vega-64-pricing

AMD Responds to Radeon RX Vega 64 Stock Shortage and Rumoured Price Increase
http://www.game-debate.com/news/235...64-stock-shortage-and-rumoured-price-increase

 

That's half-precision (FP16) which is not used in games. Single-precision FP32 is at around 13 TFLOPS.

 

Still more than Pascal.

 

So?

You're trying so hard, it's comical.

 

Am merely pointing out the obvious. The potential for driver optimization is there. Remember the 290X vs 780 Ti? Originally the 780 Ti was ahead. But now, in 2017, the tides have changed drastically.

What needs to happen is some serious voltage tuning and slight downclocking. That will bring Vega 56's power capacity in line with the 1070 while offering the same performance. Vega 64 will be slightly behind the 1080 but at least it will probably go down under 250W.

 

Maybe if AMD followed what Nvidia did with GP102 vs. GP100, consumer Vega would be more competitive in power efficiency. And by that, I mean removing compute features useless for gaming on consumer Vega, like double rate FP16. They've already been doing that (consumer Tahiti had full 1/4 rate FP64) but it's clearly still not enough to touch Nvidia's efficiency.

 

Yeah but that's how they've always been. Look at Ryzen. They could've made the R3 1200, R5 1400 and R7 1700 locked to sell more of the expensive stuff but every single chip is unlocked. Same with GPUs. They could've cut-down parts of the RX Vega cards to sell Radeon Pro Vega to slightly more people but that's just not the company's long-standing policy. I, for one, see it as a good thing that when you buy the specific chip you get almost everything enabled rather than having it half-disabled just to save 50W of power. I mean, it's not that much energy. The AC uses 400W. My Fridge uses 500W. The Oven another 200-300W. The light bulbs another 50W each. Does 50W more or less from the PC affect anything really? I'm inclined to say no.

 

That's called AMD shooting itself in the foot. Because what even is the point of Vega Frontier Edition aside from using a different driver?

 

And I call it pro-consumer. I mean, if it weren't for Ryzen's openness, we wouldn't have dropped 8-core CPU prices by more than double, Intel wanted what, 600$? You can currently get a 1700 (which is nearly identical in performance) for as low as 280$.
It was an early-adopter professional card IIRC. I believe more Radeon Pro cards are coming (though I may be mistaken here)

 

This convinced me Nvidia is still the way to go. Power consumption is insane lol.

 

On 64 - yes. It's high. Mostly because the Arch. was never developed for those clockspeeds. Assuming all you do is gaming, 1080 is better. If you need a GPGPU solution, then Vega 64 destroys even the Titan XP but that's a different market
On 56 - I'd argue it's not really relevant. 50W over the 1070 for objectively better performance and potentially longer livespan.

 

Still this is not enough imo. Ryzen is godsend but GPU wise... hopefully next time. Nvidia can just sit and keep raping us.

 

I mean AMD announced that they weren't going for the high end market before Polaris even. They said they'd go for midrange and I'd argue they somewhat managed. The 480 came out several months before the 1060 and is currently faster.

 

Arguing what a card "could" be is totally pointless. How do we know AMD after delay and delay didn't hasn't already tweaked this card for the maximal performance they can get out of it? Look at the insane power draw of the card. It's as if they threw all the power they could at the card to get the clocks as high as possible to essentially on par performance with Nvidia's offerings. Vega isn't the smashing success most hoped it would be like Ryzen. The prices are infact an outright lie by AMD, look at any YouTube video on the subject. From what I've seen AMD offered some sort of rebate program to retailers on launch to keep the price $100 below what the actual MSRP would be. This is extremely misleading and it's what reviews based their prices on in their reviews. It's shady business by AMD to essentially not make that public and was a way to make their cards more appealing in the early reviews. Reviewers have come flat out and stated this fact, and some have said the Vega 56 should have then been compared to the 1080 as it's no longer in 1070 price bracket, making it even less marketable.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3023-aib-partners-to-gn-yes-vega-price-will-change

Additionally the tweaking you speak of should have been done by, or should be done by AMD not the end user. I would argue most that go out and buy their GPUs don't know how or want to spend the time tweaking the card to be optimal. Yes some will overclock, but not everyone is an enthusiast like us. Talking about volts, watts, and clock tuning is way over their head. Most will simply drag the power slider, core and memory clocks up and call it a day. The card should work out of the box and not require the consumer to go home and fiddle with the voltage to get a working product.