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Vega is a failure aka bulldozer 2.0 Same performance as 1080, a year later with double the TDP. Only 30% higher than the Fury which was their high end card from

Vega is a failure aka bulldozer 2.0 Same performance as 1080, a year later with double the TDP. Only 30% higher than the Fury which was their high end card from 2 years ago. This whole product launch was terrible from AMD laughing at Nvidia with "Poor Volta" to "blind tests" to no live streaming of the SIGGRAPH event.

mavendependency 9y ago
They could salvage this if they can get tensorflow working.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
anilshanbhag 9y ago
That is a very pessimistic view. The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.
- loeg 9y ago
  What makes you believe there is any room to overclock the Vega cards? And how much additional cost does "decent cooling" add?
- tcfunk 9y ago
  Sure, for desktops. Poor thermals means that this line of GPUs will find it's way into exactly 0% of the laptop market, which is unfortunate.
  - meesterdude 9y ago
    > into exactly 0% of the laptop market Alienware will find a way, even if it requires a water connection to cool it
    - tcfunk 9y ago
      Oh man that would be so heavy haha. But I won't rule it out!
  - mavendependency 9y ago
    Too late, raven ridge with integrated vega taped out a long time ago. One desktop gaming card line-up operating in the wrong region of the efficiency curve doesn't instantly turn an entire architecture into house fire material.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
  The GTX 1080 is actually $500 MSRP. The Vega overclocking is surely inferior to the GTX OC. The OP is unfortunately right I think, trying to enter the Radeon ecosystem at this moment is foolhardy.
- antisthenes 9y ago
  Whatever the initial price difference there is will be lost in power consumption over the course of the first year of heavy use or 2 years of moderate use. And after the price parity, you're just stuck with a worse card.
- NamTaf 9y ago
  With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. I don't think so. The article touched on the fact that the watercooled one is already seeing a disproportionate ramp-up of power in order to ramp up clocks. That says to me that it's beginning to eat in to the headroom of the card and will soon begin to run up against its voltage wall. That suggests to me that they're already pushing the card pretty hard to get the stock performance levels, which doesn't leave a lot on the table for overclockers.
- neilmovva 9y ago
  Vega is already drawing near 300W, and is so high up on the voltage/frequency curve that even a measly 5-10% gain in core clock can easily cost over 100W more. Here, AMD is once again (see last year's Polaris) a victim of the inferior GlobalFoundries 14nm LPP process. TSMC 16nm would have been much better in perf/W, but sadly a very restrictive wafer supply agreement locks AMD to GloFo for the time being.
  - ksec 9y ago
    I would have had the same conclusion if Ryzen was not also a 14nm LPP with GloFo. It is just sad AMD could not get both Graphics and CPU momentum at the same time.
sebow 9y ago
Lmao, you forgot to mention it costs couple hundred dollars less than the counter-part
yarg 9y ago
The blind tests show something useful - consistency of throughput, which people notice, regardless of how benchmarks work. Benchmarking software should do more to provide a clean and meaningful representation of the distribution of performance - people care more about a card's worst case than its best or average. Another significant consideration - as alluded to in the TensorFlow comment - is the compute performance. Although compute performance is not yet that important from a gaming perspective, I would be rather surprised not to see some games start to utilise it for engine functionality - especially after Vulcan and OpenCL merge. Wait to see the performance of the card as a whole, and consider the implications for the next generation before you declare the card a non-starter and evolutionary dead-end.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 9y ago
  1) Blind Test - That's true, but still people who buy check benchmarks, don't forget AMD did exactly that with Bulldozer and we know how that ended up.... If AMD thought that they had a winning horse they would not hide the performance numbers, they would PR that like crazy, like they are doing with Ryzen and ThreadRipper. 2) I'm all for AMD to kick Nvidia's ass in compute and end cuds's reign but it won't sell gaming cards. Vega FE (A 1000$ card) is out for a month and I haven't seen anyone benchmark it and show that it's better, Even if games will use it there is a heck of a difference between building the model and running inference.
  - yarg 9y ago
    It won't sell gaming cards yet. My argument was that comparing underutilised hardware to that with fundamental unresolvable physical bottlenecks seemed to be a little premature. The next generation of games could potentially utilise compute functionality, especially if Microsoft and Sony get off their arses and push the capability on consoles. (That said, porting such software to a PC environment would not be withouut significant difficulty, given the vastly different memory configuration.) I'll be hugely disappointed in the industry if we don't see some decent Vulcan based game engines in the next few years.
    - 9y ago
powercf 9y ago
Only AMD can really say whether Vega turns out to be a failure or not. We don't know what their goals or constraints were. In the end, if it has a performance/price advantage over Nvidia's (year-old) offerings, then it will be at least a relative "success" from a consumer pov. It seems to be bringing some technological advancement too - using GPU memory as a cache seems like the way forward. Naive calculation gives me a couple of MB to store a single 1080x1920 texture. Current game usage is approx 1000 times that. It takes more than one texture to build a scene, but there seem to be gains if more textures are loaded on-demand (or slightly earlier).
- mtanski 9y ago
  almost of all textures use some kind of compression, and gpus support a few schemes
mrb 9y ago
Falsehoods & misrepresentations. "Same performance as 1080" Vega 56 is faster than the 1080: 15% faster in SP GFLOPS, 130%(!) faster in DP GFLOPS, and 15000%(!!) faster in half-precision GFLOPS (Nvidia artificially cripples theirs). All comparisons made at base clocks. "double the TDP" Merely 17% higher: 210W (Vega 56) vs 180W (1080). "Only 30% higher than the Fury" And Nvidia's top 16nm GPU (Titan Xp) is only 39% faster than their top 28nm (TITAN Z) released... 3 years ago. The 28nm→14/16nm transition was hard for everyone.
- gspetr 9y ago
  http://imgur.com/5A2CFuP http://imgur.com/5A2CFuP Saw it on /r/AMD. This is supposedly from SIGGRAPH. If AMD says you can't go higher than 1080 (in a cherrypicked setting, no doubt) then you cannot make the claim that it is faster.
  - mrb 9y ago
    This link shows Vega significantly faster than the 1080. Minimum FPS is 65% higher. A low minimum FPS indicates performance bottlenecks in the 1080.

mavendependency 9y ago

They could salvage this if they can get tensorflow working.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

anilshanbhag 9y ago

That is a very pessimistic view. The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.

loeg 9y ago
What makes you believe there is any room to overclock the Vega cards? And how much additional cost does "decent cooling" add?
tcfunk 9y ago
Sure, for desktops. Poor thermals means that this line of GPUs will find it's way into exactly 0% of the laptop market, which is unfortunate.
- meesterdude 9y ago
  > into exactly 0% of the laptop market Alienware will find a way, even if it requires a water connection to cool it
  - tcfunk 9y ago
    Oh man that would be so heavy haha. But I won't rule it out!
- mavendependency 9y ago
  Too late, raven ridge with integrated vega taped out a long time ago. One desktop gaming card line-up operating in the wrong region of the efficiency curve doesn't instantly turn an entire architecture into house fire material.
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
The GTX 1080 is actually $500 MSRP. The Vega overclocking is surely inferior to the GTX OC. The OP is unfortunately right I think, trying to enter the Radeon ecosystem at this moment is foolhardy.
antisthenes 9y ago
Whatever the initial price difference there is will be lost in power consumption over the course of the first year of heavy use or 2 years of moderate use. And after the price parity, you're just stuck with a worse card.
NamTaf 9y ago
With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. I don't think so. The article touched on the fact that the watercooled one is already seeing a disproportionate ramp-up of power in order to ramp up clocks. That says to me that it's beginning to eat in to the headroom of the card and will soon begin to run up against its voltage wall. That suggests to me that they're already pushing the card pretty hard to get the stock performance levels, which doesn't leave a lot on the table for overclockers.
neilmovva 9y ago
Vega is already drawing near 300W, and is so high up on the voltage/frequency curve that even a measly 5-10% gain in core clock can easily cost over 100W more. Here, AMD is once again (see last year's Polaris) a victim of the inferior GlobalFoundries 14nm LPP process. TSMC 16nm would have been much better in perf/W, but sadly a very restrictive wafer supply agreement locks AMD to GloFo for the time being.
- ksec 9y ago
  I would have had the same conclusion if Ryzen was not also a 14nm LPP with GloFo. It is just sad AMD could not get both Graphics and CPU momentum at the same time.

sebow 9y ago

Lmao, you forgot to mention it costs couple hundred dollars less than the counter-part

yarg 9y ago

The blind tests show something useful - consistency of throughput, which people notice, regardless of how benchmarks work. Benchmarking software should do more to provide a clean and meaningful representation of the distribution of performance - people care more about a card's worst case than its best or average. Another significant consideration - as alluded to in the TensorFlow comment - is the compute performance. Although compute performance is not yet that important from a gaming perspective, I would be rather surprised not to see some games start to utilise it for engine functionality - especially after Vulcan and OpenCL merge. Wait to see the performance of the card as a whole, and consider the implications for the next generation before you declare the card a non-starter and evolutionary dead-end.

TheGuyWhoCodes 9y ago
1) Blind Test - That's true, but still people who buy check benchmarks, don't forget AMD did exactly that with Bulldozer and we know how that ended up.... If AMD thought that they had a winning horse they would not hide the performance numbers, they would PR that like crazy, like they are doing with Ryzen and ThreadRipper. 2) I'm all for AMD to kick Nvidia's ass in compute and end cuds's reign but it won't sell gaming cards. Vega FE (A 1000$ card) is out for a month and I haven't seen anyone benchmark it and show that it's better, Even if games will use it there is a heck of a difference between building the model and running inference.
- yarg 9y ago
  It won't sell gaming cards yet. My argument was that comparing underutilised hardware to that with fundamental unresolvable physical bottlenecks seemed to be a little premature. The next generation of games could potentially utilise compute functionality, especially if Microsoft and Sony get off their arses and push the capability on consoles. (That said, porting such software to a PC environment would not be withouut significant difficulty, given the vastly different memory configuration.) I'll be hugely disappointed in the industry if we don't see some decent Vulcan based game engines in the next few years.
  - 9y ago

powercf 9y ago

Only AMD can really say whether Vega turns out to be a failure or not. We don't know what their goals or constraints were. In the end, if it has a performance/price advantage over Nvidia's (year-old) offerings, then it will be at least a relative "success" from a consumer pov. It seems to be bringing some technological advancement too - using GPU memory as a cache seems like the way forward. Naive calculation gives me a couple of MB to store a single 1080x1920 texture. Current game usage is approx 1000 times that. It takes more than one texture to build a scene, but there seem to be gains if more textures are loaded on-demand (or slightly earlier).

mtanski 9y ago
almost of all textures use some kind of compression, and gpus support a few schemes

mrb 9y ago

Falsehoods & misrepresentations. "Same performance as 1080" Vega 56 is faster than the 1080: 15% faster in SP GFLOPS, 130%(!) faster in DP GFLOPS, and 15000%(!!) faster in half-precision GFLOPS (Nvidia artificially cripples theirs). All comparisons made at base clocks. "double the TDP" Merely 17% higher: 210W (Vega 56) vs 180W (1080). "Only 30% higher than the Fury" And Nvidia's top 16nm GPU (Titan Xp) is only 39% faster than their top 28nm (TITAN Z) released... 3 years ago. The 28nm→14/16nm transition was hard for everyone.

gspetr 9y ago
http://imgur.com/5A2CFuP http://imgur.com/5A2CFuP Saw it on /r/AMD. This is supposedly from SIGGRAPH. If AMD says you can't go higher than 1080 (in a cherrypicked setting, no doubt) then you cannot make the claim that it is faster.
- mrb 9y ago
  This link shows Vega significantly faster than the 1080. Minimum FPS is 65% higher. A low minimum FPS indicates performance bottlenecks in the 1080.