AMD drivers had extensive telemetry back when they were bundled with Raptr, but I haven’t seen any noise about the current drivers phoning home. Honestly AMD can barely get update checks to work. They might have telemetry in there just like, broken.
I got a pretty good chuckle out of this, well done.
Farcry 5 and Wolfenstein 2 will support FP16, a feature unique to Vega. That might buy them 10 to 15 percent improvement.
(The PS4 Pro supports it too so it might not be totally uncommon in future games.)
If I had an old videocard, I guess I’d be interested. But the 1070/1080 have been out for a year, and AMD introduces equivalents with no savings advantage. Also, much bigger power envelope ie: hotter.
AMD really needed to match performance and undercut price, or retake the performance crown. Freesync support is a decent hook, but as stusser wrote, the cards will be more expensive for a good while. Not sexy at all.
Some bad news for anyone with any interest in buying a Vega for their gaming PC. Apparently Vega is very very good at Etherium mining. If those rumors are true, I expect Vega to be available at the MSRP for about two nanoseconds on launch day, and then never come back in stock at anything resembling reasonable prices.
If that’s true, it’s double or even almost triple speed of a 1080 Ti in mining. Maybe that will keep AMD afloat!
It’s not 2x energy efficient since Vega uses more power but it’s still going to be the best card by a decent margin.
Maybe Vega was so delayed because AMD was mining coins for the last six months…
That makes me tempted to try and pre-order a $499 Vega, then sell it NIB to miners for $750 and use the $250 profit to offset the ridiculous upcharge on a brand new 1060 or 1070. Let the miners pick up the cost on a new card for me.
That plan has a high probability of actually working, if you can get the preorder.
I predict that miners will from now on not accept anything less than a Vega, thus driving the prices on those even higher.
The good news is that the miners will then lose all interest in the NVidia cards, and those prices will quickly return to normal.
So, we’ll end up with AMD for mining, and NVidia for gaming. Everybody wins?
So the leaked specs and benchmarks were all basically accurate.
The Vega 64 is essentially a GTX1080 drawing >100w (!) more power. It has the same MSRP, but as noted earlier it will be very difficult to find at $499 initially, you’ll most likely have to pay $599 to get it bundled with 2 games and a bunch of coupons.
The Vega 56 is essentially a GTX1070 but also draws >100w more power. Again you probably won’t find it at $399 for the first couple of months, you’ll need to pay $499 to get the bundle.
No info yet on overclocking, but given that Nvidia Pascal GPUs sip power and run cool, and Vegas… don’t, I’m not super optimistic there.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-and-56-review
Nvidia’s next gen should be coming soon, yes?
No, Volta is 2018. We may see a Pascal refresh this year at most.
If AMD had released something competing with the 1080ti, Nvidia would probably have changed their plans. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.
And cards continue to be gobbled up by coin miners. . . I really hate this shit for anyone trying to build a mid-range system right now.
Microcenter’s doing what they can, though:
Yep Vega is supposedly amazing at compute, with a full FP16 engine.
This is actually good news, because it means Nvidia cards will be less in-demand for mining. Since they’re the same speed and MSRP but consume less power and generate less heat, they’re what you really want anyway.
I think supply is constrained enough that all the Vega, 560s/570s, and 470s will continue to be immediately gobbled up. . . and then the miners will just continue failing over to the 1060s and 1070s, anyway.
According to the hardOCP review, under load the Vega64 actually pulls a whopping 150 watts more energy than the GTX1080! Note, the entire GTX1080 uses 180w total. So that’s completely insane! It’ll heat your entire room.
Also the fan is really loud under gaming load, clearly audible through headphones. Not benchmark load, gaming load. That’s just the reference cooler, which in addition to being loud doesn’t cool very well. AIB cards will do better.
Basically what happened here is that AMD wanted this GPU to run around 180w, but were unable to compete with Nvidia at that power draw. Much like intel did with pentium 4s in elder times, they just fed it more and more power until they got the clocks they needed to compete with the GTX1080, throwing efficiency into the toilet.
Regarding overclocking, Vega56 is limited to 300w power draw in BIOS, and the BIOS is cryptographically signed, so it basically cannot be overclocked. Haven’t found anyone overclocking Vega64 yet.
Hopefully the next iteration of Vega will be more competitive. As is, it’s a piggie.
<—feels good about his 1080GTX investment last summer.
The 1070gtx is working well for me, and I will definitely grab the 1080 equivalent when the Volta cards ship.
Looking at Newegg I am glad I got my 1060 6gb card for what I felt was a ripoff 270 bucks. Sheesh