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MileageMayVary
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Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:02 pm

I pulled together average reported frame rates from several sites (including TR) for how the Vega64 and Vega 56 compare against the GTX1080 and GTX1070 at 1440. I'm not sure why the general feeling I get from the interwebs is that Vega failed. Was Vega supposed to beat the GTX1080Ti? No. Does it use more power? Yes. Is it way late? Yes. I know a lot of places are giving thumbs up, especially to the Vega56, but if the price is comparable, then being -2% to +7% of your opponent seems pretty on point to me.

Vega64 is 98% the speed of the GTX1080 @ 1440.
Vega56 is 107% the speed of the GTX1070 @ 1440.

Some games are ridiculously in favor of Team Green, such as Fallout 4, GTA V, and Civ VI, but overall very competitive.
And yes, I know this doesn't take into account minimum frame rates, micro stutter, and possible stub frames.

Here's hoping they're next gen is more or less on time with NVidia's next gen.
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bfg-9000
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:09 pm

If anything the Vega 64 should be compared with the GTX1070 because after you include the price of the monitors they are the same price, thanks to the G-Sync tax.

Only if you want to use variable refresh rate, of course.
 
cynan
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:26 pm

Vega (gaming version) is a failure from a business perspective. It is expensive, almost certainly costing more to manufacture than a 1080 Ti or Titan due to the expense of HBM2 and the large die size. Moreover, they can't even sell all that many of them yet due to the constrained supply of HBM2. And then on top of this, (again, probably mostly due to HBM2 supply) it' was postponed significantly. However, AMD desperately needs something in the high-end gaming segment to keep them relevant (so that their gaming GPUs don't cease to be taken seriously like their CPUs had more or less prior to RyZen).

From the customer's perspective, if one can find a Vega 64/56 for a competitive price with a gtx 1080/70 then it's not necessarily bad, especially if you're OK with sacrificing a couple of percentage points of performance for undervolting so that their TDP becomes almost reasonable. And they are literally what you've been waiting for if interested or locked in to FreeSync. But this starts to become dubious when the only Vega 64 one can find is going for almost $700 (almost the price of a 1080 Ti) at Newegg .
 
bfg-9000
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 4:41 pm

It's certainly a disappointment that neither Vega nor 1080 are really satisfactory for 4k. It really could have been worse though because the huge disparity in power consumption could also have been tied to noncompetitive performance like the FX-9590! There's no harm in having a low-volume halo product like an Extreme Edition to help boost sales of lower end products--provided you have those available to sell.

And yep, would be ridiculous to buy an aircooled card for the price of a watercooled one so it's always best not to be an early adopter. Prices are still all screwy because of the miners, who made the big MSRP price drop in March seem silly--but everything for high-refresh 1440p seems to be going for $100+ over MSRP.

For low-refresh 1440p though there's a big difference: 1060 6GB is at MSRP while even used R9 Fury cards are $100 more, and RX580 prices are outrageous at $175 more (miners again). That's enough to completely wipe out the difference in price between G-Sync monitors and Freesync ones!

Add in the cost of a Titan X (2016), 1080Ti or Titan Xp and smooth 4k is still out of the reach of most. Oh well, perhaps next gen with Navi and Volta.
 
MileageMayVary
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 5:10 pm

bfg-9000 wrote:
It's certainly a disappointment that neither Vega nor 1080 are really satisfactory for 4k.


Actually since I have the numbers...

AverageFPS@1440
GTX1080Ti...113.1
GTX1080.......86.9
Vega64..........85.5
Vega56..........77.0
GTX1070.......72.1
RX580...........55.7

AverageFPS@2160
GTX1080Ti....64.5
Vega64..........49.5
GTX1080.......48.6
Vega56..........43.7
GTX1070.......39.6
RX580...........30.1
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 5:42 pm

It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry. The whole point of Vega's new architecture was to allow it to clock higher, but just like Bulldozer, AMD haven't pulled it off.

The Vega64 actually has a lower base clock than Polaris 20's base clock; I know it's a bigger chip but I thought all those extra transistors were to allow 1.5GHz-1.8GHz operation. Also, given that there's clearly ZERO overclocking headroom because AMD have pushed it right to the raggedy edge already complete with TDPs we haven't seen for years, we have another hot, hugry, late, noisy, underperforming runt. Who cares if you save $200 on a monitor? It's still an obnoxious piece of kit to put into your PC instead of something with more performance and less than half the TDP.

The sad thing is that this is likely costing AMD more to manufacture than a $1200 TitanXP and probably not a lot less than an $8900 Quadro GP100. Never mind that it's getting spanked by the reference GTX 1080FE - the point is that the cheapest $500 GTX 1080s all come with factory overclocks and have both the cooling and headroom to go higher than 1800MHz with ease. The liquid-cooled Vega64 with it's outright ludicrious TDP is still slower than the slowest 1080 of them all, despite double the power draw and close to double the cost.

I'm pretty biased towards AMD with a lot of love for the underdog and good reason to dislike Nvidia (and Intel). The do not get a pass. Not this time, Vega seems to have been a design mistake, a marketing mistake, an execution mistake and now a pricing mistake. The miners and GPGPU guys can have this one, Unless I find a Vega56 for significantly less than a 1070 I'm just going to grab a 1080 when the time comes. Energy's not cheap over here and over the course of 2-3 years I'll probably reclaim the G-Sync tax in power savings alone.
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MileageMayVary
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 6:17 pm

Any reason AMD couldn't have Vega made at TSMC instead of GloFo? Didn't they redo their GloFo contract a bit ago to be less tied to them?
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 6:33 pm

Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry. The whole point of Vega's new architecture was to allow it to clock higher, but just like Bulldozer, AMD haven't pulled it off.


You haven't even seen power hungry until you see the Vega 64 Liquid results. That extra factory overclock adds an additional ~55w over and above the Vega 64 air. 161w more power than a reference 1080 and that isn't even in turbo mode. It'll go well past 200w in turbo mode.

If anything the HD 2900 XT flopped because it performed worse with higher power draw than NVIDIA's card. But 200w more power for equal performance is probably just as bad.
Last edited by Kougar on Mon Aug 21, 2017 6:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
Krogoth
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 6:46 pm

Vega has never been about recapturing the high-end gaming market. It does well as prosumer/professional products. Vega 64/56s are just rejects that ate too much power. AMD RTG gave up the notion of reclaiming high-end gaming after Maxwell's massive success via 970. Vega and Navi are all about the future. The days of widespread discrete video cards is coming to an end. iGPU on SoC solutions are getting good enough to handle majority of the needs of mainstream gamers and users which will eat away at mid-range discrete video cards (which makes up the bulk of the market). Low-end discrete cards are practically dead since iGPUs are so ubiquitous.

Ryzen Mobile is going to be the beginning when it introduces smaller-scale Vega onto its packaging (RX 450-470 tier performance). Intel is going to up their game in response with their mainstream SoC solutions. It will start becoming harder and harder to justify spending $149-249 on a mid-range discrete card when the iGPU become "almost as good" for mainstream gaming needs.

Nvidia knows that which is why they have been trying to move away from gaming market as their bread and butter. They already seen what happened to SGI, 3Dfx and Creative and wanted to avoid their fates.

This doesn't mean that discrete cards are going to disappears but rather they will end-up being a niche serving a tiny minority who is willing to spend the big $$$$ on them. The cards are going to just "rejects" and/or distillation of prosumer/professional-tier cards. Just like how discrete audio cards exist today.
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Redocbew
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 8:30 pm

Krogoth wrote:
AMD RTG gave up the notion of reclaiming high-end gaming after Maxwell's massive success via 970. Vega and Navi are all about the future. The days of widespread discrete video cards is coming to an end.


When making this kind of prediction aren't you supposed to toss in a few phrases like "paradigm shift" and "inflection point" also?

I don't doubt it'll happen, but we're not there yet. IGPs may be "good enough" for a lot of things, but the distance between a really good IGP and a lower end discrete GPU can still make for quite a gap.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Mon Aug 21, 2017 9:38 pm

Krogoth wrote:
The days of widespread discrete video cards is coming to an end. iGPU on SoC solutions are getting good enough to handle majority of the needs of mainstream gamers and users which will eat away at mid-range discrete video cards (which makes up the bulk of the market).

In PC gaming? Maybe, but I haven't seen an IGP that even comes close to a discrete GPU. It's hard to get decent memory bandwidth for an onboard GPU, and that's a necessity. But with the new consoles both doing strong 1080p and making 4K gaming affordable I don't doubt the PC gaming market is about to take a bigger hit than usual.

Personally, I won't be needing my gaming PC much in the next few years.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Thu Aug 24, 2017 11:41 am

Redocbew wrote:
Krogoth wrote:
AMD RTG gave up the notion of reclaiming high-end gaming after Maxwell's massive success via 970. Vega and Navi are all about the future. The days of widespread discrete video cards is coming to an end.


When making this kind of prediction aren't you supposed to toss in a few phrases like "paradigm shift" and "inflection point" also?

I don't doubt it'll happen, but we're not there yet. IGPs may be "good enough" for a lot of things, but the distance between a really good IGP and a lower end discrete GPU can still make for quite a gap.


We'll know more when we see Zen-based APUs. I suspect that Krogoth is right and iGPUs are going to end up replacing both low-end and mid-range dGPUs over time.

Since I missed the boat on getting a RyZen 1700, I'm considering just waiting for Raven Ridge, assuming that there is a version with more than 4 cores.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Thu Aug 24, 2017 11:48 am

All the jabber about how discrete GPUs are disappearing is a little bit silly considering AMD's product line in 2017 basically requires a discrete GPU of some type to literally present a login screen much less do 3D gaming.

And I'm not only talking about the $1000 Threadrippers, I'm talking about the $110 Ryzen 1200's that aren't even close to being a high-end CPU where you expect to be using a crazy GPU.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Thu Aug 24, 2017 12:33 pm

MileageMayVary wrote:
Any reason AMD couldn't have Vega made at TSMC instead of GloFo? Didn't they redo their GloFo contract a bit ago to be less tied to them?

They still have some minimal volumes. Two years ago (when decision whether TSMC or GloFo could have been made), they could not have known TSMC would seem to be better than Samsung/GloFo. Samsung seemed to be certainly farther at that point (first 14nm mobile chip was form them). And there was still clause in the contract back then, that AMD would have to pay for all wafers done at TSMC.

With the minimal volumes, it might be actually cheaper for AMD to have Vega being made at GloFo, than paying to both GloFo and TSMC. Tbh, better product would have been much better for them (though Vega @ 1.7 GHz would still far cry from 1080 Ti), but this is something nobody will ever find out. Maybe some guys at AMD who have experience with console HW (that is being done at TSMC) could tell. But that one is never clocked that high. And we all see that undervolting and underclocking Polaris/Vega (and Ryzen as well) yields very significant power savings.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Thu Aug 24, 2017 12:37 pm

The Valve Steam Hardware survey numbers are pretty scary.

The RX 480 is at slot 29 with 0.92%, the 470 is even further down with 0.34%.

Image

I would have thought folks looking to upgrade,... would have gotten more RX 480s. Seems like a landslide in one direction for anyone considering new build or upgrade.

Granted no matter what happens devs/studios have to work with AMD tech on the console no matter, but still...they need to do better with Vega.

Im going to fudge a little but its 16.99 to 1.79 for all current generation gaming GPUs. (GTX 1xxx and RX xxx) (With 1070/1080 only ~5% of that)

Clearly, the power/heat,.. issues do matter to gamers in some fashion. I just posted thread about Silicon Lottery seems to be doing small firesale on Ryzen because of lack of interest versus Intel. Gotta think that when you're in the $500 GPU price range, it's same issue. Maybe die hard techie will get Vega + Freesync, but average person paying big $$$$ for gaming ... edit: ill spell it out, isnt going to compromise on anything to save a few $. Even normal gamers didnt choose AMD to save a little in the more budget oriented price tiers.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:12 pm

I'm not a fanboy or apologist but as a Vega 64 AC owner who games at 1440p and with a 144hz freesync monitor the card is pretty awesome. Yes it sucks a lot of power and I had to buy a new top tier 850w PSU (needed it anyway as I overclock my 7700K) but at 1440p it is a very good gaming card. I'm getting between 25% to 50% performance improvements over my Fury Pro which ticks all my upgrade boxes TBH I had my Fury Pro for two years which is the longest I've had a graphics card and I'll probably keep this Vega card for at least the same time. For £450 I'm not complaining.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:21 am

MileageMayVary wrote:
bfg-9000 wrote:
It's certainly a disappointment that neither Vega nor 1080 are really satisfactory for 4k.


Actually since I have the numbers...


Coming in a little late here, but it needs to be said: do not- ever- argue with average FPS alone. You're on TechReport.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 7:26 am

Not all reviewers are created equal. Some just don't get it yet. It would be hard to do a meta analysis without the data.
 
MileageMayVary
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:01 am

Airmantharp wrote:
MileageMayVary wrote:
bfg-9000 wrote:
It's certainly a disappointment that neither Vega nor 1080 are really satisfactory for 4k.


Actually since I have the numbers...


Coming in a little late here, but it needs to be said: do not- ever- argue with average FPS alone. You're on TechReport.


I would go with minimum frame rates or better yet 99th percentile but not all sites do that.

But what I did find as I threw more and more numbers into Excel was that the overall % differences between the cards wasn't changing much. Seems like everyone pretty much found the same thing with these cards.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:52 am

Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:59 am

Duct Tape Dude wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.


Those 5 cents per game hour are a killer.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:02 pm

$0.00012 per watt per hour is less than 5¢/hr.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:04 pm

JustAnEngineer wrote:
$0.000012 per watt per hour is less than 5¢/hr.

I think you have an extra zero in there, unless you're buying power from the TVA.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:05 pm

Duct Tape Dude wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.


Power consumption has never been about the electric bill. It has always been about thermal management and noise level that goes with it if you go with air. If you can't afford electrical cost of running a performance GPU then you got much bigger problems on your hands.
Last edited by Krogoth on Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:07 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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ermo
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:06 pm

Duct Tape Dude wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.


Exactly this.

Unless RTG and GloFo can pull a rabbit out of their collective as***^H hats with future steppings, Vega will likely be consigned to the history books as borderline irrelevant.

For something that was hyped as the shining beacon of the future @RTG, that's a pretty poor showing.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:07 pm

Clearly, the quote function glitched and added that extra zero. ;-). It couldn't possibly have been fat-fingered typing on my phone.
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:12 pm

ermo wrote:
Duct Tape Dude wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.


Exactly this.

Unless RTG and GloFo can pull a rabbit out of their collective as***^H hats with future steppings, Vega will likely be consigned to the history books as borderline irrelevant.

For something that was hyped as the shining beacon of the future @RTG, that's a pretty poor showing.


It is performing as expected. The crowd who are disappointed are those who were expecting a "Pascal killer". The reality is high-end GPUs have been hitting the walls of physics for some time. GP100 and GP102 aren't exactly that far behind in terms of power consumption.
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Vhalidictes
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 12:18 pm

Krogoth wrote:
Power consumption has never been about the electric bill. It has always been about thermal management and noise level that goes with it if you go with air. If you can't afford electrical cost of running a performance GPU then you got much bigger problems on your hands.


Krogoth, you're not wrong. Noise and heat can sometimes matter, in niche cases. Most of us, most of the time, considering that this is TR, aren't running low-end systems. If the GPU isn't (already) an excessive source of heat/noise, the CPU is.

This smells like rationalization to me; that's what my post was pointing out. And that's fine, we all make up reasons for why we think the way we do after-the-fact, it's human nature.

Just including the builds I've created for myself, noise and heat aren't major issues. I should know; I have an OC'd 390 in my system right now. I don't really enjoy the fact that it runs at 85C, but that has never caused any game glitches and apparently Hawaii just runs hot no matter what cooling you use.

The major issue with Vega is that it's overpriced. Every other complaint flows from that, albeit sometimes indirectly.
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:12 pm

MileageMayVary wrote:
I pulled together average reported frame rates from several sites (including TR) for how the Vega64 and Vega 56 compare against the GTX1080 and GTX1070 at 1440. I'm not sure why the general feeling I get from the interwebs is that Vega failed. Was Vega supposed to beat the GTX1080Ti? No. Does it use more power? Yes. Is it way late? Yes. I know a lot of places are giving thumbs up, especially to the Vega56, but if the price is comparable, then being -2% to +7% of your opponent seems pretty on point to me.

Vega64 is 98% the speed of the GTX1080 @ 1440.
Vega56 is 107% the speed of the GTX1070 @ 1440.

Some games are ridiculously in favor of Team Green, such as Fallout 4, GTA V, and Civ VI, but overall very competitive.
And yes, I know this doesn't take into account minimum frame rates, micro stutter, and possible stub frames.

Here's hoping they're next gen is more or less on time with NVidia's next gen.


Vega launch failed in two ways:
1. The "powersaver" profile should have been the default. The difference in power is huge, the difference in perf is ridiculous. I would still consider the Vega almost equivalent to the 1080 at 95% of perf.
2. Availability and the whole miner situation make pricing very difficult. Priced very cheaply, they are snatched by miners immediately. Priced expensively and the gamers complain. The packages and games and rebates are an indirect way of putting the cards into the hands of gamers, but the simple fact is that demand is high and production is probably not yet sufficient.

The more I read about the chip, the more I realize that it is first and foremost a compute architecture. The Instinct (the deep learning card based on Vega) and the FE are very serious and competitive product. The RX is a bit of an afterthought. At its nominal price, the RX64 is a bit useless, but the RX56 (again, at the theoretical $400 price) would make a very compelling addition to the RX range.

I am still very happy with my RX480 which runs everything very smoothly, but an undervolted RX56 makes a lot of sense for people who care about twitchy games and 144Hz.
Image
 
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Re: Vega Meta Analysis

Sat Aug 26, 2017 9:53 pm

Krogoth wrote:
Duct Tape Dude wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
It's a failure to me because it's so power hungry.

+1
I wanted a flagship card and would have been ok with taking Vega64+Freesync vs a 1080Ti+Vsync if the power consumption was lower.


Power consumption has never been about the electric bill. It has always been about thermal management and noise level that goes with it if you go with air. If you can't afford electrical cost of running a performance GPU then you got much bigger problems on your hands.

Spot on, Krogoth. No one paying for a flagship card cares about cents per kWhr as much as noise levels/coil whine/thermals.

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