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AMD Confirms RX 480 At $199 USD, Other APU & Polaris Announcements

koyoot said:
Compare GTX 1080 performance with Quadro P4000.

Both are the same chips, with Quadro having lower core clock(slightly). And regardless of it, it gives higher compute performance in applications.
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There isn't any sort of hardware magic happening. Besides small frequency differences, the GP104 chip is the same in the GT 1080 and the Quadro P5000. Both AMD and Nvidia artificially segment some features in their windows drivers. Thats why in PcPer's review of the Vega Frontier Edition you see the GP104 based P5000 outperforming the GP102 based Titan XP. We don't really know if AMD is doing any of this with the frontier edition.

quadro-spec3_0.png


koyoot said:
The good thing is that possibly, regardless of everything, Apple will get Radeon Pro drivers for Vega.
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Luckily in macOS we don't have to deal with this sort of crap and get all the features of the GPU available.

koyoot said:
The features that increase performance are not visible in software for two main possible reasons.

First. They are not enabled in drivers.
Second. They are enabled in drivers, but the software is not optimized to use those features.

There is a dev, who tore down the drivers, and found out that there is no Radeon Pro optimizations available.

As I have said. This GPU purpose is to give devs tool, for which they have to pay.
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My point wasn't that AMD is somehow artificially withholding performance to segment this as a workstation/non-workstation part. My point is that AMD themselves don't know how to develop the optimizations for their cards or they would be in the drivers.
 
Unfortunate to hear that Polaris has a hashing bomb that will start to effect the cards about now. Every month mining performance will drop about 5%, unless the algorithm changes to prevent it. This is unrelated to the PoW difficulty bomb. It just makes it worse.

This hashing bomb doesn't effect Hawaii or Pascal. Don't know about Vega.
 
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Stacc said:
My point wasn't that AMD is somehow artificially withholding performance to segment this as a workstation/non-workstation part. My point is that AMD themselves don't know how to develop the optimizations for their cards or they would be in the drivers.
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They do know how to develop optimizations. If you will look for clues, and proofs of it, you will find them.

Hint: compare reviews and demos AMD did with Vega GPU and Doom in 4K.
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Unfortunate to hear that Polaris has a hashing bomb that will start to effect the cards about now. Every month mining performance will drop about 5%, unless the algorithm changes to prevent it. This is unrelated to the PoW difficulty bomb. It just makes it worse.

This hashing bomb doesn't effect Hawaii or Pascal. Don't know about Vega.
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Finally! Maybe there will be any AMD GPU to buy, in stores, after this.
 
koyoot said:
What is cheaper? P4000 which costs twice as much, and offers professional GPU driver optimizations, which bring 10-30% performance increase?

Do not get me wrong.

I have one biggest gripe, which Actually do not understand with this release. Will this GPU get the professional WX optimizations, as well? There is upcoming WX 9100 based on Vega, which will get them. But will this GPU get them as well? Or do you will have to pay wnother 500-1000$ for them?

The features that increase performance are not visible in software for two main possible reasons.

First. They are not enabled in drivers.
Second. They are enabled in drivers, but the software is not optimized to use those features.

There is a dev, who tore down the drivers, and found out that there is no Radeon Pro optimizations available.

As I have said. This GPU purpose is to give devs tool, for which they have to pay.
Click to expand...

The "dev" was a random guy on reddit and he admited that he didn't know what he was doing and only guessed about it...
 
koyoot said:
They do know how to develop optimizations. If you will look for clues, and proofs of it, you will find them.

Hint: compare reviews and demos AMD did with Vega GPU and Doom in 4K.

Finally! Maybe there will be any AMD GPU to buy, in stores, after this.
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It's all to do with the memory bottleneck on certain cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6i1r5c/ethereum_hashrate_drop_for_radeon_rx400rx500_gpus/

But by the time the perfomance has crashed then around that time Eth will be completely unprofitable. Mining Eth is already in the dying moments. It's a shame certain hardware blogs were recently paid to promote mining in adverts disguised as articles.

They should have put a warning in the articles that any big investment in GPUs now would likely not make money back. But their sponsors don't want the public to know that right now when 'mining edition' cards are released. The cards are advertised with Eth hash rates but nothing to warn customers those rates would be killed off soon. Fraud? Possible.
 
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In general the best thing to do for most people who own desirable mining cards when the craze starts is to just sell them. You don’t deal with any costs associated with mining then. I wish I had sold my HD 7950’s for $400-$450 each back in 2014.
 
Strelok said:
In general the best thing to do for most people who own desirable mining cards when the craze starts is to just sell them. You don’t deal with any costs associated with mining then. I wish I had sold my HD 7950’s for $400-$450 each back in 2014.
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I wish I have bought Bitcoin when it was 13$ each... ;)
 
koyoot said:
I wish I have bought Bitcoin when it was 13$ each... ;)
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Ah well I installed the Bitcoin wallet on my Mac five years ago and didn't know what it does so I deleted it.

For two years a colleague was telling me to mine because he saw I always bought latest hardware but I said it sounds stupid. Yes 90% is stupid and a scam but there's that 10% of this technology that will be useful in the future.

Now some people just say that when they can't mine Eth they will mine other coins. But those coins are so cheap with not much growth potential and yes, still 90% of these coins are a pump and dump scam.
 
FE allows low level API graphics engine developers to start programming for the Vega architecture.
 
Stacc said:
Did amd do a comprehensive comparison in their demo? I think I'll let the independent results speak for themselves.

vega-fe-doom-4k.png
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No they did not. However they have shown the details, and they even have shown DeviceID of the GPU, which later turned out to be 1.2 GHz version of RX Vega.

And it averaged 70 FPS in this game. In highest possible settings. Never dipping down below 65 FPS. Even Linus confirmed that details were absolutely maxed out in 4K.

Here you have 53 FPS, with dips under 50 FPS.


Well looking by numbers it may be even more than just 70 FPS, average...
And that was 1.2 GHz, 8 GB HBM2 GPU.

Hmm, now I have spotted this: The demo from AMD was done with AAx8. Gamers Nexus did it in AAx0. So the performance of the GPU should be even higher!
 
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"AMD cautions that consumer-class drivers are a work in progress, and at the risk of repeating itself, the Frontier Edition isn’t a GPU for gamers." - PcWorld

"AMD is doing everything they can to encourage their typical Radeon consumer base to wait for the forthcoming Radeon Vega RX cards. In the meantime the company is stating that the card is “For Data Scientists, Immersion Engineers, and Product Designers” ." - Anandtech

"But again — with extremely early drivers that haven’t been optimized for consumer games, and a potential clock deficiency relative to the consumer part, I just wouldn’t put a ton of weight on these scores." - Extremetech

"I think it’s premature to worry about a product’s gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming." - Tweet, AMD’s Jason Evangelho

"Please dont compare this card too much with RX Vega" - MSI representative, tweakers.com

"Q : Many argue that vega is just a refined polaris gpu, how would you respond to this ?

A: My software team wishes this was true:). Vega is both a new GPU architecture and also completely new SOC architecture. It’s our first Infinity Fabric GPU as well." - Raja Koduri – Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group – Reddit AMA

"We can't wait to announce our new Vega products, including RX at this year's #SIGGRAPH - make sure to follow us for more details." - Tweet, Radeon RX@Radeon

Vega might be late, but with FE we really don't know too much of its gaming abilities, because... the driver is not there yet. FE is a developer beta with limited support. We have to wait one month for SIGGRAPH for more information.

What would interest me in these upcoming reviews is are there any significant difference between Ryzen + Vega and Intel + Vega combination.
 
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It appears that HBM2 memory subsystem(with memory controllers) consumes around 10-11W under load, bringing 483 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

256 GB/s made from 8 memory cells(without memory controllers!) in RX 480 consumed 37W under load.
 
Zarniwoop said:
"AMD cautions that consumer-class drivers are a work in progress, and at the risk of repeating itself, the Frontier Edition isn’t a GPU for gamers." - PcWorld

"AMD is doing everything they can to encourage their typical Radeon consumer base to wait for the forthcoming Radeon Vega RX cards. In the meantime the company is stating that the card is “For Data Scientists, Immersion Engineers, and Product Designers” ." - Anandtech

"But again — with extremely early drivers that haven’t been optimized for consumer games, and a potential clock deficiency relative to the consumer part, I just wouldn’t put a ton of weight on these scores." - Extremetech

"I think it’s premature to worry about a product’s gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming." - Tweet, AMD’s Jason Evangelho

"Please dont compare this card too much with RX Vega" - MSI representative, tweakers.com

"Q : Many argue that vega is just a refined polaris gpu, how would you respond to this ?

A: My software team wishes this was true:). Vega is both a new GPU architecture and also completely new SOC architecture. It’s our first Infinity Fabric GPU as well." - Raja Koduri – Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group – Reddit AMA

"We can't wait to announce our new Vega products, including RX at this year's #SIGGRAPH - make sure to follow us for more details." - Tweet, Radeon RX@Radeon

Vega might be late, but with FE we really don't know too much of its gaming abilities, because... the driver is not there yet. FE is a developer beta with limited support. We have to wait one month for SIGGRAPH for more information.

What would interest me in these upcoming reviews is are there any significant difference between Ryzen + Vega and Intel + Vega combination.
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Just points to how badly managed their graphics division is. Not only many months behind Nvidia but then they release a product with beta drivers aimed at scientists who shouldn't be using beta drivers? Where is the emoji I need right now....
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Just points to how badly managed their graphics division is. Not only many months behind Nvidia but then they release a product with beta drivers aimed at scientists who shouldn't be using beta drivers? Where is the emoji I need right now....
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This is now a card mainly for Vulkan and DX12 developers. Maybe not too bad for running OpenGL and OpenCL either.
 
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they could have avoided all this if they weren't so tight-lipped about the consumer cards that are being released a whole month later (but I think we all know why that is...)
 
From what has been told me lately: "AMD has a very good reason to not spoil everything right now".

Whatever that means...
 
Having the option to choose between Pro and Gaming drivers is intended to help with Quality Assurance and content testing, not to stand with one leg between a Pro product and a Gamer product.
 
koyoot said:
Only thing you can do, with the GPU right now is to preview it, if it does not have the final drivers, and software is not able to use the features of the hardware, because it is so different.

The sole purpose of this release is ... to allow developers to get their hands on, and optimize their software for this architecture, because it will take some time, with learning and changing approaches.
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How can developers optimize for the new architecture when the drivers don't support any new features?

...

There's something that I think is being missed in the Vega and anti-Vega hype. Attention is towards cards with lots of graphics RAM. However, every time they refer to the HBM, they call it "cache". So - I wonder how well Vega performs with a small amount of graphics RAM?

What if Vega with 2GB can run all the same games that require an 8GB Nvidia card? What if there will be a version of Vega with on-die HBM? This may allow AMD to severely undercut Nvidia on price - in a way that will take Nvidia years to duplicate.
 
curmudgeonette said:
How can developers optimize for the new architecture when the drivers don't support any new features?
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DX12 and Vulkan developers can optimize for the resources available on Vega with the current API. When new extensions become available they can further optimize.
 
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