Friday, August 4th 2017
AMD RX Vega Mining Performance Reportedly Doubled With Driver Updates
Disclaimer: take this post with a bucket of salt. However, the information here, if true, could heavily impact AMD's RX Vega cards' stock at launch and in the subsequent days, so, we're sharing this so our readers can decide on whether they want to pull the trigger for a Vega card at launch, as soon as possible, or risk what would seem like the equivalent of a mining Black Friday crowd gobbling up AMD's RX Vega models' stock. Remember that AMD has already justified delays for increased stock so as to limit the impact of miners on the available supply.
The information has been put out by two different sources already. The first source we encountered (and which has been covered by some media outlets solo) has been one post from one of OC UK's staff, Gibbo, who in a forum post, said "Seems the hash rate on VEGA is 70-100 per card, which is insanely good. Trying to devise some kind of plan so gamers can get them at MSRP without the miners wiping all the stock out within 5 minutes of product going live."
The fact that a staffer from OC UK is actually looking for ways to prevent miners from wiping the stock speaks more to the credence of the information than the "70-100 hash rate" claim. Apparently, this information was conveyed to Gibbo from an AMD AIB partner, who remains unknown at time of writing. This information has already been sort of confirmed by a second source, coming out of Videocardz's Why Cry. In a post, the editor reported how he already had come in possession of similar information through his sources, who put the hash rate of RX Vega close to double that of the Frontier Edition's original hash rate, which was ~30 MH/s in Ethereum mining. This means the hash rate could be ~60 mark, which is still close to OC UK's Gibbo's reference to a "70-100" hash rate. This increase in hash rate was apparently indirectly enabled by updated driver features for the RX Vega cards. Apparently, these were included in the drivers to improve features and gaming performance - which also indirectly resulted in increased mining capabilities.
We had already covered in our Vega Architecture Technical Overview article that AMD's Vega NGCU computation capabilities were bolstered through added support for over 40 new ISA instructions, which result in increased IPC over Polaris - and which were also mentioned by VSG at the time as being "very relevant for GPU mining."
Adding to this story is the fact that recent optimizations from a Reddit user to a Monero mining program and an underclock to 1.3 GHz have brought the Frontier Edition's mining hashrates to around 1.16 kH/s - 34% faster than a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (around 0.76 kH/s according to Nicehash), and 43% faster than a single Radeon RX 580 8 GB. This means that the $999 Frontier Edition currently stands at double the mining performance of the GTX 1080 on Monero - and the gaming RX Vega, with its $499 price-tag, should follow suit. And these are optimizations achieved by a single user, for a cryptocurrency that is admittedly not as popular as Ethereum or others. But increasing levels of performance in some mining algorithms really does leave the door open for exploration of improved speeds on others, and you can rest assured that miners will, at the very least, attempt to achieve these optimizations in other cryptocurrencies.
All in all, if true, these reports lend credence to AMD's take on the RX Vega delays for stock build-up. And the situation seems to be less straightforward than one might hope when it comes to disabling these instructions, or only enabling them at a latter date, after gamers had already had some time to purchase their desired cards. Because these driver-level updates were apparently done with the intent to bolster gaming performance, I believe it's safe to assume AMD can't easily neuter the mining improvements without putting the increased gaming performance at risk as well. Let's see how this pans out, but consider yourselves at least warned - the RX Vega may see much reduced stock and increased pricing throughout if this scenario pans out. in the meantime, those Radeon Packs with both their shortcomings and opportunities are looking like an increasingly interesting way to get ahold of one of AMD's latest...
Sources:
OCUK's Gibbo, Videocardz, NAG, Dirtbagdh @ Reddit
The information has been put out by two different sources already. The first source we encountered (and which has been covered by some media outlets solo) has been one post from one of OC UK's staff, Gibbo, who in a forum post, said "Seems the hash rate on VEGA is 70-100 per card, which is insanely good. Trying to devise some kind of plan so gamers can get them at MSRP without the miners wiping all the stock out within 5 minutes of product going live."
We had already covered in our Vega Architecture Technical Overview article that AMD's Vega NGCU computation capabilities were bolstered through added support for over 40 new ISA instructions, which result in increased IPC over Polaris - and which were also mentioned by VSG at the time as being "very relevant for GPU mining."
216 Comments on AMD RX Vega Mining Performance Reportedly Doubled With Driver Updates
Now Would that be" POT hole mining":roll:o_O:laugh:
Our govt plain sucks at improving business to help all. So renewables, ironically, end up adding a tariff onto our bills as the govt imposes CO2 emission chrages on coal and gas etc. And solar is not free. The R&D plus manufacture and actual solar efficiency is pretty bad. And where i live it's very green and very cloudy - no droughts, very little sun.
First we had "mining is free money" and now "solar is free energy". Where do you guys come from? :o
Where is this going? What's next? Fridge contains free food?
Why would anyone install a solar panel in Illinois? I checked some figures on sun exposure and it should be similar to central Europe - that is: rubbish. Solar panels in Europe are subsidized, because they can hardly make a profit.
but after reading thru this and other forums and shoveling out the crap and whining. I look at it this way for the price of a 1080 ti water cooled is $1200 or so a amd vega 64 Liq is $700 the same results slightly lower when you look at benchmarks, all the review and testing. well im ok with that at this point.. if your like me using a r9-270x or such card then this is a good deal if your using a card bought in the last year or 2 and price is a contention then Just Make due until it stabilizes. just like Monitors the price is crazy - bought a 43" Vizio 4k tv and use it as a monitor 120htz, 2160p we all make choices to get there.
looking at the price of the FE edition being 1500.00 water cooled then the Vega64 falls in line with the price. Asus msi and others wont be coming out with water cooled versions until mid sep at the earliest. the stock air cooled versions prob earliest last week august Asus is making a limited edition vega 64 x2 ie 2 cards in one water cooled im guessing around $1680+ and over 600 watts :)
anyway this forum is entertaining to read.
NVIDIA provides quite massive jumps.
For the last 3 generations the *70 model was at least matching previous flagship. They're offering solid +30% in most segments and generations are 2 years apart at most.
And don't you worry about Intel. They've concentrated on other things lately and got slightly surprised by Zen, but will be back to leading CPU efficiency sooner than you think. It's inevitable.
AMD has been making GPUs for a decade now and they still can't match the quality ATI offered. Such a pity this great company was taken over by such a management tragedy. :-(
Unless you're running a ton of cards (like 20+) I doubt it would be a blip on a energy company radar. 1 plasma tv uses as many watts as 2 Vegas. I've also filled pools before which used thousands of extra gallons of water and I didn't have police at my door.
Unless you can eliminate all 3, basically free installation & free everything afterwards, there will be certain costs associated with solar, wind et al forever.
Few years later AMD's consumer GPUs are better for mining and general calculations than they are for games. And hardly anyone cares about their HPC lineup, so we don't know if it's good for games...Solar-wise Illinois is rubbish - no point discussing that further. :-)
As for wind... Generally speaking, Illinois is quite far from the central US area known for strong winds. Yet, there are quite many wind farms.
Is wind energy subsidized by the state? Or maybe there's some microclimat that helps? Lakes?
Potential: www.tindallcorp.com/site/user/images/USA_Wind_Map_for_Tindall_Transp_2.jpg
Installations: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Distribution_of_wind_power_plants_in_U.S.png