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
Is it bad that I sold my R9 290 for $100 to my brother in law? This was way before ETH miining, yeah I'm a nice guy. I couldn't get it sold for $250 so I just sold it to him for dirt cheap.
Specs was:
AMD Sapphire R9 290 + NZXT Kraken G10 + Corsair H55 + GELID ICY Vision VRM Heatsinks + Zalman ZM-RHS1 VRAM Heatsinks
You can't just undermine everything that is against AMD...
BTW: wasn't the leaked Zen performance figures / the hype the actual market manipulation? Think how many people preordered a Ryzen and how much the stock price increased as a result.
In normal conditions people shouldn't preorder anything, ever.
www.google.com/maps/place/West+Pullman+Branch,+Chicago+Public+Library/@41.6742517,-87.6531081,1005m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x880e2441f5c5839d:0xc4589ca9afeba7ba!8m2!3d41.6780523!4d-87.6430841
There are of course some costs that come with the territory, these panels aren't invulnerable to bullets. The locals like to fire their guns in the air and those bullets come down and damage modules from time to time.Yep, that's why key words need to be left in the text. It's semantics but I said solar was basically free energy. There's a big difference. If you pay in full(you usually don't) your ROI would be about 20 years depending on your install. I could do the work myself if I wanted to so that would save myself a lot on labor.You clearly don't know what you're talking about. You've clearly never been here and used a solar pathfinder. Solar is actually really good in Illinois. There are also kickbacks for solar installs for $10,000 in cases, a solar install will also add $10,000 to the value of your home after a home appraisal while most installs will be around $20,000 so right away you can break even. However, where I live I pay very little for per kilowatt-hour so in my case it would take a long time for solar to make sense if kickbacks weren't in effect. But I suggest you do your research and you'll realize how good solar is in Illinois and why there are very big projects being planned. IKEA has commited already.
midwestenergynews.com/2017/03/28/ikea-continues-its-renewables-push-with-illinois-largest-rooftop-solar-array/
Sure, it's not always right, but it's in their interest to be as accurate as possible.
And it's not just banks - e.g. there was this guythat says BTC will be worth $50k. He's made a living (and a media career) by giving some recommendations for free - most likely the ones he finds most accurate.
Sometimes investment banks are employed by companies to "guard" the stock price. This is legal and clean.
But manipulating against the company is illegal. I doubt any large bank would take that risk for AMD - a small, yet very popular company (too many people and institutions watching).
Now, obviously there are documented situations where banks tried to manipulate a market with their publications and trades, but it's really, really rare. And usually about currencies, not stocks.
After i stopped mining with them i tested most and selected those which did not show artifacts and sold them for half the second hand market prices, or if they flunked i scrapped them. A good miner makes sure these card never hit the gamers market or warns the user that the risk of the card failing is high.
Thinking that it would be a good deal that miners dump those on the market is absolute misleading yourself.
I hope that both companies soon make mining cards in all the models from 1060 to 1080ti and from amd's rx560 up to the vega rx 64 watercooled.
In case someone claims a miner card is useless then you never heard of sli / or setting the card as physics for nvidia and amd is even much more fun you can add 4 cards and only need 1 card to connect to monitor(s) the rest will add the power anyway. Ofcourse adding cards does not give you double the performance but it works .... they do not need to have a monitor connector at all. Especially AMD because it uses crossfire-x so no need for linking the cards with a bridge. Make sure to check that your motherboard supports CF-x but any modern motherboard does in most cases up to 4 cards. It seems you can actually use AMD and nvidia up to 8 cards in windows 10. But my experience with that is its not working well. Even 2 x nvidia and 2 amd is not easy to get and keep it working especially when large updates arrives.
As soon as you think your earning something back your earning back is moved further in the future every 5 to 7 years. So you really believe that it is free money.....
Then there is the low return of these things because non of these solar selling companies tell the truth about the system.
The truth is that every part of these things eat power as well which is never calculated the converter consumes 250 to 550 watt and every panel depending if they do not have the power optimizers or they do.
15 to 25 watt without and up 75 with the optimizers. Ofcourse there is much more loss but it goes too far to give a estimate because it all depends on how long the cables and how the solar panels are placed and so on.
My system does hardly ever deliver 6000 watt at all on average it produces just below 3000 watt at a very sunny day .... So the calculation that i earned this whole crap back in less than 7 years is a pure BS it actually will never pay me back the price i payed for it, it actually will cost me every 5 to 7 year a new converter and thats without installation costs.
Even if you have the perfect alignement and have a high solar day count its hard to break even ever.
"btw 20000 euro is about 24000 dollar"
So even though my power bill dropped i still have to pay my power company because its not even covering the little power i use in my home, you allways need power when there is no effective sunlight for these things to make up for the power the system consumes.
Thats why they allways refuse to tell what your real return delivery is, because they know its much less than you think.
When i asked them to install meters so i could monitor the real power delivered they kept saying it was impossible todo.
At the electricity meter from the power company it shows over 2 years that it delivered back 4500 kWh in total to the meter