FluffmeisterThe reality is AMD achieve wonders with their R&D budgets, but realistically they need to go the same route... if they can afford it.

EarthDogYep! Count those pennies! :)

cucker tarlsonWell you may argue that Ryzen 7 is not up to 7700K level of gaming performance, but remember that while 7700K is breaking every drop of sweat in BF1, Ryzen is doing it at 50% core load.

xkm1948When I spend 500+ on a GPU I expect it to be at least tuned good enough to use directly. If I can overclock it then great, icing on the cake.

RX Vega on the hand is already maxed out in terms of thermal profile, power consumption and MHz. How the hell should the end user adjust it to make it an appealing and somewhat OK gaming card. It is one thing to like a brand and it is another to hand out free passes when they simply failed to deliver a good enough gaming GPU for the current market.

On top of all that, RTG locked Vega's BIOS. Meaning there will be no way to implement any actual BIOS based modifications. RX Vega is a failure no matter what way you spin the story.

Also adding onto the "compute" market of Vega. Well good luck with RTG's next to non-existent technical support. In a market already has wide spread adoption of CUDA, it would be pretty fun to see how much RTG can carve out by utilizing their "Open standard Free stuff" strategy.

FordGT90ConceptLike Fiji, all those compute units are fantastic for compute workloads but the frontend and backend of the render pipeline isn't capable of saturating them in most cases. Think of Vega as a faster Fiji and...well...pretty much everything derived from that fits (especially heavy bias towards high resolutions).

• special units for integers and special for float vectors, opposed to each cuda core having both alus inside
• too many special purpose decode hardware blocks, opposed to one unit that knows to decode all and shares internal logic for all
• too many special purpose cache units connected to its special purpose block, opposed to more flexible approach with bigger unified shared cache pool and bigger multipurpose and unified local caches

EarthDogYep! Count those pennies! :)

BiggieShadyOne more reason for saturation issues, GCN compute unit is way too asymmetrical, not enough granularity and has too many special purpose modules ... let me illustrate:

• special units for integers and special for float vectors, opposed to each cuda core having both alus inside
• too many special purpose decode hardware blocks, opposed to one unit that knows to decode all and shares internal logic for all
• too many special purpose cache units connected to its special purpose block, opposed to more flexible approach with bigger unified shared cache pool and bigger multipurpose and unified local caches

Basically it's a low-latency throughput favoring design that is wasteful and inflexible. Based on the type of the code running, at some particular moment, bunch of the units are doing nothing still being fully powered on to maybe do something useful in the next clock cycle. To gracefully saturate GCN (both peak efficiency and 100% usage) you should have right ratio of int/float instructions and right amount of memory operations sprinkled through code :laugh: ... which is incidentally easier to do using async compute

Dave65Ryzen has come a long way tho, comes pretty damn close to the 7700k and for a lot less money.

cucker tarlsonYup, I actually think both 5775c and 6700K are a better buy than 7700K. It's better to get a Z170 board with 6700K and invest the difference in faster DDR4 than buy Z270,7700K and use something like 3000MHz DDR4.

ZoneDymothe one thing I dont get is all this talk about undervolting yet overclocking.
Is that just a fluke of some people? because if that is just totally possible then why does it not ship like that in the first place?

springs113That has always been AMDs Achilles heel, they've just about done that with every card in like the last 5 years or so. Best case example is XFXs 480 gtr, best 480 on the block imho. Gamers Nexus did an analysis of this and basically came to the conclusion that its a maximization(guarantee)that all cards should work given this voltage, not that all cards need that voltage to operate. I think it's a lazy approach in AMDs part, it's like what we're seeing now everything needs optimization because they didn't do it on the front end, so now they have to play catch up. A lot of Vega owners are undervolting their cards while overclocking at the same time. What's crazy is Vega is more bandwidth starved that core speed. Increasing the HBM speed nets you better return than just pushing for higher core clocks. The shameful post imo is that pushing the hbm speeds higher results in good gains while keeping power consumption relatively the same.

Why did AMD not see this? If they did why weren't memory clocks increased?

This probably is probably where Vega would shine in perf/watt. Can you imagine VEGA @1400-1600 core speed with HBM speeds in the same range?
I think that would've been a more compelling release.
What do you all think?

cucker tarlsonYup, I actually think both 5775c and 6700K are a better buy than 7700K.

FordGT90ConceptGot a similar diagram for Pascal generation CUDA core? Everything I'm finding is overly simplified.

Vayra86Yes its what I was also saying that surprised me earlier. You can read Raja's tweets and see his surprise at others finding the much better perf/watt delta for HIS OWN products. Its ridiculous, it speaks volumes of the level of dedication they have over at RTG. This is not an R&D problem, its a company culture and people problem. It also echoes everything we've seen for years now on GCN: bad decision making, bad marketing, overselling and misrepresenting your products, and bad optimization all over the place. It also echoes AMD's eternal 'more hardware to brute force software hurdles' problem.

efikkanThe design mistake with Vega is making the cores even more complex than Fiji, which requires higher voltage to operate, and a longer pipeline which makes it less efficient in dynamic workloads such as gaming. This is also why Vega has lower "IPC" than Fiji.

BiggieShadyYeah, I suppose all you find is simplified diagram is with all units stacked without any diagram interconnect arrows:

No actual diagram for pascal but here is similar setup in maxwell gpu - with all the arrows:

and the cuda core itself didn't change much since fermi afaik:

As you can see, Nvidia doesn't have fetch/decode/dispatch machinery around every 1 scalar + 4 simd units ... they have it around 32 versatile simd/scalar cores.

FrickI think I've said this, but Poland seems to be the only place where Broadwell a) exists and b) wasn't/isn't €100+ more than an i7K. In the vast majority of the market they were non existent, and getting an LGA1150 platform these days is just dumb, unless you get a good deal on an old system and somehow get a hold of the 5775c for less than the €200ish the i7K's usually go for these days.

springs113I'll give them til' Navi to see, as it seems Navi is the RTGs Ryzen. Vega is an awesome card. I was able to get 2, both at the $500 price tag. It is smooth on my non freesync panel. I'm currently undergoing a system overhaul on both my pcs and can't bench or test anything which sucks. But in due time i think Vega will be at least 10%faster given or take 3 to 6 months. Sadly AMD keeps repeating this cycle, i thought they learnt from the Polaris release and even so Ryzen. We all knew something was up when Vega was suppose to be released right after TR but the reviewers got the cards like literally 3 days before release date. Then being told to focus on the 56 and not the 64 being released first. Shameful on AMDs part. I just hope they get their act together sooner than later. I (we all) need more/better competition. I'll rock out with Vega until Navi shows itself though. Another sad part is because of AMDs marketing or lack there of even when they have the better option we as consumers don't support them. To some degree i feel us add commanders are partly to blame for this.

The trend with Ryzen is fundamentally breaking that mold but even then i think people are more tired of Intels games more than there actual appeal of Ryzen. Odd way to look at things and maybe even small minded of me, but i can't not think about the Athlon Era of cpus. AMD clearly had the better product yet ppl willingly bought Intel. Same goes for the 5870/5970 Era of gpus. They were the best at just about every level yet consumers still bought Nvidia.