Thursday, January 10th 2019
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Radeon VII: "Underwhelming (...) the Performance is Lousy"; "Freesync Doesn't Work"
PC World managed to get a hold of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, picking his thoughts on AMD's recently announced Radeon VII. Skirting through the usual amicable, politically correct answers, Jensen made his thoughts clear on what the competition is offering to compete with NVIDIA's RTX 2000 series. The answer? Vega VII is an "underwhelming product", because "The performance is lousy and there's nothing new. [There's] no ray tracing, no AI. It's 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we'll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we'll crush it." Not content on dissing the competition's product, Jensen Huang also quipped regarding AMD's presentation and product strategy, saying that "It's a weird launch, maybe they thought of it this morning."
Of course, the real market penetration of the technologies Jensen Huang mentions is currently extremely low - only a handful of games support NVIDIA's forward-looking ray tracing technologies. That AMD chose to not significantly invest resources and die-space for what is essentially a stop-gap high-performance card to go against NVIDIA's RTX 2080 means its 7 nm 331 mm² GPU will compete against NVIDIA's 12 nm, 545 mm² die - if performance estimates are correct, of course.
The next remarks came regarding AMD's FreeSync (essentially a name for VESA's Adaptive Sync), which NVIDIA finally decided to support on its GeForce graphics cards - something the company could have done outright, instead of deciding to go the proprietary, module-added, cost-increased route of G-Sync. While most see this as a sign that NVIDIA has seen a market slowdown for its G-Sync, added price-premium monitors and that they're just ceding to market demands, Huang sees it another way, saying that "We never competed. [FreeSync] was never proven to work. As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync. The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD's graphics cards." In the wake of these word from Jensen, it's hard to understand the overall silence from users that might have their FreeSync monitors not working.
Reportedly, NVIDIA only found 12 out of 400 FreeSync-supporting monitors to support their G-Sync technology automatically in the initial battery of tests, with most panels requiring a manual override to enable the technology. Huang promised that "We will test every single card against every single monitor against every single game and if it doesn't work, we will say it doesn't work. And if it does, we will let it work," adding a snarky punchline to this matter with an "We believe that you have to test it to promise that it works, and unsurprisingly most of them don't work." Fun times.
Source:
PC World
Reportedly, NVIDIA only found 12 out of 400 FreeSync-supporting monitors to support their G-Sync technology automatically in the initial battery of tests, with most panels requiring a manual override to enable the technology. Huang promised that "We will test every single card against every single monitor against every single game and if it doesn't work, we will say it doesn't work. And if it does, we will let it work," adding a snarky punchline to this matter with an "We believe that you have to test it to promise that it works, and unsurprisingly most of them don't work." Fun times.
270 Comments on NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Radeon VII: "Underwhelming (...) the Performance is Lousy"; "Freesync Doesn't Work"
Looks like your about to enjoy 1080 Ti performance two years later for... *drum roll* $699. If that makes you happy i guess the quote of the day is: "shame on you".
AFAIK, G-SYNC is the technically superior solution, but don't quote me.
He's made some pretty scandalous claims there about FreeSync on most of those monitors not working even with AMD cards, that sounds pretty suspicious. If it was true, enthusiasts would have been shouting about it on forums long ago and reviewers might have noticed a little bit, too. As long as he doesn't name names though they probably can't touch him.
It sounds like those non-functioning monitors simply don't work with NVIDIA cards, but he doesn't wanna admit that because it would look really bad for NVIDIA, so he includes AMD as well. So underhand, but NVIDIA's got form for this so I'm not surprised. And I'm saying this as a hardcore longtime NVIDIA user, so I'm not just being biased.
He could've made a constructive (or even neutral) comment, but no...
Had to say it. Thanks for the entertainment guys. It's just PR anyway, Jen-hsun has always been hands on & good on him. No question AMD dropped the ball with RTG & we all know the reasons (mostly). Just shows how forward thinking a concurrent gaphics/compute uarch it was in 2012. I don't know what people expect from Navi, but it too is GCN based. Vega20 at last gives us 128 ROPs, but doesn't break the 4 tris/clock front end given the primitive discard engine bypassing GS->HS->DS->VS is a no-show. Perhaps fixed in Navi? Nvidia has turned Maxwell->Pascal->Turing into a better balanced gaming uarch esp given substantial devrel programs.
People would notice.
Nvidia got forced out of its lucrative Gsync business because otherwise it wouldn't be able to certify against HDMI 2.1.
Nvidia's again pushed out of the console space (yes we know theres the Switch, but the Switch won't be defining GPU trends), which will continue to see Nvidia technology only bolted on, rather than core to any game experience. In 6-12 months we will see two new consoles built on AMD Navi GPU's, and corresponding cards for desktop. This is new, as traditionally console GPU's have lagged behind desktop tech, which will invariably benefit AMD for optimisation.
And lastly, with Intel entering the GPU space, Nvidia is left out in the cold with a lack of x86 ability, and only so much of that can be countered with its investment in RISC.
Full disclosure - I own a 2080 Ti, but to me this comes across as a temper tantrum rather than anything meaningful
I think that they will more than tripple in price at the rate they are going.
Just my opinion; but also based on the inovation of their recent CPU product's.
Havn't bought an AMD cpu since 2009 (I'm all intell Xeon's for my 7 RIgs right now)..
So Not an AMD fanboy, but clearly they have somthing good going in their CPU department...
The evidence of this is based on Intel majically boosting thier core count and
Frequency on their CPU's to the max; just to stay a touch ahead of AMD's CPU's.
To me that says it all..
what is a fanboy ? and will it cool my threadripper ? :)
What he meant: "FreeSync doesn't work on NVIDIA cards, because we don't want it to."
I blame google for making me extra lazy.
ha...
I don't think Radeon VII really concerns Huang so much as the road ahead for NVIDIA is rough. AI isn't taking off like they banked on it doing. RTX reception was poor. 7nm transition for NVIDIA is going to be very costly. Cryptocurrency mining on GPUs is mostly dead. FreeSync integration is rougher than he expected. The sky looks cloudy to Huang where the sky over Su looks sunny.
truth is that amd brand new flagship gpu cant challenge even nvidia 3rd faster gpu, not even close,so even amd compare it 2080 gpu...hehe, so amd compare they flagship not nvidia flagshp, but 3 rd fastest gpu...2080 nad hypeting THAT!! come on! THINK!!
i remembe same issue was when vega64 release...amd compare it gtx 1080..NOT gtx 1080 ti..think and i hope when amd then also hypeting vega64 very high...
truth is that without 7nm update radeon VII is melting,thats fact. so its need 3 fans toREFERENCE gpu,never happend bfore gpu history, just like vega64 must use watercool!
and radeon VII even its make 7nm tech STILL eat more than 300W power and i be sure real power is somewhere 350W and peak 400W its terrible score!
think ppl cant understand how big big handicap amd radeon VII have bcoz it build 7nmm architecture... THINK!! its almost half of rtx 2000 series 12nm,so its should eat much less power what is now eating....something is very wrong, and it is that amd cant build good efficiency gpu.
example rtx 2080 eat 220W for average gaming,radeon VII score is over 300W ,EVEN its make 7nm lines!!!!!!!!
its lausy gpu like it little brother vega64, and i call it vega64 II.
rtx 2060 is 10 times better gpu. if we took fastest gpus, we took rtx 2080,rtc 2080ti and of coz rtx titan.
looks that radeon VII just and just avoid watercool,let see how its oc'd.. if it is power eat go absolutly dky high. eve its 7nm gpu.
lausy gpu again, and lisa know it and huang know it.
we e seen it soon or do i say afer 12 month when nvidia release thys 7nm gpu...i promise , under 250W and performance is 2080ti + 40% at least.
dont lie urself, see truth on eye, amd want every1 have 1kw psu. or amd not care. amd should thanks and bed deep another company TMSC that they brink it 7nm arhitecture,without that help i think amd not even release radeon VII.
lausy gpu. shame amd, and ppl wake up, amd not deserve anything smpaty,its earth eat gpu, slow and for it performace its pricey.