AMD's Radeon Pro Duo Deeply Discounted on Expected Vega Onslaught

[Raevenlord]

Inventory clearing is as much a part of business as breathing is part of life; as such, various retailers have apparently started to offer deep, deep discounts on AMD's past technology in the form of their Radeon Pro Duo - the once and still king of the hill in the red camp, where performance and technology is concerned.

But as the "out with the old, in with the new" adage still stands, retailers are now clearing inventory of their Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards, sometimes offering almost 50% off from the original launch price of $1499. Newegg, for example, has the card for $799 on both their North American and Asia Pacific online stores.





While still built on the now old-news 28nm process, and in a dual-chip solution to boot, AMD's Radeon Pro Duo remains a crowning achievement for the company, at least when it comes to the amount and novelty of incorporated technology; and while merits of dual-GPU solutions can certainly be debated, no one can deny the sheer power of this behemoth of a graphics card, which packs a grand total of 8192 stream processors delivering a staggering 16.38 TFLOPs of FP32 compute and two stacks of 4 GB of the highly-costly, and highly exotic, HBM 1 memory. If you want to get your hands on a brand new piece on this part of AMD's particular history, resellers will tell you that now is the time.

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[xkm1948]

Nah, a good 1080 can blow this sideways. Nobody would shell out $800 for Fiji now.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Nah, a good 1080 can blow this sideways. Nobody would shell out $800 for Fiji now.

Still think it's aimed at pros not gamers and for 16.8 tf it's a good buy if you need the power

 

[bogami]

As I predicted happened. Well here it is not to be expected more for this late issuance Dual GPU to do a good selling product at the time when issue processor, but not for burial.! That dual Vega would be desirable but, again, there will be hesitation before it is released. Well I can not pass 350 w consumption which is only possible at minimum load. All Dual GPU which I had haw a 1500W PSU did burned connectors on the cables close to the burning due to heavy load. And, if they were not hew enough power resulted in the blue screen! 700w for 2 good joke .

 

[the54thvoid]

Nah, a good 1080 can blow this sideways. Nobody would shell out $800 for Fiji now.

Yeah but in balance, I'd also turn my nose up at any SLI offering too. Dual GPU for gaming these days is a waste of money.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Nah, a good 1080 can blow this sideways. Nobody would shell out $800 for Fiji now.

blow it sideways? I would love for you to back that up with some benchmarks cuz I highly doubt it.

 

[xkm1948]

Yeah but in balance, I'd also turn my nose up at any SLI offering too. Dual GPU for gaming these days is a waste of money.

All this direction moving away from parallel rendering makes me wonder the over abundance of 16X PCI-E slots on mobos these days.

 

[theonedub]

All this direction moving away from parallel rendering makes me wonder the over abundance of 16X PCI-E slots on mobos these days.

Bring on the PCIe co-processor solutions!

 

[Folterknecht]

blow it sideways? I would love for you to back that up with some benchmarks cuz I highly doubt it.

It's a dual card compute monster dependent on working CF profiles with lacking VRAM - for gaming there is nothing to prove. Most people prefer consistent performance at all times over maybe/sometimes/fuck that profile. Take a single Fury and you have your baseline to compare against a 980Ti/1070 and that isn't even talking about 4K and VRAM demands. DX12 and a shared memory pool sound nice on paper but still seems a long way off.

 

[Fluffmeister]

This card was basically dead on arrival, and even at $799 it's a hard sell now.

 

[Lionheart]

It's a beast but dual GPU's & multiple card setups are boring to me now

 

[Prima.Vera]

After going with all that shit from 4870X2, and then 5870 in CF, I swear never to go CrossFire again. I think less than 35% of the games out there didn't (don't) have a proper CF/SLI support, even the AAA ones.
Forget the benchies. Those games are cheery picked from the ones that have some multicard support, but for some of the indie games I'm playing CF/SLI is an utopia.

 

[SimpleTECH]

I didn't even know that the Radeon Pro Duo was available at this time. I remember AMD showing it off over a year ago but never heard nor saw anything after that, including "deals". Goes to show that your product is almost vaporware to the consumer if you don't have anything to show for it.

 

[BADDOGGY]

blow it sideways? I would love for you to back that up with some benchmarks cuz I highly doubt it.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Graphics-cards-best-PassMark-score-5825384

I think thats a good start

 

[thesmokingman]

It's an engineering marvel but no one asked for it and especially not even at its current.

 

[ShurikN]

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Graphics-cards-best-PassMark-score-5825384

I think thats a good start

Gpuboss... uhhhh

 

[ZoneDymo]

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Graphics-cards-best-PassMark-score-5825384

I think thats a good start

seeing the cards in order...I dont really think it is a good start tbh

and if I look here:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/10/06/amd_radeon_r9_fury_x_crossfire_at_4k_review/4

I can see dual fury X beats 980ti in sli so a single gtx1080 blowing the produo sideways....again, hard time believing that

 

[ZipFreed]

After going with all that shit from 4870X2, and then 5870 in CF, I swear never to go CrossFire again. I think less than 35% of the games out there didn't (don't) have a proper CF/SLI support, even the AAA ones.
Forget the benchies. Those games are cheery picked from the ones that have some multicard support, but for some of the indie games I'm playing CF/SLI is an utopia.

That's the thing with mGPU setups. When they work they work incredibly well (on paper) but when they don't work it can be a nightmare and incredibly frustrating. Not to mention that most SLI/Crossfire gamers of the past where both AMD and nVidia's most diehard/enthusiastic customers. Many, myself included, saw it as a kind of slap in the face that those who dished out for two of their top-end GPU's always seemed to be the last ones on the list for support / fixes.

SLI/Crossfire seemed to be at their biggest boom during the Eyefinity/Surround days. Once all of the frametime stuff came to light a couple years ago they slowly started dying off.

Crossfire as of recent seems to have much better performance/scaling across the board compared to SLI but this past year or two has been awful to mGPU as far as support goes. I can see it having a future in the VR space and that's about it. Some of the improvement's promised by DX12/Vulkan seem great but I think we are a couple years away from an actual working/stable implementation.

 

[crsh1976]

This thing suffers from such an identity crisis that I'm starting to wonder if it was just a way for them to put excessive Fiji stock to use (and now it needs to be discounted because they still haven't managed to sell much of it).

 

[Relayer]

As I predicted happened. Well here it is not to be expected more for this late issuance Dual GPU to do a good selling product at the time when issue processor, but not for burial.! That dual Vega would be desirable but, again, there will be hesitation before it is released. Well I can not pass 350 w consumption which is only possible at minimum load. All Dual GPU which I had haw a 1500W PSU did burned connectors on the cables close to the burning due to heavy load. And, if they were not hew enough power resulted in the blue screen! 700w for 2 good joke .

I'm assuming Google translate here. But it looks like you are saying this card burned up your PSU. If so you had a real problem somewhere.

And as was already stated, the cards aimed at professional users not gamers. It's excellent value for it's intended use.

 

[Kanan]

This is just a card for pro's for VR or other professional creating stuff. Other than that, for gamers, maybe for 4K playing until the 4 GB Ram isn't sufficient anymore and 1440p generally should do the trick too. The card isn't suited for 1080p at all and already loses speed in 1440p compared to 4K, so keep that in mind, it's a pure pro and enthusiast card, best suited for 1440p/high frequency gaming, if you're a gamer.

 

[Relayer]

I didn't even know that the Radeon Pro Duo was available at this time. I remember AMD showing it off over a year ago but never heard nor saw anything after that, including "deals". Goes to show that your product is almost vaporware to the consumer if you don't have anything to show for it.

It's not even close to vaporware. It's been readily available all along.

It's an engineering marvel but no one asked for it and especially not even at its current.

This is very true. Although if I still did a lot of modeling and rendering it would be a great product and value.

 

[RCoon]

Legitimately forgot it ever existed, let alone was released that long ago.

 

[KrisCo]

I would love to get a few of these if they werent so damn expensive. Be great for when I host lan parties - I have one rig for all of us to use with VMware and dual gpus make the whole process so much easier. I really hope AMD continues making dual gpu cards, or reasonably priced nvidia ones.

 

[Prima.Vera]

I see a lot of posts that states this card is for Pro gamers and so on.
This is not true. All Pro gamers are using top single cards in order to reduce input delay and micro stuttering as much as possible.
As for the Professional use; neh, there are better FireGL or Quatro cards dedicated for that purpose.