Radeon VII Lacks Full FP64 Compute Capabilities Available to Instinct MI60

[btarunr]

AMD's upcoming Radeon VII high-end consumer graphics card lacks full FP64 compute capabilities available to the company's other products targeting the enterprise-compute market, such as the Radeon Instinct MI60. Radeon VII offers an FP32 peak compute throughput of 13.8 TFLOP/s single-precision, which, given its hardware resources, should normally work out a double-precision throughput of 6.7 TFLOP/s. However, with the feature disabled for the Radeon VII, the FP64 throughput will be closer to 860 GFLOP/s. Disabling FP64 capabilities for client-segment graphics cards is a common practice among both AMD and NVIDIA.

For gamers, PC enthusiasts, and even creative professionals, double-precision floating-point performance of a graphics card remains completely irrelevant. The disabling of DPFP ensures gamers have access to Radeon VII, lest every cloud compute provider and their dog would soak up Radeon VII inventory owing to its $699 list price, had it offered 6.7 TFLOP/s rivaling compute accelerators 10-15 times more. Radeon VII is the world's first consumer graphics processor built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process, with company-claimed performance rivaling NVIDIA's RTX 2080. It will be available from February 7.



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[M2B]

So, the "It isn't a gaming card" statement after it got beaten by RTX 2080 won't exist. Nice.

 

[Vayra86]

Good move, and it shows AMD wants to play ball with this card. Which also leads us to believe that they can.

 

[dj-electric]

Building this card is an expensive thing, and with RTX 2080s already dropping towards 700$ anyway i don't see anything compelling about the Radeon VII yet.

I just don't. They have to compensate for their lack of features and high power draw with a lower price, and we don't really get that with the RVII, but how can one expect prices to come down on a new 7nm product with 16GB of HBM2? We need a traditional gaming card that can punch RTX 2070 level at 350-400$ price using conventional methods, not a grossly expensive one at 699$

</rant>

 

[Vayra86]

Building this card is an expensive thing, and with RTX 2080s already dropping towards 700$ anyway i don't see anything compelling about the Radeon VII yet.

I just don't. They have to compensate for their lack of features and high power draw with a lower price, and we don't really get that with the RVII, but how can one expect prices to come down on a new 7nm product with 16GB of HBM2? We need a traditional gaming card that can punch RTX 2070 level at 350-400$ price using conventional methods, not a grossly expensive one at 699$

</rant>

We do indeed, but with competition at this price point, and the way Vega 56/64 is looking today, we may well see both the VII and 2080 drop further towards 600 or so. Which at least is a win in a loser's generation of cards.

 

[M2B]

Building this card is an expensive thing, and with RTX 2080s already dropping towards 700$ anyway i don't see anything compelling about the Radeon VII yet.

I just don't. They have to compensate for their lack of features and high power draw with a lower price, and we don't really get that with the RVII, but how can one expect prices to come down on a new 7nm product with 16GB of HBM2? We need a traditional gaming card that can punch RTX 2070 level at 350-400$ price using conventional methods, not a grossly expensive one at 699$

</rant>

AMD Could easily price this card at 599$ if they wanted to.
It might be a bit expensive to produce because of HBM2 but don't forget the very little R&D budget behind this GPU.

 

[xkm1948]

Would be curious to see clock per clock performance versus Vega56/64 and even FuryX if possible.

 

[ArbitraryAffection]

Sorry AMD but I just don't like Radeon 7. The only thing it has going for it is the 16GB of Video Memory. At $699 I truly feel the 2080 brings more to the table with DLSS and RTX. And honestly from previous launches of high end Radeons, I don't think this is going to beat 2080 at all. 300W on 7nm, a full node shrink ahead of NVIDIA and barely competitive with their 210W offering is technological a disaster for GCN's 3D graphics performance.

I hate to say it but this is GTX 1080 Ti performance for GTX 1080 Ti price, more than a year later, and 50W more power use. But I guess you get 5GB extra VRAM, right?

With no Fp64 support it basically is a gaming card, too. So maybe it has a use for content creators but it's dead to me. I am so mad at tech prices going up and companies like Intel and Nvidia charging big bucks (markup). This year I want to see 1080~ performance (What we had in 2016!!) at £200 price point with good features. 2060 is not this card and I hear 6GB is already limiting it with RTX and stuff.
Navi GTX 1080 perf for £200 make it happen AMD. Kthx,.

 

[Zubasa]

Would be curious to see clock per clock performance versus Vega56/64 and even FuryX if possible.

I wouldn't be surprised that 1/3 of those CUs are just sitting there sucking power and questioning their existence in a gaming card.
There was an article on Vega vs Fiji IPC earlier, there were some measurable improvements but they are almost within the margin of error.
Given that most of Vega's new features were not functional, it is really not surpising.

Sorry AMD but I just don't like Radeon 7. The only thing it has going for it is the 16GB of Video Memory. At $699 I truly feel the 2080 brings more to the table with DLSS and RTX. And honestly from previous launches of high end Radeons, I don't think this is going to beat 2080 at all. 300W on 7nm, a full node shrink ahead of NVIDIA and barely competitive with their 210W offering is technological a disaster for GCN's 3D graphics performance.

I hate to say it but this is GTX 1080 Ti performance for GTX 1080 Ti price, more than a year later, and 50W more power use. But I guess you get 5GB extra VRAM, right?

With no Fp64 support it basically is a gaming card, too. So maybe it has a use for content creators but it's dead to me. I am so mad at tech prices going up and companies like Intel and Nvidia charging big bucks (markup). This year I want to see 1080~ performance (What we had in 2016!!) at £200 price point with good features. 2060 is not this card and I hear 6GB is already limiting it with RTX and stuff.
Navi GTX 1080 perf for £200 make it happen AMD. Kthx,.

I doubt even Lisa Su likes this product from RTG either, it will hardly sell enough to make a profit, and the profit margins would be basically nothing for each card sold.
Also it goes against the whole distruptive pricing campain that AMD was doing for the last couple of years.
It also is a bit of a PR disaster for AMD to be seen as joining in on nVidia's price gouging.

 

[kastriot]

Well they had to show something and that's what is radeon 7, now at 599$ it would be better or having 8GB version for 399$ would be very good move but time will tell.

 

[ArbitraryAffection]

I wouldn't be surprise that 1/3 of those CUs are just sitting there sucking power and questioning their existence in a gaming card.

I did some testing myself when i owned a Vega card with the Radeon Performance Profiler tool thing and in the games i tested 'wavefront occupancy' is extremely low. Below 50% more than half the time of each rendered frame. So yes, Vega shader array is severely underutilised in gaming workloads. This is not going to be fixed with Vega 20.

 

[unikin]

The same crippling as for RTX titan. I still have working poor man's Quadros (3x Titan V) in my rig, when they die I'm looking at 20-30K expense instead of 9K for the same performance. Thank you AMD and NVidia, you're both the same greedy …

 

[Captain_Tom]

So, the "It isn't a gaming card" statement after it got beaten by RTX 2080 won't exist. Nice.

It does still have 16GB of HBM2 providing 1 TB/s of bandwidth, and also the immense 14TFLOPS of FP32 and 28TFLOPS of FP16. There will be many professional workloads this tears most things apart at.


Having said that I have always said "Titan's" are gaming cards... So I don't disagree. This card is meant for gaming first, but just like the AM4 Ryzen CPU's many people will justify it for non gaming uses (like me).

 

[Imsochobo]

Building this card is an expensive thing, and with RTX 2080s already dropping towards 700$ anyway i don't see anything compelling about the Radeon VII yet.

I just don't. They have to compensate for their lack of features and high power draw with a lower price, and we don't really get that with the RVII, but how can one expect prices to come down on a new 7nm product with 16GB of HBM2? We need a traditional gaming card that can punch RTX 2070 level at 350-400$ price using conventional methods, not a grossly expensive one at 699$

</rant>

My rant is that 2080's are increasing in price and becoming more and more hilarious at the point of being 300$ more than 1080ti's was.
RTX2060 however looks like the deal of the year!
VII if at advertised price will be decent (not amazing as it matches GTX1080TI with more framebuffer and slightly faster) - Decent...

RX590\RX580\570\RX560 are all hilariously good deals.
V64 and RTX2070 is the worst deals even.

RTX2080TI,VII,RTX2060,RX500 series is the decent deals in my country.

 

[Captain_Tom]

Well they had to show something and that's what is radeon 7, now at 599$ it would be better or having 8GB version for 399$ would be very good move but time will tell.

Everyone knows that this would have been way better if they made a $579 version with "just" 8GB of HBM2, but they didn't design this card for gaming. These are the lowest yields of the MI150 Instinct cards. AMD did literally the bear minimum again to stay in the high-end gaming segment till they can do a full Navi refresh at the end of this year.

 

[dj-electric]

My rant is that 2080's are increasing in price and becoming more and more hilarious at the point of being 300$ more than 1080ti's was.

Several 699$ models. What am i missing?

 

[Captain_Tom]

My rant is that 2080's are increasing in price and becoming more and more hilarious at the point of being 300$ more than 1080ti's was.
RTX2060 however looks like the deal of the year!
VII if at advertised price will be decent (not amazing as it matches GTX1080TI with more framebuffer and slightly faster) - Decent...

RX590\RX580\570\RX560 are all hilariously good deals.
V64 and RTX2070 is the worst deals even.

RTX2080TI,VII,RTX2060,RX500 series is the decent deals in my country.

Yeah I think most of the hate around R7 is the fact that it proves Navi is coming Q3/4 instead of Q1/2 like people were hoping. But either way this is still going to bring prices down a bit.

I mean Vega II looks to be clearly a bit stronger than the 2080 (unlike the V64 really only tying the 1080 for most people's games). With a slightly stronger card at $100 less money, VII will put a ceiling on pricing. Then the V64 should slot in just fine at $379, and the V56 at $329. Polaris will continue to dominate the midrange. People will just have to wait for prices to really come down.

Several 699$ models. What am i missing?

$699 is the price on good days. VII will insure the overall price moves closes to (or below) $699. I agree there are a couple of good $699 options for the 2080 right now, but usually it's just 1/5 star blower junk cards.

 

[Maye88]

Well my reasons to buy the VII just hit zero. It's a flaming pile of hot garbage now. Way to kill the feature that caused people to actually get excited about the card and would shake up the market. Great job AMD.

 

[dozenfury]

I don't doubt that AMD can match or even beat the performance numbers card for card in the same price segment. Radeon VII should be right there in that regard.

But, 295W (and probably more for third-party "oc" versions) is a problem. Even taking aside the environmental hit, that's a lot of heat and fan noise to add to your desk area to keep that down compared to NV. I really am not wanting to go back to the days of the R380 blow drying space heaters. I've gotten very used to my cool and quiet 150W 1080ti.

The second issue are drivers. To go back to AMD video cards they have to be more on top of the drivers and software. I'm not sure why this isn't mentioned more. But that is a significant difference between green and red. AMD will sometimes take up to 2-3 months after a game release to put out an optimized driver for a game. I've had to wait 3+ months before for AMD drivers to be put out to play games. NV has issues with drivers sometimes too, but far less often and generally the experience for me and I think most has been that drivers for new games are available much earlier with fewer bugs on NV. I spent far too much time scouring forums for fixes to AMD video card drivers to try to fix glitches in games. In fact about the only problem I run into with NV drivers is sometimes needing to downgrade to an older version if I go back and play an older game. Again, neither are perfect and I've had both for years. But I would say NV has the edge.

I'm not pointing these out to feed the red vs. green debate. It's actually more that I'm really interested and liking the current Radeon cpu/mb line (the 3800X/3850X cpus from AMD look great), but these 2 items above would be my reasons for hesitating before going back to an all red system with a new Radeon or TR cpu and AMD video card.

 

[Patriot]

Oh, So that's why it exists... it's a defective Mi50 die.

Cool, So does the fp16/8/4 features still work for DL accelerations?

 

[Mescalamba]

Hm, Im curious about performance, but not really holding my breath for it..

 

[Imsochobo]

Several 699$ models. What am i missing?

In my country 1080TI launched at 7000.
RTX2080 launched at 7400.
Now it's 8000-> and above.
issue is, it's not the same price as the same performance TWO years ago.

And IF Radeon 7 launches at it's advertised price it will be good.
RTX2060 certainly have done so far, even direct from Nvidia!

The funny fact that GTX1050TI is same price as RX570 (which is an absolute bomb!) is also hilarious, Nvidia has 3 worthy cards buying currently and one being an absolute bomb (2060) but high end is left with worse value than 2 years ago, which makes me rather offended as that is the standard these days in 20-offended

 

[toyo]

Well they had to show something and that's what is radeon 7, now at 599$ it would be better or having 8GB version for 399$ would be very good move but time will tell.

They really didn't, all they had to do is reveal Zen 2 with the expected good pricing, and everyone would have been excited and happy. Now we're in doubt about the price of the upcoming Zen 3000 series as well. After all, the 9900K is 500$+, so why AMD would sell us a lower power version at 300$ or below, if they wouldn't bother to offer a disruptive videocard.

 

[TesterAnon]

And there goes one of the main reasons to buy it.
This card keeps looking worse and worse everyday.

 

[MrGenius]

Flash an MI50 BIOS on it and run the Radeon Pro drivers. Problem solved. Provided you can find an MI50 BIOS.