AMD to Unlock Professional Features for Radeon VII to Blunt RTX 2080's Ray-tracing Edge

[Midland Dog]

Nice move imho. They can place Radeon 7 as a successor of Vega FE which was costing over $1000 when launched. And at 30% more performance with 30% less money, the VFM is strong there for whoever needs it.

confirmed false by amd

 

[R0H1T]

Ah yes the flip flops - free PRO features + AMD = bad gaming cards!

Unlocked PRO feature, on what is not just a gaming card - oh wow Nvidia's the best!

confirmed false by amd

Radeon VII major USP should be gaming, that's it - whatever else there is, or not, should just be a bonus!

 

[IceShroom]

Funny how Nvidia got bashed by some people, when they unlocked certain pro features in Titan Xp.

"Its an evil company, crippling the GPUs deliberately...", " I will never buy Nvidia again..."

Now, AMD does the same thing, and everyone applauds. Go figure...

People bashed Titans because Titan marked as a proconsumer card but do not have pro feature(pro driver,lack laster FP16(less the smartphone gpus) and FP64 performence, no ECC, less VRAM).

 

[bug]

I'm not particularly worried about unlocking extra feature(s). It is ultimately up to the user to determine whether a piece of hardware fits their needs or not.
I think what's missing here (and causing this debate) is clear product positioning from AMD. Which is both expected - this is a rushed, cash grab products (again, I don't have a problem with that) - and not unprecedented - Nvidia's Titan are roughly in the same spot: not part of the GeForce line, but won't run with pro drivers either.

If this was a mid-range product, I'd say the more, the merrier. But since this is high-end, it only gets a meh from me. I'm usually only interested in high-end because they push the boundaries giving me a glimpse of what's to come. This card does not do that.

 

[notb]

That is what Quadros / Radeon Pro cards are for.

Exactly!

I doubt there are many non-nVidia or non-Intel hardware at big corporations' IT deprartments anyway.

What you wanted to say: big corporations don't buy AMD. Well... correct.

IT department is often the first to go when there are lay-offs, so I doubt many would take the "risks" either way.

But why would they take the risk? Heaving a business is not about taking IT risks. IT risk is something you're supposed to minimize.

I am thinking more from the hobbiest / Freelancer point of view.

IMO this card won't be interesting to this group. No AMD card is.
AMD in fact makes very good GPUs: good image quality, great compute performance and lots of features.
The problem is not the GPU. It's the final product they sell (or rather: they don't know how to sell).

Radeon cards need a lot of work: tweaking, troubleshooting, optimizing. A lot of people undervolt or flash them.
And when you do all of this, the cards become fairly robust and even somehow competitive on efficiency.

Problem is: AMD would like to sell them to scientists, data analysts, photo/video editors, 3D artists, CAD designers and so on. And in general these people don't know how to do such things.
Sure, some percentage may have the computer skills needed to live with a Radeon... but would they?
We're talking about freelancers and small companies. They earn when they work. So it's a question of how much time are they willing to spend on making the PC work as it should.

IMO it's a card for "enthusiasts", i.e. people with big budget who can accept (even welcome) the additional work this card imposes.
"Prosumers" is the exact opposite. Their budget is limited. Their time is precious. And while they don't have the security policies of large enterprises, they need even more support and easier to use hardware, because they seldom have any IT support to fix stuff.

OEMs provide all of that. And we know that Radeons shine once put into a OEM workstation or a Mac. But as a standalone card? No way.

 

[HD64G]

confirmed false by amd

Confirmed true you mean? I read that it has exactly the same abilities with the Vega FE and some others that are cut and only available to Radeon Pro GPUs.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I've had enough with the people of trying to justify that amd performs better at this price point. People are so fucking dumb to remember things nowadays, a few months ago, they criticized nvidia over and over and over again about it's price to performance ratio, now this gpu comes along and all the fanboys are loving it. this is pure and utter bullshit. nvidia brought many different innovations to the market, I wonder what amd accomplished in last 2 years? don't get me started on the 7nm process and hbm2, both are not the technologies of amd. (7nm TSMC, HBM2 Samsung)

This is not a gaming card, if you want to compare this to something else, compare it to Quadro because it has a repurposed chip from MI50 with ECC memory. AMD is losing money just to compete with nvidia and investors soon be aware of it. If and when I get one of these cards, I'll be using on testing my ROCm platform, till then, this card is just a compute card, like all other amd cards, they all have brute force performance with extreme power consumption.

All of the amd processors, since the beginning of their time, consumed much more power compared to innovative companies. they must realize that this needs to stop somewhere.

Exactly!

What you wanted to say: big corporations don't buy AMD. Well... correct.

But why would they take the risk? Heaving a business is not about taking IT risks. IT risk is something you're supposed to minimize.

IMO this card won't be interesting to this group. No AMD card is.
AMD in fact makes very good GPUs: good image quality, great compute performance and lots of features.
The problem is not the GPU. It's the final product they sell (or rather: they don't know how to sell).

Radeon cards need a lot of work: tweaking, troubleshooting, optimizing. A lot of people undervolt or flash them.
And when you do all of this, the cards become fairly robust and even somehow competitive on efficiency.

Problem is: AMD would like to sell them to scientists, data analysts, photo/video editors, 3D artists, CAD designers and so on. And in general these people don't know how to do such things.
Sure, some percentage may have the computer skills needed to live with a Radeon... but would they?
We're talking about freelancers and small companies. They earn when they work. So it's a question of how much time are they willing to spend on making the PC work as it should.

IMO it's a card for "enthusiasts", i.e. people with big budget who can accept (even welcome) the additional work this card imposes.
"Prosumers" is the exact opposite. Their budget is limited. Their time is precious. And while they don't have the security policies of large enterprises, they need even more support and easier to use hardware, because they seldom have any IT support to fix stuff.

OEMs provide all of that. And we know that Radeons shine once put into a OEM workstation or a Mac. But as a standalone card? No way.

So we have your opinion now , at least three times in all, nothing useful to add , just in your opinion no one is allowed to use vega for pro uses, ok sooooo ,,,, , and only stupid enthusiasts would buy it, hmnn i wonder why people keep disagreeing with you two.

Any recourse on the fact your clueless about RPM yet fact master?.

You and your man are in serious bad moods eh so much rage considering your not buying it, why , go and have a beer and chill the f out instead of haunting Amd threads to bate Owner's?.

 

[XXL_AI]

So we have your opinion now , at least three times in all, nothing useful to add , just in your opinion no one is allowed to use vega for pro uses, ok sooooo ,,,, , and only stupid enthusiasts would buy it, hmnn i wonder why people keep disagreeing with you two.

Any recourse on the fact your clueless about RPM yet fact master?.

You and your man are in serious bad moods eh so much rage considering your not buying it, why , go and have a beer and chill the f out instead of haunting Amd threads to bate Owner's?.

I'm going to get one as soon as it arrives to my country. I've bought and used many amd hardware and developed my ROCm platform, I need a faster accelerator. You can't sell intel, nvidia, arm/qualcomm to everyone, you have to increase the variety with amd and other terrible companies.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I'm going to get one as soon as it arrives to my country. I've bought and used many amd hardware and developed my ROCm platform, I need a faster accelerator. You can't sell intel, nvidia, arm/qualcomm to everyone, you have to increase the variety with amd and other terrible companies.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective eh , I have had few troubles with Amd hardware over the last 20 odd years, I have never even had a Amd part randomly break, i always had to put extreme effort or stupidity to task to kill off Amd part's.

 

[XXL_AI]

I suppose it's a matter of perspective eh , I have had few troubles with Amd hardware over the last 20 odd years, I have never even had a Amd part randomly break, i always had to put extreme effort or stupidity to task to kill off Amd part's.

Our problem is power consumption, we don't have power budget to run those power hungry amd parts all year long, overheating parts tends to break easily, we've killed a few ram modules in the past on amd cards. Nvidia, with pascal, brought a power setting that was really helpful for decreasing the power consumption on the fly by half, turing and volta also have the same feature, but I can't say the same thing for Amd hardware, neither for gpu nor cpu.

 

[Sasqui]

I won't complain about more features, especially since they only need a software update, but as someone pointed out in another thread, this card has a serious identity crisis. Adding more pro-level features to a supposedly consumer product won't help clearing that out.

True, it could confuse those who aren't familiar with the "professional" graphics card moniker. This is a bold gamble by AMD, they've effectively wiped out a high priced market segment and replaced it with a lower priced one. In the end, it could equate to overall higher revenue for AMD, hard to say. NVidia must be PISSED!!!

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Our problem is power consumption, we don't have power budget to run those power hungry amd parts all year long, overheating parts tends to break easily, we've killed a few ram modules in the past on amd cards. Nvidia, with pascal, brought a power setting that was really helpful for decreasing the power consumption on the fly by half, turing and volta also have the same feature, but I can't say the same thing for Amd hardware, neither for gpu nor cpu.

I took the time to figure my parts out and ran the crap out of it still , just with enough maintenance and cooling to actually do the job.
Not meaning to sound bitchy you may have tried the same with a different outcome so I can only suggest researching forums ,watch temps and act accordingly.

 

[EarthDog]

I won't complain about more features, especially since they only need a software update, but as someone pointed out in another thread, this card has a serious identity crisis. Adding more pro-level features to a supposedly consumer product won't help clearing that out.

Indeed. I said the card had an identity crisis before this broke...I think that statement has been confirmed.

Regardless, it's a good thing for those prosumers to have these things at a lower price point. A good job by AMD here in that front!

 

[XXL_AI]

I took the time to figure my parts out and ran the crap out of it still , just with enough maintenance and cooling to actually do the job.
Not meaning to sound bitchy you may have tried the same with a different outcome so I can only suggest researching forums ,watch temps and act accordingly.

I don't think you have experience with deep learning dataset training. It takes a lot of time. Its not like 8hr gaming, it takes over a month to train a dataset sometimes.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I don't think you have experience with deep learning dataset training. It takes a lot of time. Its not like 8hr gaming, it takes over a month to train a dataset sometimes.

Yes indeed I've never done AI, I've ran PC's doing simulations for years instead with a year of mining too and I used all hardware as i should have, economically Even dare i say it if i had to learn to overclock to underclock ,watercool what ever.
I took care of my shit , if it took submersion id be doing it im not changing the plan just working to one.
But don't be mistaken my vega has been running sims since it was bought at about 1650mhz 1000 memory and 58°c hotspot, (some hardware is flat out here)) ,be prepared or prepare for failure.

 

[XXL_AI]

Yes indeed I've never done AI, I've ran PC's doing simulations for years instead with a year of mining too and I used all hardware as i should have, economically Even dare i say it if i had to learn to overclock to underclock ,watercool what ever.
I took care of my shit , if it took submersion id be doing it im not changing the plan just working to one.
But don't be mistaken my vega has been running sims since it was bought at about 1650mhz 1000 memory and 58°c hotspot, (some hardware is flat out here)) ,be prepared or prepare for failure.

we usually use thermal cameras to track the changes of temperatures on the gpus and our designed embedded systems, more reliable.. some of the coolers on gpus failing to cool the ram chips.

 

[Super XP]

Well its quite evident the Radeon VII isn't a gaming card per say, despite doing good enough in gaming.
Great move by AMD for unlocking such professional features.

Our problem is power consumption, we don't have power budget to run those power hungry amd parts all year long, overheating parts tends to break easily, we've killed a few ram modules in the past on amd cards. Nvidia, with pascal, brought a power setting that was really helpful for decreasing the power consumption on the fly by half, turing and volta also have the same feature, but I can't say the same thing for Amd hardware, neither for gpu nor cpu.

Interesting statement, especially when based on FACTS, testing and information, AMD's new ZEN CPUs don't have a heating nor high volt problem. As for AMD's GPUs, you won't find an issue with any and all Radeon RX series. Sure the Vega & VII suck back power but there's cooling solutions for this, to mitigate heat output and keep those puppies cooLR. Not to mention Threadripper blows Intel's equivalents away on Price/Performance and everything else including the kitchen sink. lol

 

[notb]

So we have your opinion now , at least three times in all, nothing useful to add , just in your opinion no one is allowed to use vega for pro uses, ok sooooo ,,,, , and only stupid enthusiasts would buy it, hmnn i wonder why people keep disagreeing with you two.

Any recourse on the fact your clueless about RPM yet fact master?.

You and your man are in serious bad moods eh so much rage considering your not buying it, why , go and have a beer and chill the f out instead of haunting Amd threads to bate Owner's?.

What you fail to understand is that it's not an opinion. It's an observation.
I don't know your background. Maybe you just don't have any exposure to science, large enterprises or the kind of freelance work I've mentioned here. And there's nothing bad in it. Many "corporats" would envy your situation.
But you have to accept that large companies have all kinds of security procedures and guidelines. And they buy Quadro instead of Vega just like they buy Oracle DB instead of just using a "free" PostgreSQL. Because performance and price are not everything. Because things cost as much as you pay throughout the use period, not just the money paid for the license. Because there are certifications, formal requirements, clients' expectations and all this stuff.
I know this is all boring and may seem like wasting money. But that's how enterprises need to work to be stable, secure and make money.

As for freelancers: they can use whatever they want - I don't care and I may not care even if I was a client. But as someone how used to earn that way, I can only tell you that being a freelancer really needs a lot of focus and hard work. And you quickly get to a point when you start spending more on robust equipment and things like 24h service, because you just don't have time to tinker. An hour spent on making websites or analyzing stocks is an hour you earn money. An hour spent on looking for driver fixes is an hour you regret the next day.

And this is how a proper opinion looks:
this Radeon VII is the worst graphic card I've seen in years

 

[Super XP]

But you have to accept that large companies have all kinds of security procedures and guidelines. And they buy Quadro instead of Vega just like they buy Oracle DB instead of just using a "free" PostgreSQL. Because performance and price are not everything.
And this is how a proper opinion looks:
this Radeon VII is the worst graphic card I've seen in years

So what you are saying is AMD FirePro cards are in none compliance with security procedures and guidelines via Corporations? lol, complete nonsense if that is what you mean.
With regards to Radeon VII, it may not be the best of the best, but its a viable solution till AMD gets its new GPU design out. Of course, as you said you are entitled to your opinion.

 

[Midland Dog]

Confirmed true you mean? I read that it has exactly the same abilities with the Vega FE and some others that are cut and only available to Radeon Pro GPUs.

i meant fp64 thats what i was thinking, confirmed to be borked as to not undercut server chips