Update: AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Now Available

[Aldain]

https://enrollment.rochester.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/And-Its-Gone..jpg

The state of VEGA 56

 

[Frick]

As was said, the 56's performance and MSRP put it competing quite well against NVIDIA.

And if it responds to undervolting as well as the Vega 64 it'll be even better.

 

[ZoneDymo]

So many people out there willing to throw money at something so mediocre.

..bizarre.

no less or more mediocre then a GTX1070, and if you start calling that mediocre.... then idk what planet you are from.
Unless you are just insanely rich and nothing less then a GTX Titan will satisfy you.

 

[EarthDog]

Oh geez, let's not get into a p1ssing match....

its a solid card at the $399 price. Yes, it uses a lot more power out of the box. Surely, this can be tweaked as we saw in 64, but, the failure there is having to manually do it instead of it coming out of the box this way. Why should any user have to touch the card to get it to run more efficiently at the same speeds???? That minor point aside... solid card at that price for sure.

 

[Vya Domus]

Note the £379 on Overclockers UK is being listed as a "Launch Only" price, so I think we can all agree on where this is headed.

Yeah I definitely know where this is headed. They are trying to absolve themselves from any potential criticism in regards to future price gouging. Considering they are at the heart of the rumors of "AMD's fake prices" I find this unsurprising. They'll just stick to their story and hope it will slip under the radar.

 

[krusha03]

@Raevenlord I actually for one am grateful for taking the time to post where these things were in stock. I was stupid enough not to pay attention of the lunch time and now they are all gone even thou I wanted one

 

[notb]

When?* Never. Should only past history inform our actions in the present? Looking at vega 64's launch, why not do it? I think it's much better to have it than not to have it. You have a right to disagree, naturally.

Well... the "why not do it" argument is pretty risky. After all we are talking about updating pricing information on a GPU launch. If you were doing this after a few drinks, you'd have a laugh tomorrow.

Why not doing a proper headphone review, since TPU decided to have so many of them? Why not do something with the server that keeps crashing down? Why not push the mobo reviews a bit, because cadaveca is AFAIK doing this alone and he mentioned a long queue of mobos waiting. It takes you so long that a new socket is likely to come first. :-D

Of all the "why nots" we could think of you went for a live coverage of Vega launch...

Your own opinion, which our own objective review found, at its announced price-point, to be a pretty good match for the competition in price/performance terms.

Exactly. At the announced price-point it was a good match. Now it is just a fairly average card - landing somewhere between 1070 and 1080.
But it still has that bonkers power consumption and (unacceptable for many) rubbish cooler. By the time AIB partners manage to make this household-friendly, it'll cost as much as a 1080.

And BTW: now every time when mentioning these reviews, you'll add "at announced price-point"? Or will the reviews be corrected?

I don't know why I'm even having an argument about this. It's extra content, increased coverage, that you have for free. People really do complain about everything.

I'm complaining because this used to be a better site, with better reviews and news. That's why we're having this discussion - because I care and I miss what TPU usually provided for the last years. It's really getting worse now.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

*snip*

But it still has that bonkers power consumption and (unacceptable for many) rubbish cooler. By the time AIB partners manage to make this household-friendly, it'll cost as much as a 1080.

...

have you seen the prices on newegg lately?

Here, just incase you want to take your blinders off

$849 for an Rx Vega 64 much higher than a 1080 Ti from Best Buy

 

[Vya Domus]

have you seen the prices on newegg lately?

Here, just incase you want to take your blinders off

$849 for an Rx Vega 64 much higher than a 1080 Ti from Best Buy

Interestingly enough Vega 64 recently showed up in my country and it's below local 1080ti prices. Which is very surprising since most things back here are greatly overpriced upon launch.

 

[Eric3988]

@Raevenlord : Just ignore the trolls and team green fanboys. Most of us appreciate the coverage. Thank you!

After working a ten hour shift last night, my wife convinced me to stay up for the launch of the 56 rather than risk sleeping an alarm to wake up in time for the release. She helped me stay awake and sure enough I got in an order for a Sapphire 56 at Amazon. I can tell you guys refreshing like a madman and checking nowinstock.net, Newegg never released a 56 without a bundle. As much as I like where the 56 is sitting, no way would I have thrown $500 at it, bundled or not. The 1080s from any of the AIBs are the better buy at that bracket. Anyways, wish me luck in getting this thing shipped out in a timely manner.

 

[EntropyZ]

It's not confirmed but it seems that VEGA 56 reference has the same PCB and VRM as the 64 and Frontier Edition. I am more worried about AIB cards having lackluster VRM compared to the reference.

Someone might be able to buy a waterblock and OC/Underclock the crap out this baby. I wish there was a hybrid card out now at 450-499 euros, but those prices are a dream for the foreseeable future.

VEGA is pretty much Polaris tweaked a little and beefed up (to the point where it feels like a 295X all over again). They react to OC/Underclocking almost on par with Polaris cards. Better efficiency when underclocked, much, much worse when pushed to it's limits. The turbo mode makes no sense!

I think only the minority of gamers will own VEGA cards. Most have already upgraded to GTX 1070/1080s anyway or at least previous gen cards and Nvidia isn't in a hurry to release Volta (little to no competition and price of manufacture considered).

Right now VEGA 64 is overpriced in my country and the 1080 and Ti are the better buy any time of the day, they're going below MSRP prices. I don't think the 56 will fare any better.

I personally am tempted to get a 1080, the big problem is lack of Freesync support because I have a panel that supports it and future DX12 support is pretty much non-existent, Nvidia bruteforced the driver to have some support through software with no Async compute. But hardware wise, it's a very very good DX11 card that pushes pixels at a decent price.

I waited for more than a year for a decently priced Radeon card to come out. But the prices are cucked.

Shot myself in the foot when I bought the R9 380, it was not up to my expectations (It couldn't run select DX9 and DX11 titles as fast as competition) and it costed full price at my retailers. Several months later Polaris comes out at the same prices. And I sold off the card at 30% less than what I bought it for just few months after getting it, because the majority of people don't care about Radeon cards and think used ones aren't a good deal, when they usually are. Thanks to marketing and mostly word of mouth, people keep spreading the "hot and loud" meme everywhere. Radeon Technologies Group has to do something about that. Or one day we might not get a new Radeon card, while NV charges whatever they want for their GPUs.

I still don't get why they tried to market VEGA 56 and 64 to gamers, when they are actually more suited to compute tasks, hmm that awfully sounds like the Frontier Edition, no? FE was quickly forgotten.

I wonder how long it takes for a Radeon to comfortably reach 2GHz clock speed. Cause right now that's impossible on conventional cooling. Games like high clock speeds, and not compute cores. It's quite clear VEGA is better for miners/compute, but at stock it's just not efficient even for that. So, um, what?

VEGA is still in limited quantity, so it's not like RTG is going to spend too much on it. I hope. At least they released something, but it's underwhelming when you see the pricing.

Going with HBM again was a mistake from gaming standpoint. It costs way too much and becomes a liability. RTG did say they did it for lower power consumption, which is fair enough. But for gaming it seems to mean nil.

2017 is such a mess for graphics cards. A year old architecture is stomping something relatively new at better price, efficiency and performance for gaming. While this isn't new, why is RTG repeating same old mistakes? Or is it software that is holding back the real power of these cards? Maybe one day we'll all find out.

Still I will be patiently waiting VEGA AIB cards to see how well they do, and how much undervolting helps them.

 

[biffzinker]

Actually, if I remember the reviews correctly, wasn't the 56 actually the pretty good card? It was the 64 that was overhyped and underwhelming.

I thought the 56 was the card to get over the 64 when considering price/performance. A bit of under voltage applied helps knock power consumption down as well.

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.p...vega-56-und-vega-64-im-undervolting-test.html

Edit: Overclocking was included with the undervoltage applied to 64/56.

 

[EntropyZ]

I thought the 56 was the card to get over the 64 when considering price/performance. A bit of under voltage applied helps knock power consumption down as well.

They had the balls to show Fallout 4, which notoriously stutters/framedrops on AMD cards (Like any other BGS game). Of course now with the release of more powerful ones, and better drivers, this isn't much of an issue now I think. I haven't had the pleasure of testing it myself after it ran horrible at 900p on High with an R9 380 overclocked 2 years ago, it just couldn't keep 60-70 FPS stable.

I think AMD was asleep ever since GCN was released then they woke up and said: Hey! Why our cards framedrop all over the place with DX11 titles? They made the drivers much better since then though. Then again blame the software developers for having only NV cards (I don't have proof, but it's pretty clear, unless it was a gaming evolved title, it wasn't optimized for Radeons 9/10 times).

 

[InVasMani]

Vega 56 is the only Vega card worth getting, what are you talking about, Vega 64 is the meh card.

For gaming sure, but for 3D rendering with Blender not at all either of them are incredible for Blender they both utterly destroy a 1080Ti at said task.

 

[Basard]

The moral of the story: Any publicity is good publicity.

For gaming sure, but for 3D rendering with Blender not at all either of them are incredible for Blender they both utterly destroy a 1080Ti at said task.

That was pretty impressive..... totally worth it if you use blender a lot and make money off of it.

 

[Vayra86]

Well... the "why not do it" argument is pretty risky. After all we are talking about updating pricing information on a GPU launch. If you were doing this after a few drinks, you'd have a laugh tomorrow.

Why not doing a proper headphone review, since TPU decided to have so many of them? Why not do something with the server that keeps crashing down? Why not push the mobo reviews a bit, because cadaveca is AFAIK doing this alone and he mentioned a long queue of mobos waiting. It takes you so long that a new socket is likely to come first. :-D

Of all the "why nots" we could think of you went for a live coverage of Vega launch...


Exactly. At the announced price-point it was a good match. Now it is just a fairly average card - landing somewhere between 1070 and 1080.
But it still has that bonkers power consumption and (unacceptable for many) rubbish cooler. By the time AIB partners manage to make this household-friendly, it'll cost as much as a 1080.

And BTW: now every time when mentioning these reviews, you'll add "at announced price-point"? Or will the reviews be corrected?


I'm complaining because this used to be a better site, with better reviews and news. That's why we're having this discussion - because I care and I miss what TPU usually provided for the last years. It's really getting worse now.

 

[Relayer]

Yeah I definitely know where this is headed. They are trying to absolve themselves from any potential criticism in regards to future price gouging. Considering they are at the heart of the rumors of "AMD's fake prices" I find this unsurprising. They'll just stick to their story and hope it will slip under the radar.

Well, seeing as all the "news sites" reported it as fact without any validation, I'd say it worked.

 

[Amite]

Have had a Vega 64 for about a week - Have run a lot of both flavors ATI and Nvidia except for the 1080s.
I must say Vega has amazing picture quality. I mean Amazing. It takes on some 3 D aspects like I have never seen.
Its like holy moley look at that.

 

[evernessince]

Currently have gtx780sli but it aged like milk so considering the vega56. People will buy as it will be 2-3 years before Navi is released, but before this happens maybe some vega refresh is possible?

Da fuq? Navi is scheduled for a 2018 release. Even with significant delays it won't be anywhere near 2-3 years.

 

[EarthDog]

Have had a Vega 64 for about a week - Have run a lot of both flavors ATI and Nvidia except for the 1080s.
I must say Vega has amazing picture quality. I mean Amazing. It takes on some 3 D aspects like I have never seen.
Its like holy moley look at that.

 

[Th3pwn3r]

Have had a Vega 64 for about a week - Have run a lot of both flavors ATI and Nvidia except for the 1080s.
I must say Vega has amazing picture quality. I mean Amazing. It takes on some 3 D aspects like I have never seen.
Its like holy moley look at that.

Hmm, what about Vega64 makes it look that much better? I have never been as confused as I am now

 

[sweet]

Hmm, what about Vega64 makes it look that much better? I have never been as confused as I am now

The IQ of still images is way better on AMD, if you works with PS/LR you will know what I mean. With nVidia you can match the IQ of AMD in games using color profiles, but there is no similar option for still images.

 

[AsRock]

So many people out there willing to throw money at something so mediocre.

..bizarre.

Well we don't know that for sure, it's said that the new xbox has sold more units than the Playstation in just a week but for all we know each retailer might only have 5 units making it look like a lot are selling.

 

[dyonoctis]

The IQ of still images is way better on AMD, if you works with PS/LR you will know what I mean. With nVidia you can match the IQ of AMD in games using color profiles, but there is no similar option for still images.

Ho ? I though that was a thing of the past. I remember reading an article about that a loong time ago, but i think that it was more focused on games. (To be fair I've been using amd gpu with a decent screen since 2011, whenever I've encoutered bad IQ, I just though that the culprit was the cheap TN panel. ) If the difference is really that great, now I'm getting even more regrets about not being able to buy an RX 580/570, still image are kinda a big deal for me.

 

[springs113]

Ho ? I though that was a thing of the past. I remember reading an article about that a loong time ago, but i think that it was more focused on games. (To be fair I've been using amd gpu with a decent screen since 2011, whenever I've encoutered bad IQ, I just though that the culprit was the cheap TN panel. ) If the difference is really that great, now I'm getting even more regrets about not being able to buy an RX 580/570, still image are kinda a big deal for me.

i think it's still in existence, the image quality was not just games either it was video/movie watching as well. Granted the differences aren't as great in favor of AMD like it was several years ago, it's still better imop.