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AMD Businesses Hardware

AMD Launches Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56, Taking On GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 (hothardware.com) 84

MojoKid writes: AMD has finally launched its Radeon RX Vega series of graphics cards today, based on the company's next generation Vega 10 GPU architecture. There are three base card specs announced, though there are four cards total, with a Limited Edition air-cooled card as well. Three of the cards have 64 NGCs (Next Generation Compute Units) with 4096 stream processors, while Radeon RX Vega 56 is comprised of 56 NCGs with 3584 SPs. Base clocks range from roughly 1150 to 1400MHz, with boost clocks from 1470MHz to 1670MHz or so. All cards come with 8GB of HBM2 and sport 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth, except for Vega 56, which has a bit less, at 410GB/s. They are power-hungry as well, ranging from the 345 Watt liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, to the 295 Watt air-cooled RX Vega 64 and 210 Watt Radeon RX Vega 56. Performance-wise, Radeon RX Vega 64 is neck-and-neck with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, winning some and losing some, with flashes of strength in DirectX 12-based games and benchmarks. Vega 64 also maintains generally better minimum frame rates versus GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 56 is a more credible midrange threat that handily out-performs a GeForce GTX 1070 across the board. In DX12 gaming, Radeon RX Vega 56 stretches its lead over the similarly-priced GTX 1070. Both cards, however, are more power-hungry, louder and run hotter than NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 1080. Radeon RX Vega 64 cards will retail for $499 (Liquid Cooled cards at $699), while Radeon RX Vega 56 drops in at $399. All cards should be available at retail starting today.
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AMD Launches Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56, Taking On GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070

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  • only 15months late (Score:3, Interesting)

    by arbiter1 ( 1204146 ) on Monday August 14, 2017 @01:11PM (#55009989)
    Only took AMD 15 months to finally get out a gpu to compete. Which means nivida has had 15months to develop a new gpu to stomp on them.
    • What's new? AMD has been playing catch up in the APU world for a long time. Who knows though, it might be that Nivida isn't quite ready to squash them with a new GPU offering just yet...
      • by PIBM ( 588930 )

        they don`t need to be -- I went with the 1080TI 4 months ago and it's much faster than even their new V64 watercooled edition..

        • Same power for half the price, and I just had to wait 4months more than you... ;)

          • by PIBM ( 588930 )

            Humm, the price I paid for my ti is inline with the announced price for the V64 wc edition. I had managed a pre-order at 100$ less for the strix OC editition so I really can`t complain for the price paid. Beside, if I decided to sell the BTC it generated on nicehash since my purchase, it would be more than paid back.

            • I can agree with your point of view (as a BTC miner). But as a gamer it's not worth it.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        What's new? AMD has been playing catch up in the APU world for a long time. Who knows though, it might be that Nivida isn't quite ready to squash them with a new GPU offering just yet...

        No. AMD has been arguably leading in APUs.

        But these aren't APUs. These are GPUs. And AMD has up Polaris & Pascal (this gen) kept up. Their R9 290 card for instance used more power but it kept up in performance and offered a pretty compelling package for the price. With Polaris what AMD managed to do was to drop the power consumption and keep the performance but Nvidia already had the lower power consumption and upped the performance.

        The situation now though is that Nvidia Volta is likely near whereas AM

    • by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Monday August 14, 2017 @04:32PM (#55012057) Journal

      Yeah, the basic consensus seems to be...

      The 56 isn't a bad card. In theory a bit pricier than the 1070, but we'll see what the miners do to the respective prices when it actually hits the shelves. Performance is mid-way between the 1070 and 1080. Power consumption is high, but if you're not worried about that, then this is a gaming card that for certain given budgets will be the rational purchase.

      The 64 aircooled is in theory pricier than the 1080. It offers a very similar level of performance to the 1080, but with much higher power consumption. There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.

      The 64 watercooled looks like an absolute disaster. Prices are comparable to the 1080 Ti, but with a level of performance only very slightly better than the base 1080. In addition, various sites have reported issues with the sample cards they were sent. PCGamer's had nasty coil-whine. Eurogamer reported that their card was overloading a 1000W PSU and that they had to switch to a 1200W to keep it stable. God only knows why anybody would want to pay almost as much as you pay for a 1080 Ti for a card with significantly lower performance and possible "issues".

      Nvidia's Volta cards probably aren't coming out tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the first wave of consumer cards in 6 months time.

      • There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.

        FreeSync support is a reason (for some).

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Only took AMD 15 months to finally get out a gpu to compete. Which means nivida has had 15months to develop a new gpu to stomp on them.

      AMD might not be competing with NV in the gaming market, but they are still selling pretty much every damn board they can make as fast as they make them due to coin miner insanity so that should buy them some time revenue wise.

    • still can't compete with such massive power output

  • AMD is doing pretty good if they are only a few months behind NVIDIA in releasing an equivalent. Although the NVIDIA Volta GPUs are supposed to be out early 2018, so if you already spent your lunch money on a 1080 you can skip the AMD stuff and pick up something faster in several months.

  • *quote article *NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 has been out for over a year now and it may not be long before team green tosses another volley.*endquote*

    Well, 1080 Titanium, duh. It's essentially the Titan X Pascal - with ONE less gigabyte, and 8 less ROP's from the 96 the titanium sports, and roughly 500$ cheaper.

    And if the new RX Vega 64 just is "on par" with the 1080 that roughly cost the same as the Vega 64, then - they've already lost that race. But hey, great - finally some competition.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Well, 1080 Titanium, duh. It's essentially the Titan X Pascal - with ONE less gigabyte, and 8 less ROP's from the 96 the titanium sports, and roughly 500$ cheaper.

      Well, the Titan has always been a massively overpriced card for those who must have the best under the weak guise of being a "prosumer" card yet good for gaming. But yes, most expected the 1080 Ti to create a new tier between the Titan and the 1080, instead it took the 1080s place and pushed it down in price without any apparent competition from AMD, had only very minor cuts and was boosted by an increased memory frequency compared to the Titan delivering 32% better performance than the 1080 for the same pr

  • by yoink! ( 196362 ) on Monday August 14, 2017 @01:27PM (#55010139) Homepage Journal

    Is it reasonable to discuss computing performance without the inclusion of efficiency?

    RX Vega 64: 345 Watts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:AMD_Radeon_RX_Vega)
    1080 (Titan XP): 250 Watts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_10_series)

      I have no skin in the game other than competition is necessary in this market and I'd love to see ATI, oops, AMD, perform better than it has recently.

    • If you're a gamer are you going to care about a few bucks on your electric bill or a difference of 30% in frames per second?

      With the way solar is trending... electricity costs are going to be a null factor in the future. The best use for ultra-efficiency is mobile gaming. Inefficient, powerful and cheap is perfect for desktop gaming... which is the point of these big GPUs.

      AMD is obviously behind in tech, this round of CPUs and GPUs are the best they can do and to be honest it might be the best move they've

      • by PIBM ( 588930 )

        When your gaming card is not used for playing, they are mining (at least I hope so). I have an upper bound of wattage per room I can tolerate (while working / gaming) using free cooling, so that's indeed important (also, don`t underestimate the noise). I could blast the AC, but at some point it`s not worth it anymore. Their new offering doesn't appear to appeal on any front.

      • If you're a gamer are you going to care about a few bucks on your electric bill or a difference of 30% in frames per second?

        I'm a gamer, and I don't care about a few extra bucks on my electric bill. I do however care greatly about the heat that extra power will generate. I also care about the extra noise those fans will generate trying to dissipate that heat.

      • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
        my house has a pretty massive solar array on it, enough to supply my two electric cars and a fairly large place. What I don't want to do is have to rip up ceilings and walls just to route additional cooling to whatever room I put a PC in; the office in our house merely has 3 laptops in it right now, and is already noticeably warmer than anywhere else in the house. Watts aren't just about power, they're also about heat. If this weren't San Diego, then I guess you could make some comment about heating bill
        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          I was about to call BS, my pea-sized brain immediately thought "there is now way that small wattage would make much of a difference." But this [calculator.net] seems to indicate that 350 watts is enough to raise a well insulated 10'x10'x10' room 10 degrees. You definitely have a valid point.
      • by DG ( 989 )

        My house is electrically heated. This way I get more work out of my heater.

        I'm probably going to buy a Vega once Sapphire releases their aftermarket cooled, OC version.

    • by dAzED1 ( 33635 )
      I've not updated my fun/"main" pc for a long time, have needed to for a bit now but was waiting for ryzen/vega as a combo. Not a fan of nvidia for various lack-of-open-source-drivers-forever reasons, but yeah...it's a very fair point that the power consumption of these things is horrible. Was just a couple years ago everyone was bragging about power efficiency, and suddenly...out the door. I don't want nvidia, but I also don't want my GPU to be using more electricity than every light in my house combined
    • 1080 uses GP104 instead of a GPU accelerator chip, so it has 180 Watt TDP, not 250. 1080 Ti, Titan X and Xp—a bit more powerful cards based on GP102 chip family— consume 250 Watts.
  • Both cards, however, are more power-hungry, louder and run hotter than NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 1080.

    I have a GTX 1080 and it runs pretty damn hot already. Whenever I fire up the Oculus Rift, the graphic card's auto fan kicks in and I can feel the many thousands of btu's of heat emanating into my (non-air conditioned) basement.

    It doesn't help that my computer has vents on top of the case, so I can just move my hand slightly over to the right from my sitting position and feel the heat.

  • Both cards, however, are more power-hungry, louder and run hotter than NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 1080.

    Not interested.

  • by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday August 14, 2017 @01:44PM (#55010295) Journal

    You can buy one on ebay for $1200

  • The last AMD video card that I had was the 7970 that I got to play with id Software's Rage. Except there was a bug in the game, the driver or both when running on AMD CPUs that caused the game to render at 1FPS. This bug was never fixed. It didn't help that the fan died and the 7970 baked itself to death. I got a Nvidia 700-series card that played the game with some minor visual artifacts. I'm very reluctant to trust AMD on a video card these days.
    • Except there was a bug in the game, the driver or both [...] It didn't help that the fan died and the 7970 baked itself to death.

      This was my experience with Radeon cards. I hated Nvidia because they killed 3DFX which I loved and bought everything except Nvidia for a long time. So I had Matrox, Radeon, etc. My last Radeon had just endless weird framerate issues. Then the fan died and it baked itself to death as well. I relented and finally bought an Nvidia card. Everything immediately ran perfectly smooth. No weird random glitches. I've begrudgingly become an Nvidia devotee since then (and had no issues).

      Now if only I didn't h

    • Heh, I just sold a 7970 today, with one remaining. Certainly the strongest AMD cards I've had. One machine has an integrated APU which is newer than those, but mostly unused due to a GTX 750. For most of my purposes, those little beasts are almost as fast, but only use about 1/4 the power; the machine in question is a Mini-ITX box with a fanless power brick.
  • Are these cards shipping with proper open source drivers, or is it just the same, old story of shitty, proprietary, binary blobs? Gamers are the worst when it comes to defending software Freedom, sadly. I don't have high hopes for either company. I'll still be going with Intel for all my graphics needs until one of them finally steps up.

  • The 64 can only trade blows with the 1080 till you throw MSAA at it.

    https://www.hardocp.com/articl... [hardocp.com]
    The 64 is using 475w compared to 325w for the 1080, not to mention you can get an AIB 1080 for cheaper than the 64.

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