AMD's Vega Graphics Are Coming To Gaming Laptops (tomshardware.com) 62
Paul Alcorn reporting for Tom's Hardware: AMD listed the Ryzen 7 2800H and the Ryzen 5 2600H on its website. These new processors bring the inherent goodness of the Raven Ridge architecture, found in the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G, to gaming notebooks. As such, these processors come with AMD's Zen compute cores paired with the Vega graphics architecture, and they are also AMD's first processors to support DDR4-3200 as a base specification. Both new models feature a similar design as their desktop counterparts, albeit with slightly redesigned in frequencies to adjust for the flimsy cooling in mobile form factors and battery life limitations. That's reflected in the processors' reduced 45W TDP (thermal design power), which is much lower than the 65W TDP found on the desktop parts. AMD does give vendors some wiggle room with a configurable TDP (cTDP) range that spans between 35W and 45W.
The Ryzen 7 2800H is analogous to the 2400G, but it comes with a 3.3 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost clocks. The four-core, eight-thread CPU is complemented by Vega graphics with 11 CU (Compute Unit) clocked up to a max of 1,300 MHz, which is a nice boost over its desktop counterpart. The Ryzen 5 2600H is similar to the 2200G, but it's four cores are hyper-threaded, which is a big bonus. The Vega graphics come with 8 CUs and boost up to 1,100 MHz.
The Ryzen 7 2800H is analogous to the 2400G, but it comes with a 3.3 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost clocks. The four-core, eight-thread CPU is complemented by Vega graphics with 11 CU (Compute Unit) clocked up to a max of 1,300 MHz, which is a nice boost over its desktop counterpart. The Ryzen 5 2600H is similar to the 2200G, but it's four cores are hyper-threaded, which is a big bonus. The Vega graphics come with 8 CUs and boost up to 1,100 MHz.
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To be honest, who asked for the uninformed-yet-somehow-opinionated moron's take? ATI has nothing to do with any of this. Laptop refreshes of new graphics hardware is nothing new, it's as good as it's ever been now.
And it doesn't sound like you're making a lot of purchases, so why are you filling up slashdot's infinite space for useless opine with YOUR personal vanilla-lite preferences anyway? No offense but go fall off a cruise ship.
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in reality, AMD's Linux support is better! (Score:2, Informative)
AMD has open-source drivers and kernel support for its newest line of GPUs, APUs and CPUs.
Nvidia still requires developers to reverse-engineer drivers for them to be free.
And Intel has simply stopped being an qualified as an option, with their products being hack sieve,if they hadn't already with their criminal monopolistic bullying tactics against competitors.
FGLRX vs Opensource (Score:5, Insightful)
ATI has never really be all that great, given it eh linux support.
The Linux support of Radeons (back in ATI time) relying on the proprietary FGLRX driver : yes, it wasn't stellar.
The thing is, that was a long time ago.
Since then, AMD has massively invested into opensource development (lots of devs on their payroll).
Modern day opensource stack works very nicely, including latest bells and whistles (supports openGL 4.5, supports vulkan - actually two different drivers available, RADV written by mesa devs, and AMDVLK recently open-sourced by AMD devs).
(This comes as the result of giant re-writing efforts from AMD, where they basically rewrote their drivers from scratch, with the intent to make cross-platform drivers that share as much as possible code between (which includes Windows, Linux, but also the tons of various other custom platforms), and have the Linux portions fully opensourced, eventually. But because this meant that massive parts of this new efforts did got written by devs with less Linux experience than the previous wave of opensource efforts at AMD, that also meant that often the kernel code did need lots of polishing before reaching quality necessary to be accepted upstream : hence the long-drawn story behind DAL/DC, behind AMDKFD/ROCm/OpenCL, AMDVLK/XGL/PAL, etc.
Took some time, but it's totally worth it, both from the end-user point of view (great quality opensource code with corporate support) and AMD's point of view (lots of shared bits across their platforms means easier to develop and less efforts. Newer GPU gets much faster support) )
Using a rolling distro (e.g.: like openSUSE's Tumbleweed) to frequently get driver & kernel updates, is a good idea.
The performance #'s I've seen have been OK (Score:1)
The trouble is I've seen laptops with the mobile version of the GTX 1060 in them for under $900 bucks and, well, they out perform Vega and draw less power while generating less heat. The problem isn't that Vega isn't good, it's that nVidia's offerings are still better.
Silvergun comparing discrete with on-Cpu gfx? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't seriously be comparing discrete graphics with on-APU graphics speed 1:1, can you? You aren't this simple are you?
Re:The performance #'s I've seen have been OK (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't that Vega isn't good, it's that nVidia's offerings are still better.
I'd rather have less performance and play older games than support nVidia's tomfoolery with review terms and other bollocks. If AMD has figured out how to write a video driver, and if they've finally started releasing enough information for there to be a good free driver in a timely fashion, then I for one would prefer an AMD solution. And now that I'm over fiddling and diddling my PC endlessly and just want it to work, I may even consider something with an APU.
(composed on a desktop system with a FX-8350 and dual GTX 950s)
Re:The performance #'s I've seen have been OK (Score:4, Interesting)
It isn't the best value or performance I could get, even per dollar, but I just wanted it because I thought it was cool to have an AMD GPU paired onto an Intel mobile chip.
Anyway, to the point- I've been pleasantly surprised. Haven't had any problems with the thing, and the performance is better than I've ever had in a laptop before.
Re: The performance #'s I've seen have been OK (Score:4, Informative)
It's not quite that simple. The core itself appears to have more in common with a Polaris than a Vega, but it has dedicated HBM on-die and the high-bandwidth cache controller, while the Vega 8 in the Ryzen 2200 doesn't. So what it really comes down to is, "what is Vega?" to which I answer- "Whatever AMD says is."
I rate your comment 0 stars.
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No, it's not that simple. Stupid people love to simplify that which they don't understand. Makes the world easier to swallow for them. Carry on, soldier
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I can't believe that was your argument.
No, you're right. 2 / 5 makes it no longer a football field.
But 3 / 5? Definitely football field.
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Educate yourself, kiddo. [radeon.com]
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Perhaps Vega APU doesn't have HBCC, but HBCC is a feature on dedicated GPUs to deal with two memory pools (including the system memory).
Kind of... More accurately, it's a controller that turns dedicated VRAM into a gigantic cache for system memory.
Real Vega APU like the Ryzen 2200 has only one physical memory pool.
That is true.
Tests show that you can set this reserved RAM at the lowest setting and still get adequate 3D performance (but maybe a few % slower than if set at 2GB) so this is managed adequately anyway.
Of course there's little change- "VRAM" and "System" RAM are the same. The partitioning is virtual.
GPU and CPU can shared a single memory space.
They can, but they must communicate over a bus. In this instance, it's the PCIe bus, and while it's one peppy bus, it's not a silly-wide local data bus.
That's a significant feature.
It's a significant cost-saving exercise... Which should be lauded as such, but let's not try to pretend it has some kind of performance
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I think you should read this. [pcworld.com]
It was well known that the Vega in the Kaby Lake-G parts was some kind of Polaris Hybrid. Nobody fooled anyone. And the Vegas in the AMD APUs are some kind of neutered Vega with Polaris memory buses. I knew this when I bought the laptop. As did anyone who did their homework.
Was there some kind of point you were trying to make, anyway? Because I really don't think you did anything other than ma
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Maybe if you're a good boy, mommy will purchase you a new Vega 11 that's slower than the Vega M.
Probably not though. You don't sound like you come from money, or class, or even a household with a generous disposition
Re: The performance #'s I've seen have been OK (Score:2)
The GPUs are now good enough
Thank God; it's been over twenty years since I [quite foolishly] advised a friend to buy nV's first 3D card (Diamond Edge 4MB PCI w/nV1 and audio-out - a $600 fiasco).
So relieved that this farce is over... that is what you were meaning to say, right??
Try anything old & weird? (Score:2)
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So far, I have managed to successfully get everything old I've tried to run, after a bit of work.
Most common fix was setting desktop resolution to 1080P before running game.
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That's like saying "I'd rather eat Carob and follow LDS teachings than eat Chocolate."
I don't give a shit about tomfoolery. I want the best I can get.
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I'd rather have less performance and play older games than support nVidia's tomfoolery with review terms and other bollocks. If AMD has figured out how to write a video driver, and if they've finally started releasing enough information for there to be a good free driver in a timely fashion, then I for one would prefer an AMD solution.
That is very definitely the case currently, in fact AMD now does most of the work on the open source AMDGPU driver, the old proprietary drive is deprecated, and other than a few ancient oddball chipsets it supports and AMDGPU does not, there is no discernible reason to use it. In terms of performance, Radeon + AMDGPU is great, especially with Vulkan, where it outperforms nVidia. Does well in OpenGL too, but everything is moving to Vulkan so except for some legacy games that aren't really that demanding comp
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especially with Vulkan, where it outperforms nVidia
In performance per dollar, very solidly. In raw performance, the 1080Ti is still king by a very large margin, even in Vulkan applications.
AMD drivers on Linux (Score:2)
and if they've finally started releasing enough information for there to be a good free driver in a timely fashion,
Oh, boy ! Have things changed since last time you've had a look.
AMD goes much beyond that. They don't only release information. They release code, and they have opensource developer on their own payroll.
End result: Mesa has opengl 4.5 support, Mesa has RADV vulkan driver, AMD has opensourced AMDVLK, and the latest bits to get ROCm/OpenCL 2.x are on their way to get accepted into upstream kernel.
(Plus the current opensource drivers offering stems from an effort at AMD to rewrite their own stack from scratch
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My desktop has an nVidia + Intel IGP, and in the nVidia driver control app, I can just set it to just use the nVidia all the time.
To anyone using amdgpu on a debian derivative- I recommend oibaf's daily Mesa builds. It contains the most recent drivers, and it really makes a difference.
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It's a bios setting.
How about AMD get some graphics to desktops? (Score:1)
They seem very content with having not just slightly but significantly slower video cards on the desktop. I know nvidia has a bit more firepower but man is AMD behind and they seem stuck there (and I don't even play PC games anymore! I just enjoy reading about the tech)
While they're damn well at it, AMD those Snowy Owl (Epyc 3000) chips? Shovel them out somewhere, drop the price, DO something. Announced 21'st of Feb and our first review was from leaked non standard hardware via ServeTheHome just last week.
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I'm talking about their GPU's you irrelevant piece of garbage, not the CPUs.
Also, they use a shitload more power. They are simply not competitive in this arena, either drop GPU prices 25%, or release something faster.
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They seem very content with having not just slightly but significantly slower video cards on the desktop.
Only true for obsolete single-threaded game engines. With Vulkan or DX12, Radeons generally dominate. Personally I don't care a whole lot about old broken stuff, I like shiny new.
price points aren't relative (Score:2)