AMD Teases Vega Architecture: More Than 200+ New Features, Ready First Half Of 2017

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Errrrrrrm no, I never said I expected the cards to be released on the 5th. AMD was supposed to have Vega done Q3 of 2016 though. According to their early road maps. The delays for this product are real. AMD continues to bump their release dates and give a very soft feel in terms of "availability" which means a couple of very important things.

1. AMD is not confident in what they have, how it is being made, and what state it will actually be in.

2. AMD is falling behind and has missed many of their windows to jump in with a product that potentially beats all offerings from their primary competition (insanely important if you want AMD to grow and challenge NVIDIA)

I completely understand that there are production and development issues that can not be predicted. However, AMD is hyper marketing Vega before it appears to be ready. Their countdown site that played out hints that more than some basic high level power point slides were being released were made. That is a mistake as it wreaks of "cried wolf" that AMD has been guilty of for well over a decade now. This all feels too much like Bulldozer, or even Fiji, which is a scary ordeal for them. AMD nearly died under those product lines and is in desperate ways for something significant.

They have done so much right with Zen and now Vega, but to pull their marketing stunts where they don't belong puts everyone on edge. Even their investors were shaken up by the lack of "Big News" that was their marketing and hype machine. This is now big news, this is teaser info that could have been released on any given Tuesday, and actually would have been better off for it if it was a random Tuesday release of info.

People, including myself, expect more tangible information and more concrete results from a big event that is built up like its going to be a product release. The "Make some noise" Ve.Ga hype site was a mistake, and highly misleading. If Vega isn't ready for prime time, its not ready.

With AMD falling behind and losing important ground in terms of the timing of the release, it is a big deal and should be treated as such. This is the tech industry, and timing of a product release is absolutely everything. Vega was needed in May of 2016, hinted for November/December (in more than a few ways) almost all but confirmed for Q1 of 2017, and now a maybe for 2h of 2017. Do you see the trends? Vega, which is a competitor to Nvidia's Pascal high end cards is at risk of not making it. These sorts of year long delays would only work in a competitive market if the competition sat on their hands and waited for AMD.

If Vega hits the market too late, it won't matter how good it is today, or how many neat things they did, if Nvidia destroy their cards performance with a full generation leap ahead. For the first time, in a long time, Radeon group is at risk of going the way of the FX CPUs. Too little, too late in a world of competition. The example of the FX chip is perfect. It wasn't that the FX chips weren't advanced, and even ground breaking at the time. It was that AMD took too long to get them out, and when they did finally come out, the competitions offerings were just faster. That stumble nearly killed AMD.

Sorry for the long response. However, everyone should be critical of AMD in what they are doing, or failing to do. Its important to do if you care about the industry at all, and if you care about the existence of AMD as a player in the space. This year is do or die for AMD. If AMD messes this up, takes too long, runs into serious delays beyond what they have already hit, have performance or stability issues with just about any of their big products this year. AMD may very well go the way of the dinosaurs. It is a very serious situation, and these surprise delays and late launches do not do them any favors.
 


1) Nvidia have preferent silicon, AMD has to wait for their supply, if it is not available AMD can't release.

2) I think AMD is looking to release Vega and Ryzen together, I think both are about complete and have been live sampled while CPC have already benched an ES Ryzen successfully on an incomplete setup

3) I don't think there is any hype, but like everything as soon as AMD releases a RX490 Nvidia will release the 1080ti so it is just delaying Nvidia. As soon as AMD release RX500 series, Nvidia will push Volta.
 
Originally Vega was mean to be released first half of 2017. Later there were rumours that it would happen Sooner, but those were rumours. Not from AMD, so in my eyes They Are more or less in their intended timetable.
Polaris is the AMD gpu core in the meantime. And yes, it is not highend, but if you want to put 600-1200$ to gpu at this moment you can always chose the Nvidia. If not, wait the competition. There Are really strange posts in this conversation...
 


AMD might not be ready in time for me to buy but at least the GTX1080 has dropped from $1400 to $850 in Australia since it's release.
It's in my price range now :)
 


AFAIK the release in october was never confirmed. not even in their roadmap. before the october rumor comes out vega has always been expected for 2017 time frame. we just don't know on which quarter it will going to come out. and then some people play around with the rough roadmap from AMD and take it too seriously. they look at the scale and said vega could end up coming out early 2017 or even late 2016. the 2017 release are even further backed by the leaked AMD investor slide. in that slide they specifically mention Vega as 1H 2017 product. and what AMD said a few days ago is exactly this.

so where does this october rumor first coming out? it could be from people speculating (then treated as fact) or it could be from AMD themselves to stall people from buying nvidia card. remember what happen with 980/970 launch. back then AMD hinting as if they have something in the works to counter nvidia 980/970 and there is misleading ad from india firepro launch. anyone still remember captain jack?
 


I don't really understand what the whole fuss is about AMD's market stratagy. Polaris was per just about every stock rating site an unmitigated success in sales and cashflow even though AMD never intended to build a top end GPU for that series. They produced two unsurpassed value for money Ultra setting GPUs for 1080+ gaming at the mainstream market level price. The result is AMD sold out all excess silicon used and sat with no stock on hand. That helps because now they can release baby Vega to compete with the top end cards of the Gforce 10 series ie: 1080 (think the 490 will handsomely beat the 1070 on price and performance so really it is launched against the 1080) and the estiated price of the little vega will be around $400 for 1080 + peformance. Yes Nvidia will react by bringing the Ti and drop prices on the 1080, 1070 and 1060 but it will not detract people from buying into AMD's product line. A RX480 will still fly off shelves until the 500 series arrives and the RX470 is the mothership of price to performance, the 1050ti is embarrassed at every turn against the 470 and they are priced the same, AMD may even drop the 470 to 140USD and the 480 to 180 making it almost impossible for Nvidia to follow them

I needed a replacement to my old GTX 670 DirectCUII card that was long in the tooth, the 1050ti and 960 are barely able to be competitive with that card, so at the same price I picked up a RX470 Nitro 4GB card and lets just say it is ~20-50% faster across a sleuth of games. AMD won me over because the made a Graphics card at an affordable price and they said just because you can't afford a high end card, doesn't mean you should not be given high end performance. Very happy with the RX470, fast enough for every game on ultra on my ultra wide, Nvidia has nothing to compete on the money paid. My only other options were the rX 480 @4000 and the 1060 @5500 and lets be quite honest a 1060 and 480 are basically the same so there is no way in hell I would spend 5500 on a 1060 come hell or high water.

 

I think some people feel that Polaris was overhyped, but it wasn't really AMDs fault. Particularly fervent AMD fans and rumor mills like WCCFTech fueled that fire all on their own. I remember numerous people on this site speculating that the 480 would be in the same tier as the 1070, despite costing half as much. There was lots of other speculation and rumors like that. Again, not AMD's fault, but some people might have started buying into the hype and then felt that Polaris was a let down.

That being said, I do think AMD oversold Polaris' efficiency a bit. Here's one example, compare this ("Competition" is a GTX 950): http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/AMD-Polaris-16.jpg
to these results: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-460,4707-5.html

Edit:

Looking on PCPartPicker right now, the 1050 ti starts at $139 while the 470 starts at $176. The most expensive 1050 ti still costs less the the cheapest 470.
 
A RX480 will still fly off shelves until the 500 series arrives and the RX470 is the mothership of price to performance, the 1050ti is embarrassed at every turn against the 470 and they are priced the same, AMD may even drop the 470 to 140USD and the 480 to 180 making it almost impossible for Nvidia to follow them
Click to expand...

meh. if anything 1050ti that force AMD to drop their price on 460 and 470. remember the official price for RX460 4GB is $140. then nvidia put their much faster 1050ti 4GB at the same price point as RX460 4GB. what makes you think that nvidia cannot drop their price further? don't underestimate nvidia when it comes to price war. i have been following gpu news for years and i have seen when both engage in price war AMD usually the one that raise the white flag first. one of the most intense during fermi era. and recently 980ti vs Fury X.
 


That's probably the date of the presentation. Most of the world doesn't use ***-backwards date formats.
 


Nvidia has used the advantage of preferential silicon to do that but the 460 2GB (VRAM is mostly inconsequential) was a $100 and the 460 had no competition for very long. The RX480 was a $200 card from the inception, all reference designs were cheap it was only if you got third party designs and OC editions did you pay more for that.

AMD doesn't have to win on overall performance to take back marketshare and boost profits. The RX490 will still be poised to be a good interim high end card for the Polaris family cards. Bit late but not like it won't sell a fortune. Nvidia's cadence is wait for AMD then release, wait for AMD then release again. It is quite easy when you know the benchmark.

 


don't try to treat as if RX460 4GB does not exist. 1050ti was positioned to compete with RX460 4GB. then the 1050 non ti compete with RX460 2GB on the same price bracket. 460 had no competition for very long? 460 just have 2 month head start. in fact even before 1050 arrival GTX950 most often already trail 460 very closely with 460.

also just because the reference design was cheaper than board partner card it means the cost also cheaper for reference. in fact from what i heard and see in PCB analysis for RX480 the reference design are using more expensive component than the one use by board partner. hence there were speculation that AMD probably intend to sell RX480 in 250-300 range instead of 200-250 initially.

 


twice? we almost pay three times more expensive now. GF114 die size is 332mm2. the fully enabled card (GTX560Ti) MSRP was $250 back in 2011. right now GP104 die size is 314mm2. the fully enabled card (GTX1080) MSRP is $600-$700 (FE).
 


Exactly right. 05/01/2017 meant January 5th to me. Which is when the countdown was counting down to.

My point remains the same. Ve.Ga is a mistake, they lead on their fans, the market, and in a weird way let us down once more. Sure, Nvidia didn't release the 1080Ti, and that is likely because AMD was a no show once again for any competition in the high end space at all. However, Nvidia DID release all sorts of things at the CES event, and that bums me out as an AMD fan.

 


The fact of the matter is that the 480 is not enough. The 480 is not what people want. It may be what many settle for due to budget, but that's about it.

The market has moved on from 1080P. Sure there are plenty who use 1080P, but I don't know anyone who doesn't want 1440P or 4K. 4K is the goal for everyone in the gaming, and digital entertainment world.

The rx480 plays a very specific mid range role that is certainly an important one, but its not one that wins people over. There is a reason that Nvidia still destroyed GPU sales last year. There is a reason that every pre-made gaming machine entices you about the Nvidia GPU options and hides the fact that it comes base with an AMD card or 1060 at the starting price.

" (think the 490 will handsomely beat the 1070 on price and performance so really it is launched against the 1080)" - I agree, but that was needed a couple weeks after the launch of the 1070 and 1080. The 1070 and 1080 are old news. Everyone who is interested in a GPU at that power level has already bought a 1070 or a 1080, everyone else is waiting for something more powerful or is not interested in the space due to use or budget. You can't release competition in the PC hardware industry nearly a year after the competitor. The 490 should have been offered right along with the 480, and at $450-$500. It should have been a dual GPU card, and should have held two rx480's

AMD seems to be fighting a losing battle with themselves. There is a real disadvantage of over hyping, and over promising things. AMD showed on their own road maps that Vega was bound late 2016 to early 2017. Not 1H 2017 which may likely become 2H 2017 with the current track record. I worry for AMD if they can't ever catch up to NVidia. They seem to always look like they are going to catch up, or be in the lead for a brief little moment, but they have failed time and time again to do that, because of their failures to meet their target time frames for launches. AMD is like a game developer that always delays their games multiple times, and often under delivers. It doesn't mean that what we get is bad, its just too late to really make a huge difference.

I really felt this was going to be AMD's time to shine and surprise the industry. To make the splash that turned AMD around. What we saw was promising, but disappointing. AMD has burned us all time and time again, and the market needs to see AMD show everyone that they have moved on from that, but fail to show up each and every time. Since the Bulldozer launch, AMD has been just shy of being there at every turn.

I will say it again. timing in this industry is absolutely everything, and AMD has been losing that battle for well over a decade now.
 


Actually, AMD not showing up at all in the high end space last year hurt the industry. Nvidia ran away with the prices of their cards, and everyone still paid for it. Nobody wants the 480. Everyone would rather have a 1070 or 1080. The only reason people picked up the rx 480 is because it was priced at what they could afford. The 480 for most customers was a settlement. Those who bought AMD cards did so because the Nvidia cards were just out of reach price wise. That is an unfortunate thing for all parties involved.

A couple years ago we had options. AMD was not beating Nvidia's cards in each tier, but they were close enough that it didn't really make a huge difference. We got to chose between Nvidia and AMD (I went AMD and have a furyX) and there was competition. Last year, anyone with a monitor with a resolution over 1080P really had one choice, and it was green.
 

Please provide some evidence for this statement. I mean, yeah, if budget was no object we'd all get a Titan. If I had unlimited money I'd get a Rolls Royce, doesn't mean that's the tier of car all other auto makers should be making. If we take at the Steam HW survey and look at the top 10 GPUs (not including integrated and mobile), 8/10 of those GPUs have an MSRP of $250 or less. Seems to me the RX 480 falls firmly into the price/performance category most people want.

The market has moved on from 1080P. Sure there are plenty who use 1080P, but I don't know anyone who doesn't want 1440P or 4K. 4K is the goal for everyone in the gaming, and digital entertainment world.
Click to expand...
Except the stats don't remotely back up this statement. Again, looking at Steam HW survey, 1080p is the most popular category at 38%. Next is 768p at 25%. 1440p is at a whopping 2%, and 4K gets lumped in with "Other" at ~2%. 1080p also had the greatest % increase, suggesting there are more people moving up to 1080p from lower resolutions than there are people moving away from 1080p to higher resolutions.

Tomshardware is a PC enthusiast site, it's easy to get them impression that many/the average gamer is at 1440p with a GTX 1070 tier card based on the forums. But that's simply not the case.
 
Looking on Newegg, seems like it's typical for a 4GB 1050 Ti to start at $150 (not counting MIR)... the 4GB 470 starts at $175 (again ignoring MIR). So there is a price tier, and there is a performance difference to justify that $25 difference in price. But there's lots of options for lots of users. Nvidia and AMD both have good options depending on your budget and needs.

Why do people focus so much on launch price? Launch price e-peen? Early adopters are the only ones who should cry about launch price and they do it to themselves. The most important price is the price products sell for. This can shift after a product launch shakes things up and the new price should be what you look at. Competition and all. Anyway you'll notice that products often are tiered according to things like performance. The 1050 Ti does not compete quite directly with the 460, even the 4GB. The 4GB 460 starts at $120, the 1050 Ti at $150. That's $30 - a slightly larger gap in price than between the 1050 Ti and the 470.

If you're building a rig on the cheap and are even considering a 4GB 460, that $30 can seem like a decent jump... could be the difference between affording a decent size SSD or something. But I will say if you're looking at a card in this range in the first place, you're probably better off with a 2GB 1050 ($110). That extra 2GB isn't needed when your settings are going to be low for playability, and the vanilla 1050 provides good value for the money.
 

...OK? Restricting yourself to Newegg seems kinda arbitrary if you can find the cards elsewhere (e.g. Amazon) for cheaper. Yeah, the prices are fairly close, but to say they are "priced the same" isn't true, which is the point I was making.

Edit: 470 performs ~25% better on average at 1080p. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1050_Ti_Gaming_X/27.html
Looking at lowest cost models, you can get a 1050 ti for ~$140, and an 470 for ~$175. 175/140 = 1.25, putting the 470 and 1050 ti at similar performance/dollar, in slightly different price brackets.
 


that's my point. people said nvidia incapable of matching AMD pricing but if not for nvidia decided to put 1050ti base MSRP at $140 then we will not going to see AMD drop their RX470 and RX460 price either. nvidia can further drop the price but it is not as simple as that. some board partner probably did not like such decision when nvidia can still easily sell their card even priced higher. the profit is not about nvidia only.
 
"NVidia on the other hand seems to have issues getting any substantial gains out of DX12 compared to DX11. since their driver team is superb in my experience this seems to be a design limitation in the chip, so unless they revamp pascal or come up with something completely new within the next 6 months amd has more than a small chance to beat the 1080(ti) with vega if it pans out half as good as the leaks suggest at the moment."

I still believe that the reason Nvidia doesnt see much gains when moving to DX12 is that their DX11 driver code base is so efficient, well coded, that the gains from DX12 wont start showing up on their side until devs start using some DX11-choking features like very high numbers of draw calls.

AMD, OTOH. has always had powerful hardware, but hampered by their lesser drivers. Which, when you start taking that overhead away with DX12, their hardware is finally free to perform more optimally.
 

I didn't say they had the same price. In fact I specifically said there is a price tier and a performance tier to match. They do compete but not directly. Newegg pricing tends to be fairly reliable and they have multiple decent models at those price points. IMHO it's more representative of what people will actually purchase, good brands often with better clocks and cooling. Rather than a cheap Zotac or something. I find it's a good compass for what these GPUs are selling for, and thus a slightly better basis on which to compare price. YMMV.

Of course if you REALLY want to pinch pennies, you'll buy them off somewhere like Newegg - they have $15 MIRs. $135 for a 1050 Ti and $160 for the 470, after MIR.
 

Yes I know you never said they were the same price. @sarinaide said that, and that's who I was responding to in my first post. I am confused as to why you feel the need to keep downvoting and responding to my posts even though we seem to be saying the same thing.
 
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