AMD Vega MegaThread! FAQ and Resources

[Jsimenhoff]

Welcome Community, to the Official AMD Vega MegaThread!

**Updated 6/19/2017**

This thread serves as the primary discussion thread for ALL Vega information and resources. While discussing, please remember to stay within the guidelines set by Tom's Hardware and above all, DO NOT start a flame war.

AMD announced Radeon Vega earlier this year and followed up with news of its Vega Frontier Edition at its 2017 Financial Analyst Day. AMD claims the Frontier Edition is the "world's first" GPU geared for AI (Artificial Intelligence), creatives, and science pioneers.

Pricing
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will retail at $1199 for the air cooled model and $1799 for the liquid cooled card.

Release Date
The Vega Frontier Edition is slated for release on June 27th, 2017

Memory Architecture
The card features 16GB of HBC (High Bandwidth Cache), which is AMD's new term for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). The new card also features support for 8K displays, and it can access up to 256TB of virtual memory. This voluminous capacity is useful for crunching, video processing, and deep learning algorithms.


The Vega NCU (Next-Generation Compute Unit)
AMD is updating and revamping it's compute engine. The focus this time around is on higher clock speeds as well as an increased amount of IPCs. The NCU is very much a jack of all trades designed to excel no matter the application. Consoles, datacenters, and PC gamers all stand to benefit from the Vega's improved Compute Engine.

Performance
The Vega reveal did have some preview boards on hand, demoing id Software's Doom at 4K resolution under its most taxing detail settings. The preview board was able to t hit 70+ FPS despite having optimized software. Many in the industry expect the Vega cards to land somewhere between a 1080 and Titan X performance wise.

Performance chart courtesy of AnandTech

News and Future Updates
AMD shared some basic performance data on its blog and provided a rough overview of the new Frontier Edition.

• ■Machine learning: Together with AMD’s ROCm open software platform, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition enables developers to tap into the power of Vega for machine learning algorithm development. Frontier Edition delivers more than 50 percent more performance than today’s most powerful machine learning GPUs.
  ■Advanced visualization: Radon Vega Frontier Edition provides the performance required to drive increasingly large and complex models for real-time visualization, physically-based rendering and virtual reality through the design phase as well as rendering phase of product development.
  ■VR workloads: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is ideal for VR content creation supporting AMD’s LiquidVR technology to deliver the gripping content, advanced visual comfort and compatibility needed for next-generation VR experiences.
  Revolutionized game design workflows. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition simplifies and accelerates game creation by providing a single GPU optimized for every stage of a game developer’s workflow, from asset production to playtesting and performance optimization.

 

[Herc08]

Interesting. A lot of users who are building new computers really prefer to wait for Vega. If it is indeed going to perform between a GTX 1080 and Titan X, and the price of a GTX 1070, then that's a steal. We may see.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

The new cards will certainly drive down prices on all existing cards ... expect nVdia to play their spoiler role again, a practice that started with the 7xx series. Waiting for AMD to show their hand and then stealing the thunder / excitement by announcing the 1080 Ti is almost a certainty worth betting the farm on. Be nice if AMD is ready this time and keeps something on the shelf till nVidia shows their hand.

As for THG promoting a "Mega Thread", from my PoV, pleas don't.... Mega Thread topics soon contain such a wide range of topics that reading them becomes too cumbersome and not worth the effort... having to read / bypass 21 posts between the ones you see that actually address the data one might be searching for tends to make them less useful as a data source.

 

[JamesSneed]

Hitting 70+ FPS in Doom at 4k it does make me wonder if the high end Vega will be closer to Titan X performance than the GTX 1080. I wonder if they still have some optimizations left to do in software/drivers since we are talking 4-5 months from now. Considering Nvidia has done very well in OpenGL and AMD has fared better on Directx12, Vega's 70+ FPS on an OpenGL game makes me wonder where the card will really land. I'm not in the market but I hope they do get very close to Titan X performance so we can have some serious competition and get these crazy high prices from Nvidia back down.

 

[Herc08]

Hitting 70+ FPS in Doom at 4k it does make me wonder if the high end Vega will be closer to Titan X performance than the GTX 1080. I wonder if they still have some optimizations left to do in software/drivers since we are talking 4-5 months from now. Considering Nvidia has done very well in OpenGL and AMD has fared better on Directx12, Vega's 70+ FPS on an OpenGL game makes me wonder where the card will really land. I'm not in the market but I hope they do get very close to Titan X performance so we can have some serious competition and get these crazy high prices from Nvidia back down.

What I would like to see is nVidia push for DX12 support. Not saying I want them to be better than AMD, but Windows is pretty popular and devs will continue to use DX no doubt. I just want to see true competition. Before Polaris, it seem nVidia had a leg up in the game, but AMD is surprising us all. But getting that 70 FPS at 4K is an amazing feat. I suspect it will be around $500-600. One thing I want to knowis, will there be a card to match the GTX 1070? Not everyone has money to get a 4K monitor, and Ultra wides are popular at the 1440p level.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

At the end of the free year ... 1 of 8 eligible Win 7 / 8 users had upgraded to Win10. MS's frustration at the "failure to update" reception of the free offer was what led to the Borg like ... "You will be assimilated" tactics that only served to drive more away from taking the plunge. What I have noticed in the past is, every time there's a new API, AMD jumps on it and the marketing machine pushes out "look we're better in this new thing ... check out this game demo benchmark for a game that won't be out for a year", ... and than it's out and the gap is nothing to get excited about.

Not that that is a bad thing in any way unless of course the focus on that results in less focus on addressing what is out now. We still see each side doing better in different games, but as we still see reviewers reporting results for DX12 games in DX11 because the DX12 implementation is still boinky, DX12 to my eyes is going to be a long transition with games started in development 3 years ago w/ DX11 now being adapted for DX12.

Windows 8 was "gonna change everything" ... and pre-release we saw lotsa benchies showing it would ... but it didn't, most game benches were slower. So I think it's gonna be quite some time before we can makes heads or tails out of DX12.

The 290x "was gonna crush" the nVidia 780, but nVidia dropped the Ti ... and then we found out with both cards OC'd, it didn't even top the 780. But it was close and the competition dropped prices for everyone ... I saved $300 off the prices from 2 weeks before buying 2 780s (SLI) compared to the prices on the 780s before the new cards dropped.

As long as you don't want the card that "has the title", you made out good. The 39x series didn't work out so well against the 9xx.... w/ the 970 selling at more than 2 times the rate of all R7 / R9 2xx and 3xx cards combined. I still believe that nVidia used predatory pricing on the 970, not to compete, but to purposely hurt AMD financially during a tough stretch.

If I won a 4k monitor, I'd sell it .... holds no attraction to me at 60 Hz. From an investment in technology perspective, when the 1st Display Port 4k monitor hits the shelves, the value of everything else at 4k is going to drop in the toilet. I noticed one think in the last year or so is that hardware srveys no longer break out display resolution above 2560 x 1440 ... now whydooyathink that is ?Seems the industry doesn't like folks having access to the fact that adoption of 4k remains at sub 1% levels and feel that having that thrown out there for public consumption is being perceived as stifling investment in new monitors.

Right now you can do quite well at $200 @ 1080p, the 1070 is just fine at 1440p.... why the Titan keeps coming up is kinda discussion beyond me because the only person who'd pick one for a gaming box is the guy who puts to together a build by selecting the Graphics card filter on newegg or PCPP and sorts everything by highest price... with the 9xx series, the highest performing gaming card was not the one at the top; the 980 Ti was. Leave the Titan to those who wanna play games on their workstation box w/o killing rendering performance.

But I think you hit the nail on the head with the 1070 ... that's where the market is. The 970 was priced weirdly low such that it made everybody who normally budget a 960 level card spring for the 970. From nVidia's side, it didn't work out as well as the 980 became a non-factor with many at that budget range springing for dual 970s instead of the 980. Obviously nvidia made more money selling one 980 than two 970s and I suspect that's why we see SLI performance way way down from last generation.

That (x70 tier) is what AMD should have their sights set on....The 970 remains the most popular card in use today. AMD has only one entry in the top 20 and that's not a card but a card series. There are 4.2 970s in use for every 79xx card in use and almost 10 970s in use for every 390 series card in use. The 1070 is 63% faster than the 970 ... and with no competition, nVidia's been able to rake it in.

So this is where they have to make their mark. Ya gotta think that AMD wouldn't have sat back for so long with no new entries until they could show a win in this sector. Great news for us,.. ya know there's $100 of room in the 1070 prices so if we see 1070 like performance at $300 from AMD, it's good news for everyone.

 

[mitch074]

Hitting 70+ FPS in Doom at 4k it does make me wonder if the high end Vega will be closer to Titan X performance than the GTX 1080. I wonder if they still have some optimizations left to do in software/drivers since we are talking 4-5 months from now. Considering Nvidia has done very well in OpenGL and AMD has fared better on Directx12, Vega's 70+ FPS on an OpenGL game makes me wonder where the card will really land. I'm not in the market but I hope they do get very close to Titan X performance so we can have some serious competition and get these crazy high prices from Nvidia back down.

The demo was probably made using the Vulkan renderer for Doom. AMD's OpenGL drivers suck performance-wise for gaming, they maintain it primarily for workstations (according to bridgeman, an AMD developer who frequents Phoronix forums - the closed source driver on Linux shares most of its code with the Windows one),

 

[mitch074]

At the end of the free year ... 1 of 8 eligible Win 7 / 8 users had upgraded to Win10. MS's frustration at the "failure to update" reception of the free offer was what led to the Borg like ... "You will be assimilated" tactics that only served to drive more away from taking the plunge. What I have noticed in the past is, every time there's a new API, AMD jumps on it and the marketing machine pushes out "look we're better in this new thing ... check out this game demo benchmark for a game that won't be out for a year", ... and than it's out and the gap is nothing to get excited about.

Not that that is a bad thing in any way unless of course the focus on that results in less focus on addressing what is out now. We still see each side doing better in different games, but as we still see reviewers reporting results for DX12 games in DX11 because the DX12 implementation is still boinky, DX12 to my eyes is going to be a long transition with games started in development 3 years ago w/ DX11 now being adapted for DX12.

Windows 8 was "gonna change everything" ... and pre-release we saw lotsa benchies showing it would ... but it didn't, most game benches were slower. So I think it's gonna be quite some time before we can makes heads or tails out of DX12.

The 290x "was gonna crush" the nVidia 780, but nVidia dropped the Ti ... and then we found out with both cards OC'd, it didn't even top the 780. But it was close and the competition dropped prices for everyone ... I saved $300 off the prices from 2 weeks before buying 2 780s (SLI) compared to the prices on the 780s before the new cards dropped.

As long as you don't want the card that "has the title", you made out good. The 39x series didn't work out so well against the 9xx.... w/ the 970 selling at more than 2 times the rate of all R7 / R9 2xx and 3xx cards combined. I still believe that nVidia used predatory pricing on the 970, not to compete, but to purposely hurt AMD financially during a tough stretch.

If I won a 4k monitor, I'd sell it .... holds no attraction to me at 60 Hz. From an investment in technology perspective, when the 1st Display Port 4k monitor hits the shelves, the value of everything else at 4k is going to drop in the toilet. I noticed one think in the last year or so is that hardware srveys no longer break out display resolution above 2560 x 1440 ... now whydooyathink that is ?Seems the industry doesn't like folks having access to the fact that adoption of 4k remains at sub 1% levels and feel that having that thrown out there for public consumption is being perceived as stifling investment in new monitors.

Right now you can do quite well at $200 @ 1080p, the 1070 is just fine at 1440p.... why the Titan keeps coming up is kinda discussion beyond me because the only person who'd pick one for a gaming box is the guy who puts to together a build by selecting the Graphics card filter on newegg or PCPP and sorts everything by highest price... with the 9xx series, the highest performing gaming card was not the one at the top; the 980 Ti was. Leave the Titan to those who wanna play games on their workstation box w/o killing rendering performance.

But I think you hit the nail on the head with the 1070 ... that's where the market is. The 970 was priced weirdly low such that it made everybody who normally budget a 960 level card spring for the 970. From nVidia's side, it didn't work out as well as the 980 became a non-factor with many at that budget range springing for dual 970s instead of the 980. Obviously nvidia made more money selling one 980 than two 970s and I suspect that's why we see SLI performance way way down from last generation.

That (x70 tier) is what AMD should have their sights set on....The 970 remains the most popular card in use today. AMD has only one entry in the top 20 and that's not a card but a card series. There are 4.2 970s in use for every 79xx card in use and almost 10 970s in use for every 390 series card in use. The 1070 is 63% faster than the 970 ... and with no competition, nVidia's been able to rake it in.

So this is where they have to make their mark. Ya gotta think that AMD wouldn't have sat back for so long with no new entries until they could show a win in this sector. Great news for us,.. ya know there's $100 of room in the 1070 prices so if we see 1070 like performance at $300 from AMD, it's good news for everyone.

Instead they got the RX480 out, which can do 1080P flawlessly and handles 1440p rather well, and can even play in the 1070's ballpark on games that actually cater to the newer APIs out there (not that black box Nvidia proprietary GameWorks stuff) : DX12 and Vulkan : 80% of the performance for 60% of the price, it may sway some. Too bad it's such a good deal that the price for it actually went UP since it came out.

 

[axlrose]

So I finally put together a new build after many, many years. I have two old 560 ti's in sli that need replacing. They are among the only parts I retained in the new build. I was hoping, like many people, that we'd see something about the 1080ti at CES. If we are now in the game of waiting until May or June to be able to own a Vega or 1080 ti, is it likely to be worth the wait? I'm guessing my answer is going to be yes, as I want to make the jump to 4k with my next card purchase, but now it's looking like another six months to own the next gen cards instead of January. What are you guys thinking about the delay? Anyone else out there in a similar situation?

 

[Gforlife]

So I finally put together a new build after many, many years. I have two old 560 ti's in sli that need replacing. They are among the only parts I retained in the new build. I was hoping, like many people, that we'd see something about the 1080ti at CES. If we are now in the game of waiting until May or June to be able to own a Vega or 1080 ti, is it likely to be worth the wait? I'm guessing my answer is going to be yes, as I want to make the jump to 4k with my next card purchase, but now it's looking like another six months to own the next gen cards instead of January. What are you guys thinking about the delay? Anyone else out there in a similar situation?

I would wait until the vega 10/1080ti drops, when both cards are on the market and benchmarks can be compared you can bet that prices won't be as high as when just one company is at the top. I am running a acer xr34 with a 7970HD. I badly need to upgrade as my train simulators dip to 5fps all the time the 7970 just can't keep up with my monitor upgrade. I think only 3GB vram is killing me. So I am in the same boat with you but I am trying to hold off for vega myself as I strongly believe that it will make the RX 480 look like a childs toy.

On an edit:Strong belief is that vega 10 will drop at the end of may so I would suspect that the 1080ti won't be to far off that as nvidia won't let amd dig to far into the gaming market if you want to go nvidia.

 

[Memhorder]

so close yet so far away....

Yeah I'm in the same boat. Waiting. Waiting for CPU's and GPU's so it's twice the anticipation.

 

[-Fran-]

My own speculation is that AMD will put 2 flavors of Vega: GDDR5X and HBM2. That also implies that I think there will be 2 Vega siblings, just like with Polaris.

Why do I think that? Because they can show off their fancy new "this is not memory, but buffer" idea. HBM2-pure cards, then HBM2+SSDs for the higher end and pro parts, then GDDR5 with no "buffer" lower tier stuff. Yes, they require different memory controllers and they are indeed different GPUs, right? Plus, we just saw with Polaris they are still on-board with using GDDR from a cost-efficiency perspective.

So, any ideas or counter points on why it might not be good speculation?

Cheers!

 

[Gforlife]

I was probably gonna go enthusiast level to begin with, perhaps the 16GB model that might come to fruition. How ever if they over a card with onboard ssd and it only came in a 8GB model I would probably jump all over it!

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Vega launch date as confirmed by Lisa Su yesterday*:
April/May/June 2017.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3163500/components/amd-confirms-its-ryzen-cpu-will-launch-in-early-march-followed-by-the-vega-gpu.html
"What's new, though, is a Vega timetable: Su revealed that the Vega GPUs will ship during the second quarter as well."

Vega+Zen APU, anyone?
"In the second half of 2017, AMD still plans to launch a Zen-based APU, codenamed “Raven Ridge,” primarily designed for notebooks but also some desktops."

Via [H]ardOCP:
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/01/31/amd_confirms_ryzen_vega_launch_timetables

Edit: *Well, it's yesterday in my timezone. It might be tomorrow in yours... #IHateTimeZones

 

[axlrose]

So long from now...

 

[Gforlife]

"What's new, though, is a Vega timetable: Su revealed that the Vega GPUs will ship during the second quarter as well."

This could be because of the HBM2 memory used if you look at the databook under graphics memory on skhynix.com the HBM2 is only 204.8GB/s not the 256GB/s that we expected. The 204.8GB/s will put it under the GTX 1080, perhaps they will roll out VEGA with the 204.8GB/s HBM2 then when its fully finished start shipping VEGA with the 256GB/s.Makes me think about getting an RX 470/480 to replace my 7970 and hold off until 256GB/s HBM2 is garanteed. The only other option is if they are gonna use samsung HBM2 but I don't know if they have reached 256GB/s either

 

[renz496]

Hitting 70+ FPS in Doom at 4k it does make me wonder if the high end Vega will be closer to Titan X performance than the GTX 1080. I wonder if they still have some optimizations left to do in software/drivers since we are talking 4-5 months from now. Considering Nvidia has done very well in OpenGL and AMD has fared better on Directx12, Vega's 70+ FPS on an OpenGL game makes me wonder where the card will really land. I'm not in the market but I hope they do get very close to Titan X performance so we can have some serious competition and get these crazy high prices from Nvidia back down.

The demo was probably made using the Vulkan renderer for Doom. AMD's OpenGL drivers suck performance-wise for gaming, they maintain it primarily for workstations (according to bridgeman, an AMD developer who frequents Phoronix forums - the closed source driver on Linux shares most of its code with the Windows one),

the demo indeed running with vulkan API.

 

[renz496]

At the end of the free year ... 1 of 8 eligible Win 7 / 8 users had upgraded to Win10. MS's frustration at the "failure to update" reception of the free offer was what led to the Borg like ... "You will be assimilated" tactics that only served to drive more away from taking the plunge. What I have noticed in the past is, every time there's a new API, AMD jumps on it and the marketing machine pushes out "look we're better in this new thing ... check out this game demo benchmark for a game that won't be out for a year", ... and than it's out and the gap is nothing to get excited about.

Not that that is a bad thing in any way unless of course the focus on that results in less focus on addressing what is out now. We still see each side doing better in different games, but as we still see reviewers reporting results for DX12 games in DX11 because the DX12 implementation is still boinky, DX12 to my eyes is going to be a long transition with games started in development 3 years ago w/ DX11 now being adapted for DX12.

Windows 8 was "gonna change everything" ... and pre-release we saw lotsa benchies showing it would ... but it didn't, most game benches were slower. So I think it's gonna be quite some time before we can makes heads or tails out of DX12.

The 290x "was gonna crush" the nVidia 780, but nVidia dropped the Ti ... and then we found out with both cards OC'd, it didn't even top the 780. But it was close and the competition dropped prices for everyone ... I saved $300 off the prices from 2 weeks before buying 2 780s (SLI) compared to the prices on the 780s before the new cards dropped.

As long as you don't want the card that "has the title", you made out good. The 39x series didn't work out so well against the 9xx.... w/ the 970 selling at more than 2 times the rate of all R7 / R9 2xx and 3xx cards combined. I still believe that nVidia used predatory pricing on the 970, not to compete, but to purposely hurt AMD financially during a tough stretch.

If I won a 4k monitor, I'd sell it .... holds no attraction to me at 60 Hz. From an investment in technology perspective, when the 1st Display Port 4k monitor hits the shelves, the value of everything else at 4k is going to drop in the toilet. I noticed one think in the last year or so is that hardware srveys no longer break out display resolution above 2560 x 1440 ... now whydooyathink that is ?Seems the industry doesn't like folks having access to the fact that adoption of 4k remains at sub 1% levels and feel that having that thrown out there for public consumption is being perceived as stifling investment in new monitors.

Right now you can do quite well at $200 @ 1080p, the 1070 is just fine at 1440p.... why the Titan keeps coming up is kinda discussion beyond me because the only person who'd pick one for a gaming box is the guy who puts to together a build by selecting the Graphics card filter on newegg or PCPP and sorts everything by highest price... with the 9xx series, the highest performing gaming card was not the one at the top; the 980 Ti was. Leave the Titan to those who wanna play games on their workstation box w/o killing rendering performance.

But I think you hit the nail on the head with the 1070 ... that's where the market is. The 970 was priced weirdly low such that it made everybody who normally budget a 960 level card spring for the 970. From nVidia's side, it didn't work out as well as the 980 became a non-factor with many at that budget range springing for dual 970s instead of the 980. Obviously nvidia made more money selling one 980 than two 970s and I suspect that's why we see SLI performance way way down from last generation.

That (x70 tier) is what AMD should have their sights set on....The 970 remains the most popular card in use today. AMD has only one entry in the top 20 and that's not a card but a card series. There are 4.2 970s in use for every 79xx card in use and almost 10 970s in use for every 390 series card in use. The 1070 is 63% faster than the 970 ... and with no competition, nVidia's been able to rake it in.

So this is where they have to make their mark. Ya gotta think that AMD wouldn't have sat back for so long with no new entries until they could show a win in this sector. Great news for us,.. ya know there's $100 of room in the 1070 prices so if we see 1070 like performance at $300 from AMD, it's good news for everyone.

Instead they got the RX480 out, which can do 1080P flawlessly and handles 1440p rather well, and can even play in the 1070's ballpark on games that actually cater to the newer APIs out there (not that black box Nvidia proprietary GameWorks stuff) : DX12 and Vulkan : 80% of the performance for 60% of the price, it may sway some. Too bad it's such a good deal that the price for it actually went UP since it came out.

even with vulkan RX480 is nowhere close to 1070:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/zotac_geforce_gtx_1080_arcticstorm_review,19.html

the only thing i can imagine RX480 can close the gap with 1070 is with tittle that is extremely favoring AMD architecture.

 

[axlrose]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/nvidia-gsync-hdr%3Famp?client=ms-android-verizon

Soon.

 

[Martell1977]

Vega launch date as confirmed by Lisa Su yesterday*:
April/May/June 2017.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3163500/components/amd-confirms-its-ryzen-cpu-will-launch-in-early-march-followed-by-the-vega-gpu.html
"What's new, though, is a Vega timetable: Su revealed that the Vega GPUs will ship during the second quarter as well."

Vega+Zen APU, anyone?
"In the second half of 2017, AMD still plans to launch a Zen-based APU, codenamed “Raven Ridge,” primarily designed for notebooks but also some desktops."

Via [H]ardOCP:
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/01/31/amd_confirms_ryzen_vega_launch_timetables

Edit: *Well, it's yesterday in my timezone. It might be tomorrow in yours... #IHateTimeZones

What I found most interesting about the article was:
"Su added that the profit margins for both Ryzen and Vega will be well above AMD’s average."

So much for the rumors that AMD would sell i7 level performance for i5 prices. If they plan to price Ryzen similar to competing Intel products and Vega similar to nVida, they must be very confident they have some winners there. That or they are getting really close to bankruptcy.

Personally, I have no problems with AMD pricing things competitively, if they have the performance on par, then the price should be as well. I just hope that they finally do some advertising and let people know they aren't a cheap Intel knock-off, which is what most of my clients thought for a long time. They need to make themselves into a household name, like Intel did.

 

[renz496]

part of the problem is people expectation. if AMD wants to price their product competitively according to competitor performance people will expect AMD to win the benchmark. heck some people want AMD to win the benchmark while at the same time undercut nvidia/intel pricing. because to their eyes AMD is not the "greed" company like intel and nvidia is. i still remember the mantra some people said a few years back. "AMD will never going to charge more than $400 for a single GPU because AMD care about customer unlike nvidia". then bam they got slap with 7970 costing $550. forget about $400 AMD end up charging more than nvidia at the time for their top flagship.

this is ultimately become one of AMD problem. we see a lot of Fury X being heavily discounted out there even before Vega comes out. for consumer it is definitely a good thing (in short term) but for AMD it is definitely not. that's why AMD did not coming out with a flagship that can compete directly with 1080 last year.

 

[Martell1977]

this is ultimately become one of AMD problem. we see a lot of Fury X being heavily discounted out there even before Vega comes out. for consumer it is definitely a good thing (in short term) but for AMD it is definitely not. that's why AMD did not coming out with a flagship that can compete directly with 1080 last year.

There is mention of AMD taking time to "clear out the channel", which to me indicates that they are trying to clear out as much stock of old products before introducing the new. It's understandable, but it was in reference to Ryzen, but there is no reason it doesn't apply to the GPU's as well. With the money they are expecting to make, I don't think the loss they might take from discounts and clearing out the vendors stock will hurt them much.

It will be an interesting year for sure, I just hope Vega can live up to the "leaks" or there might be some dark days ahead for AMD.

 

[renz496]

this is ultimately become one of AMD problem. we see a lot of Fury X being heavily discounted out there even before Vega comes out. for consumer it is definitely a good thing (in short term) but for AMD it is definitely not. that's why AMD did not coming out with a flagship that can compete directly with 1080 last year.

There is mention of AMD taking time to "clear out the channel", which to me indicates that they are trying to clear out as much stock of old products before introducing the new. It's understandable, but it was in reference to Ryzen, but there is no reason it doesn't apply to the GPU's as well. With the money they are expecting to make, I don't think the loss they might take from discounts and clearing out the vendors stock will hurt them much.

It will be an interesting year for sure, I just hope Vega can live up to the "leaks" or there might be some dark days ahead for AMD.

but their competitor have no such problem.

 

[Martell1977]

but their competitor have no such problem.

That's the problem with such small market-share. However, I see in Newegg's newsletter constant sales on nVidia cards with only a few Radeons sprinkled in.

The market-share issue is especially relevant in their CPU business. They have gained a good amount on the GPU side, but not on the CPU side.

Plus it didn't help that the Fury X got such a bad rep even though it was comparable to the 980ti. Then the RX 480's power draw debacle. They have great products, it's just that they get hammered much harder for minor missteps.

I think that another issue with "clearing the channel" is the power draw of the last gen. There seems to be a plethora of computers out there with horrid PSU's and the added cost of replacing it turns a lot of people off.

I'm waiting for Vega to possibly upgrade, which would be the quickest GPU upgrade I've ever done, but the performance gain could be awesome considering I'm at 480 levels now.

 

[renz496]

sometimes i was thinking this is a problem that AMD create for themselves. they start attacking with price very aggressively with HD4800 series. since then people expecting AMD to do that every time they release new GPU. hence when they tried to play the premium game by having the fastest GPU with 7970 many people are hesitant to jump right into it and waiting for nvidia offering first for price war. when you're launching your product first you should have the advantage to take more market share from your competitor (like what happen with 5k series vs 400 series) but it did not happen with 7970. instead AMD were losing market share instead.