AMD releases their Radeon Software 18.0 Vega driver
- Thread starter WYP
- Start date
NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
After all this time they only have a beta driver? Really?
Dicehunter
Resident Newb
But but but AMD were working since like forever on the driver side....or so the fanboys kept crying.
AlienALX
Active member
Yup and Crossfire is disabled.
I saw a couple of benchmarks today where the 64 actually beat the 1080Ti. One was WOW, IIRC. So there may be life in it yet.
Dicehunter
Resident Newb
That will be down GPU utilisation, My 1080 Ti sits at around 36% most of the time in WoW.
AlienALX
Active member
Well just so that you understand this dude. If Vega can spank the 1080Ti in deep learning and mining it could do the exact same in gaming, if it were used properly. But it isn't, and by the time it is it will be too late.
If you go back to the GTX 480 vs the 5870 right? on paper the 480 utterly destroyed the 5870. However, the 5870 was a much smaller die and thus could run much faster. And it worked in gaming. There was hardly any difference. However, you try and fold with a 5000 series and you would be left in tears. The 480 kicked so much ass it even spanked the 5970 by a considerable margin.
Vega and Fermi are one of the same tbh. Very big, very high powered, suck when not utilised.
AMD seem to think if they come up with these odd ideas that they will be supported. But it doesn't work like that. Devs always take the easy path. FX 83x0? fantastic when supported. Easily swatted aside the I5 K. Yet they weren't supported so they sucked. Well, unless you were streaming, Xsplit or VMs. Then they were good.
I am sure over time Vega 64 will get better and better. It's just very sad that that time is not now. We don't need Vega to be good in two years.
NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
Drivers certainly can massively increase performance. But looks like we will have to wait for that. Like really they "delayed the launch" and still no proper non beta driver? Wtf are they doing? They said they had a dedicated team for Vega. Sure doesn't look it.
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
And as far as I can tell, since January Doom performance hasn't improved by very much. I really don't know what AMD have been doing since Vega silicon was first developed. Increasing clocks? No reason to do that when scaling is abysmal in performance per watt. Producing more chips? Where are they? Refining the process to reduce cost? Apparently prices are set to increase. It's starting to become more clear that it's High Bandwidth Memory that has been teh thorn in AMD's side. It's almost impossible to tell what Fiji and Vega could have been without it, but I'm starting to think it could have been a lot more for a lot less effort.
Dicehunter
Resident Newb
Maybe Vega is a pipe cleaner product and the real BIG product will arrive with Navi ?
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
Yeah, I'm thinking that as well, but some were saying that about Fiji/Polaris/Vega. 'Skip Fiji and Polaris; Vega is where it'll be at.' If Navi comes mid-2018, which it won't, maybe Radeon will have a chance in the high-end gaming sector, but I just can't see AMD ever getting back to being competitive in the high-end. I'm strongly considering keeping my Fury card and waiting for Volta. If only Nvidia supported Freesync.
Dicehunter
Resident Newb
Would be nice but putting the money aspect of it aside, Nvidia do have more control of configuring their G-Sync modules which can help bring latency, Frame rate window that G-Sync works with etc... down to levels that Freesync can't get to so there are plus sides to it.
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
The benefits of Gsync are not worth the £150-200 premium, IMO.
Edit: Especially as it adds value to monitors with poor quality control, at least it did two years ago when I was deciding between Nvidia and AMD.
MacLeod
New member
They said the same thing about Steamroller......then Excavator. Piledriver was just a stop gap CPU and Excavator was gonna clean house.
Not saying AMD can't right the GPU ship cause they most certainly did that with the CPU wing of the company but I think they're gonna have to go back to the drawing board to do so just like they did with Zen.
Surfie
New member
I'm sorry, but I don't entirely agree. Zens success was a result of two factors going in AMDs favour: 1) Their R&D team doing a phenomenal job of figuring out the best way forward (and they really did. Ryzen and Threadripper are awesome products for their price) AND 2) Intel being exceptionally lazy/resting on their laurels and only releasing minor improvements with the intervening chipsets while AMD were not competing.
The net result of this was Zen not only being the fantastic product that it was going to be anyway, but bowling Intel over and having them scrambling.
Everything that I can see says that NVidia are smarter and more hardworking than this. They delayed Volta - which says that they either are not happy with its respective performance, OR, are deliberately holding it back while tweaking it so that when AMD DOES become competitive again (Navi maybe? Future driver enhancements?) they have an Ace up their sleeve. I have NO DOUBT that they watched what happened with Intel and thought "Nope. Not going to happen to us, if we can help it". So in actuality, it is probably a bit of both. The proof is in the pudding, in that they released the 10xx series while they still ruled the roost (albeit barely, in some cases) with the 9xx series.
What does this mean for AMD? As they did with the CPU side of things, they need to stop making products that "compete" with a given tier of NVidia, and start doing their own product independently of the NVidia product. Failure to do so means that they will always be on the back foot. Doing so means that they will be on the back foot for a while, until they can find the right mix of components that blows NVidia away (or at least, sends them running for the hills).
I might be wrong of course, I don't get paid the big dollars (and this might even be why). But to me, it seems sensible (although, not without risk).
MacLeod
New member
This will be super simplified because I ain't no engineer by any stretch and only understand the very basic and very broad strokes of CPU and GPU manufacturing so I can't spit out details, equations and all that stuff cause frankly that's way over my head. That said, Zen was a success because AMD brought in Jim Keller again. Keller is the genius that got AMD to the top way back when with the Athlon 64. He designed Zen basically from the ground up. As I understand it they scrapped the Bulldozer line completely and Keller came in and worked his magic. Bulldozer was built banking on the moar cores trend that didn't actually pan out where Intel bet on faster IPC being the wave of the future. We all know who won that gamble. But you really can't blame AMD too much. When Bulldozer first hit the drawing boards, everybody wanted more cores. That was the marketing and if you didn't have a quad core CPU you might as well be wearing a dress. AMD figured that if everybody wanted 4 cores now, hell they'll definitely want 8 cores later. Nope. So AMD was stuck with an obsolete CPU architecture basically.
The GPU side isn't in as bad of shape as the CPU side was. It wasn't that long ago that AMD was on top with GPU's in the 5000 line and the 6000, 7000 and R9 line were all competitive with Nvidia card for card. It's just this last batch, starting with the Fury X that have been kinda duds, costing too much based on their performance. So where AMD had a worthless CPU architecture with the Bulldozer line and needed to go back to the drawing board, their GPU line is really only 1 generation behind and they're not that far off now. Knock $50 off the price of a RX64 and you've got a pretty damn good card.
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NeverBackDown
AMD Enthusiast
Ryzen is a success because Intel got lazy.
AMD in the GPU market is doing good, but Nvidia has not let off the breaks. They are REALLY putting in 110% effort into there engineering designs. This is forcing AMD to catch up and despite the fact they have good cards, it's just not good enough in comparison. Yet despite the fact Nvidia is trying hard to get rid of them completely, AMD is not all that far behind. They are a whole generation behind which is much closer to Nvidia than they were against Intel before Ryzen launched.
AMD in the GPU market is doing good, but Nvidia has not let off the breaks. They are REALLY putting in 110% effort into there engineering designs. This is forcing AMD to catch up and despite the fact they have good cards, it's just not good enough in comparison. Yet despite the fact Nvidia is trying hard to get rid of them completely, AMD is not all that far behind. They are a whole generation behind which is much closer to Nvidia than they were against Intel before Ryzen launched.
AngryGoldfish
Old N Gold
This.
Ryzen is a success because it's a powerful CPU that can be produced cheaply and because Intel are lazy. Vega is a failure (right now) because it's a powerful GPU that costs too much to produce and because Nvidia continued to push out excellent products.
AlienALX
Active member
I still don't think Intel are lazy. Tight? most definitely. I mean at the end of the day every tech they have made in god knows how many years could have had an unlocked 8 core beast or up to 24. They were just too tight to do it, and instead wanted to make tiny CPUs for max cash. Which is greed IMO.
