AMD Radeon Vega in the League of GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN Xp

[btarunr]

In an AMA (ask me anything) session with Tom's Hardware community, AMD desktop processor marketing exec Don Woligrosky answered a variety of AMD Ryzen platform related questions. He did not shy away from making a key comment about the company's upcoming high-end graphics card, Radeon Vega, either. "Vega performance compared to the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp looks really nice," Woligrosky stated. This implies that Radeon Vega is in the same league of performance as NVIDIA's two top consumer graphics SKUs, the $650 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and the $1,200 TITAN Xp.

It is conceivable that AMD's desktop processor marketing execs will have access to some privileged information from other product divisions, and so if true, this makes NVIDIA's recent memory speed bump for the GTX 1080 a failed gambit. NVIDIA similarly bumped memory speeds of the GTX 1060 6 GB to make it more competitive against the Radeon RX 580. Woligrosky also commented on a more plausible topic, of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync becoming the dominant adaptive v-sync technology, far outselling NVIDIA G-Sync.



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[EzioAs]

"Actually, Vega is much slower than the GTX 1080 and Titan Xp, so don't hold your breath."

Yeah, you're not going to see an AMD marketing exec answer that in an AMA on an unreleased product

 

[btarunr]

"Actually, Vega is much slower than the GTX 1080 and Titan Xp, so don't hold your breath."

Yeah, you're not going to see an AMD marketing exec answer that in an AMA on an unreleased product

They generally say "I cannot comment on unreleased products."

 

[EzioAs]

Well, let's hope they deliver

 

[Frick]

I bet it will be that quick ... in certain scenarios.

 

[PowerPC]

the royalty-free AMD FreeSync becoming the dominant adaptive v-sync technology, far outselling NVIDIA G-Sync.

This definitely rings true, and a big win for AMD. Nvidia will have to adapt to FreeSync or be left behind. Right now they are probably thinking hard on how to make that move and still maintain face in the process.

On the topic of whether Vega will compete with 1080ti, I'm pretty sure it will, at least in Vulkan or DirectX 12 games. Might even be faster, honestly. And for much cheaper? If they can do this, people will flock to the AMD platform in masses. They know this, so I hope they are not planning to disappoint. This is the biggest test for AMD after they proved themselves in the CPU market against Intel, and might be the biggest test for them yet, whether they can also beat Nvidia? I really hope they can make Vega what people want and show it to Nvidia after they (kinda) beat Intel.

The good part is that Intel is now announcing consumer 6 cores for their next gen CPUs and even going to release them sooner than they "planned". But in reality, would they have done it if AMD didn't kick their asses in multi-core? Same for Nvidia, would they be making HBM2 and releasing it sooner now if AMD wasn't able to kick their asses in Graphics? I bet Nvidia already smelled or even knows for sure that Vega will be a threat. Otherwise, they would never announce Volta for so much sooner, wouldn't they?

 

[RejZoR]

I just can't understand why people keep applying same things to Vega as they've seen in the past, entirely ignoring EVERYTHING we've learned so far about actual Vega.

R9 Fury X was such a "fail" (it wasn't really) because it was essentially a really beefed up R9 290X with Tonga's framebuffer compression and HBM memory. It simply relied on brute force to render its way through games using existing tech.

RX Vega on the other hand sports same brute force, but with a finesse of advanced technologies underneath. It uses same basic units (shaders, TMU's and ROP's) configuration as Fiji core if I remember correctly, but EVERYTHING else is entirely new from pixel rendering to triangle processing.

 

[ShurikN]

I just can't understand why people keep applying same things to Vega as they've seen in the past, entirely ignoring EVERYTHING we've learned so far about actual Vega.

Vega looks great on paper, but we haven't learnt anything about actual Vega, as there is no actual Vega.
Actual Vega isn't released. It all comes down fps, tech preview slides mean nothing.

Bulldozer was great on paper too. Not saying Vega will fail, as I'd love to have one in my future Ryzen build, but theres nothing to say at the moment if Vega will be successful or not.

 

[RejZoR]

Ryzen was great on paper and it's also great in real life. If we go with comparisons...

 

[the54thvoid]

Ryzen was great on paper and it's also great in real life. If we go with comparisons...

It has it's limitations - I have one. Ryzen's slower clocks do make a tangible difference at 1080p res with moderate settings. I ran the Superposition bench at 1080p Extreme and got the 4th highest score (got Ryzen into the charts). Ran it at Medium and GPU usage plummetted to 70-80% average (from 99% at Extreme).

Clocks. It'll all be in the clocks for Vega and with all that hardware...... Time will tell.

 

[RejZoR]

Eeeeerm, no. And comparing a 16 threads octacore CPU to 8 threaded quad core at crazy clocks just feels disingenuous. And bloody EVERYONE is doing that. Stop it. People should stop obsessing over stupid framerate like it's god of everything. It's not.

Do games run smoothly on max settings? If answer is yes, why do you care?

 

[PowerPC]

It has it's limitations - I have one. Ryzen's slower clocks do make a tangible difference at 1080p res with moderate settings. I ran the Superposition bench at 1080p Extreme and got the 4th highest score (got Ryzen into the charts). Ran it at Medium and GPU usage plummetted to 70-80% average (from 99% at Extreme).

Clocks. It'll all be in the clocks for Vega and with all that hardware...... Time will tell.

I don't get it. Was the slower clock of Ryzen blocking your GPU to only 70-80%? How does that work?

 

[the54thvoid]

Eeeeerm, no. And comparing a 16 threads octacore CPU to 8 threaded quad core at crazy clocks just feels disingenuous. And bloody EVERYONE is doing that. Stop it. People should stop obsessing over stupid framerate like it's god of everything. It's not.

Do games run smoothly on max settings? If answer is yes, why do you care?

The rough 3.9-4.1Ghz limits of Ryzen (whether it's 8 cores or the 4 core versions) is a limiting factor for some. I game at 1440p so it doesn't matter to me. I also dont need 144fps so again - no biggy. But the fact is pretty blatant and refusing to see it is obvious contrary. Ryzen clocks slower, therefore, in situations where raw clocksped is king, Ryzen loses some of those fights. It's simple. So for Vega, again, clockspeeds will be the determining factor, not so much the hardware. AMD have put more hardware into their chips for a while now but the clocks have kept them back (or is the chatter about RX580 clocking higher meaningless fluff for it's performance? No, of course not - it's fundamental to it's increase over the RX480).

I don't get it. Was the slower clock of Ryzen blocking your GPU to only 70-80%? How does that work?

As fps increases, the CPU needs to feed the GPU. If both chips (Intel and AMD) have comparable 'IPC' but the Intel chip is faster, it can feed the GPU better. That's my understanding and it is borne out in reviews and theory as well.

 

[medi01]

I don't believe 314mm2 1080 can be overall (GameWorks surely does wonders) faster than 500mm2 Vega.

Oh, and wceeimakethingsup site reported smaller Vega using GDDR and not HBM, so 1070 competitor would be nice to see too.

looks really nice

Can mean pretty much anything.

 

[Fluffmeister]

"Actually, Vega is much slower than the GTX 1080 and Titan Xp, so don't hold your breath."

Yeah, you're not going to see an AMD marketing exec answer that in an AMA on an unreleased product

Yeah it's shocking news.

 

[ratirt]

For me it's like
Vega card 4k 60 fps in modern games, Free-sync monitor lower price point than NV's cards and I'm golden.

 

[RejZoR]

People are skeptic about Vega, but I have confidence. They aren't just making it "more of everything", Vega is a more clever design. You'll see I was right. Also be aware that certain new things on Vega do require specific programming, like Primitive Shaders, so those will show benefits over time and not from get go. There are other things that will work straight away without extra coding, like advanced surface removal and tile based rendering...

 

[bug]

"Looks really nice" in marketing speak means it's 5-10% slower. Give or take.
That's not an issue (outside of benchmarks), but we'll have to wait for the rest of the details. RX480's performance also "looks really nice" next to the GTX1060, but the power usage, not so much.

Once more, I'm ignoring speculation and marketing talk and I'm waiting for the actual product instead.

@RejZoR Netburst was also "a more clever design". On paper.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

This definitely rings true, and a big win for AMD. Nvidia will have to adapt to FreeSync or be left behind. Right now they are probably thinking hard on how to make that move and still maintain face in the process.

VESA embedded DisplayPort adaptive sync. It's an open standard Intel and NVIDIA have access to. I wouldn't be surprised in NVIDIA already has a working implementation of it ready to go but corporate needs to decide if/when to discontinue the G-SYNC program. I doubt they will until monitor manufacturers stop cooperating.

On the topic of whether Vega will compete with 1080ti, I'm pretty sure it will, at least in Vulkan or DirectX 12 games.

We already know it does in compute and that's likely what he was talking about. Graphics workloads get a lot more complicated and much of that is not in AMD's hands.

 

[ratirt]

VESA embedded DisplayPort adaptive sync. It's an open standard Intel and NVIDIA have access to. I wouldn't be surprised in NVIDIA already has a working implementation of it ready to go but corporate needs to decide if/when to discontinue the G-SYNC program. I doubt they will until monitor manufacturers stop cooperating.

NV will not discontinue G-sync. They get money from it and quite a lot so there's no point moving to F-sync when they have NV cards supporting G-sync. Look at the price tags of the 2 technologies. Monitors with equal specs are separated with a huge price difference.

 

[Tsukiyomi91]

no proof of physical chip for the rest of the world to compare, means it didn't happen. AMD needs to stop pushing hypes that leaves many enthusiasts disappointed.

 

[ratirt]

no proof of physical chip for the rest of the world to compare, means it didn't happen. AMD needs to stop pushing hypes that leaves many enthusiasts disappointed.

I don't know what you are after but i'm not disappointed. Actually I'm moving to AMD gear soon cause I can see way more potential in this than NV's and the price difference is noticeable

 

[RejZoR]

no proof of physical chip for the rest of the world to compare, means it didn't happen. AMD needs to stop pushing hypes that leaves many enthusiasts disappointed.

Right, and when NVIDIA releases same info, everyone jumps on it as absolute fact...

 

[Tsukiyomi91]

if you count the number of hype AMD failed to deliver, I think it's quite obvious compared to Nvidia, especially in the GPU department.

 

[RejZoR]

And when has AMD failed to deliver? Their last gen R9 290X was so fast they could just rebrand it to R9 390X and still compete with brand new GTX 980. That's more a definition of pwnage than fail. The RX480 was a mid end economy targeted product. They literally targeted segment where most profit is made. They literally didn't even bother to compete with top end products. And the card is far from bad. FAR FROM IT. Even the R9 Fury X which many consider as fail is not one at all. Sure, in some games it's beaten by GTX 980Ti by a lot, but in others, it almost matches GTX 1080 and certainly goes past GTX 1070. For a card that targeted GTX 900 series as competition, that's again hardly a fail. But whatever...