Volta might not show up anytime soon in the gaming space

[Vya Domus]

https://www.techspot.com/news/70584-nvidia-volta-gaming-gpus-not-foreseeable-future.html

Looks like Jensen himself has said the following :

"Volta for gaming, we haven't announced anything. And all I can say is that our pipeline is filled with some exciting new toys for the gamers, and we have some really exciting new technology to offer them in the pipeline. But for the holiday season for the foreseeable future, I think Pascal is just unbeatable. It's just the best thing out there. And everybody who's looking forward to playing Call of Duty or Destiny 2, if they don't already have one, should run out and get themselves a Pascal"

He also confirmed one of my suspicions , that Volta is very expensive to make in it's current iteration :

"The price of Volta is driven by the fact that, of course, the manufacturing cost is quite extraordinary,” said Huang. "These are expensive things to go and design."

There is a mention about Volta GPUs costing 1000$ to produce. I'd assume they are talking about V100 but I am not exactly sure what this price actually means , if it's a per-die cost for example.

Looks like they are doing the smart thing and might skip on this one.

I wonder what those "new toys" are though.

 

[cdawall]

Sounds like a Pascal refresh

 

[qubit]

Translation: no competition from AMD with a rubbish Vega so they're milking Pascal for all its got and are gonna give us "toys" to play with in the meantime.

And it's us who lose out. I'm sure if Vega had leapfrogged the 1080 Ti in framerate, power, heat and noise, that suddenly a Volta card would be close to release and none of these lame excuses.

 

[Steevo]

Toys for gamers.


Glad they see how their customer base loves toys, not graphics cards that cost hundreds of dollars, but toys...... cause we are all teens living in our parents basements, playing with toys.


What a dbag.

 

[chaosmassive]

should blame Vega for this
Nvidia will hold their Volta until AMD able to outperform or on par with their flagship card
till then Nvidia will continue milking with Pascal

 

[Vya Domus]

Toys for gamers.


Glad they see how their customer base loves toys, not graphics cards that cost hundreds of dollars, but toys...... cause we are all teens living in our parents basements, playing with toys.


What a dbag.

Well , that's how Nvidia/AMD looks at their consumer market. Sad , but that's how it is , they no longer have to rely on the average Joe to buy their products , therefore they are now selling these things as toys from their point of view.

 

[cucker tarlson]

Lol I don't know why you snapped so hard Steevo, it's what gaming PCs basically are, toys for you to play with and have a little fun. It's silly to sulk when someone says you still like playing with toys at the age of 30 or 40. We all do and that's natural, whether it's PC or some other hobby. I'm 29 and I've played PC games since I was 14, I've never thought that now I'm almost 30 I don't wanna ppl to see my pc gaming affection like I'm an overgrown baby still playing with toys. It's themz whoz silly if they do.

Back to the topic, see how concerned JHH is about competition from Vega, he goes publicly to say that competition is none and nvidia's over year old architecture is/will be #1 for the foreseeable future. Vega is much ado about nothing for pc gaming oriented customers,ekhm, I mean expensive pc toys oriented spoiled kids in their 30s.

 

[the54thvoid]

Lol I don't know why you snapped so hard Steevo, it's what gaming PCs basically are, toys for you to play with and have a little fun. It's silly to sulk when someone says you still like playing with toys at the age of 30 or 40. We all do and that's natural, whether it's PC or some other hobby. I'm 29 and I've played PC games since I was 14, I've never thought that now I'm almost 30 I don't wanna ppl to see my pc gaming affection like I'm an overgrown baby still playing with toys. It's themz whoz silly if they do.

Back to the topic, see how concerned JHH is about competition from Vega, he goes publicly to say that competition is none and nvidia's over year old architecture is/will be #1 for the foreseeable future.

How dare you.

Playing 'serious' games with global friends on headmics while drinking beer and swearing profanities is NOT what we do with toys. It's all very serious and grown up you know.

Pew pew - die. Haxors! Ping's sky high, can't hit him at all. Where's a mod - PB his ass. etc etc etc.

Yeah, okay. Toy it is.

EDIT: I see you're Polish, I hope you dont play BF1 and belong to a clan called UNSQ.... Unhittable ping hacking mofos.

 

[cdawall]

Translation: no competition from AMD with a rubbish Vega so they're milking Pascal for all its got and are gonna give us "toys" to play with in the meantime.

And it's us who lose out. I'm sure if Vega had leapfrogged the 1080 Ti in framerate, power, heat and noise, that suddenly a Volta card would be close to release and none of these lame excuses.

I mean that's fair, but for the last three generations of nvidia cards they have waited 10-12 months after the release of their flagship (690/780ti/980ti) before releasing the next generation of cards. 1080ti dropped on the normal schedule in March this year that gives us January through March of next year for volta...

If they give us a Pascal refresh I would push Volta out through mid summer for release without a doubt, but holiday season 2017 is way pushed up timetables

 

[Fluffmeister]

Makes perfect sense, focus on V100 and the HPC market, including big buck government contracts like Summit.

Pascal more than holds it's own in the consumer market...

 

[cucker tarlson]

They can hypothetically still squeeze a fair bit of performance out of pascal cards provoded they're willing to produce a 330W card like amd did which probably won't sell that well.

How dare you.

Playing 'serious' games with global friends on headmics while drinking beer and swearing profanities is NOT what we do with toys. It's all very serious and grown up you know.

Pew pew - die. Haxors! Ping's sky high, can't hit him at all. Where's a mod - PB his ass. etc etc etc.

Yeah, okay. Toy it is.

EDIT: I see you're Polish, I hope you dont play BF1 and belong to a clan called UNSQ.... Unhittable ping hacking mofos.

I'm not a multiplayer fps type of a guy. I love co-op in games like dying light or watch dogs 2 tho.

 

[Liviu Cojocaru]

I heard something about Volta being released in the Spring of 2018 more specific march. I think I've seen this on the PCGamer website

 

[cucker tarlson]

At this point I'm interested of hearing what Volta for masses will be even more than specific date, it's coming in 2018 you can be sure. Is it going to be a purely gaming card like maxwells and pascals, or are they going to trickle some of those double fp16/tensor features down on the GeForce GTX line.

 

[qubit]

I mean that's fair, but for the last three generations of nvidia cards they have waited 10-12 months after the release of their flagship (690/780ti/980ti) before releasing the next generation of cards. 1080ti dropped on the normal schedule in March this year that gives us January through March of next year for volta...

If they give us a Pascal refresh I would push Volta out through mid summer for release without a doubt, but holiday season 2017 is way pushed up timetables

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I wouldn't mind a "GTX 1080 Ti +" lol. While my 1080 does run just fine, I still want the best card, simply because it's there. And I'm hankering for a 4K monitor to go with it, too.

 

[cucker tarlson]

I don't think those "toys" JHH was speaking of are necessarily refreshed pascal gpus. Maybe they're preparing some other whacky gadgets.

 

[Raevenlord]

Just so users don't think this slid by us, the earnings call was held on August 10th, while the NDA on Vega reviews was only lifted on August 14th. So unless Mr. Huang had a crystal ball, or was privy to privileged information, he wasn't refering specifically to Vega, hence why we didn't cover this .

Though yeah, it gives a good story after Vega's reviews are out in the wild with the overall lukewarm reception of it. techspot wasn't one of the publications to use it that way, though.

Also, personal aside, yeah, I don't think NVIDIA has a reason to pull the trigger on Volta. Sad, but true. Pascal is just competitive, and even in the "fine wine" discussion holds and Vega improves more than marginally in performance, NVIDIA can just drop pricing and remain competitive until Volta lands.

 

[xkm1948]

Honestly you may never know. 1080 was perfectly capable where it was and yet Nvidia released 1080Ti not long after. Rumors are just rumors. Remember there were rumors that Vega could challenge TitanXp and mine at 100MH/s

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

Would be nice to have NV HBM cards, but I guess yeah... VEGA was probably even disappointing for the guys in the nvidia office.

 

[Fluffmeister]

There is no real benefit bringing HBM consumer cards to market yet, as AMD have demonstrated.... twice.

 

[Vya Domus]

Memory bandwidth is memory bandwidth , the more the better. The benefit of using HBM is very real.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Of course, but then it's direct competition seems to manage with less. But then Nvidia's memory compression technology is superior and they don't need HBM to cut power consumption.

Still not seeing the benefits for the consumer, but OK.

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

Yeah, the tradeoffs in terms of yield and probably also development costs are significant. Not to mention that Vega is clearly just behind Pascal as an architecture indicating they probably havent invested as much into refining the arch...

 

[Vya Domus]

Compression algorithms can get you so far , they need more memory bandwidth just as much as AMD.

The biggest bottleneck inside a GPU comes from accessing what is referred to as global memory (GDDR5 , HBM etc). The issue is not only memory bandwidth but also latency. HBM offers improvements on both of these fronts. Only thing that prevents Nvidia from using HBM is cost and very limited production , trust me as soon as it is viable for them they will switch to HBM for the consumer products regardless of what AMD does.

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

Which begs the question of why AMD is reaching for HBM... I really doubt that they are actually getting good returns on their investment in adding HBM to their cards.

If anything, Polaris showed that they are better off investing in actually improving their architecture, at least for gaming cards. With HBM, they are just paying early adopters tax when they are the ones on the back foot.

 

[arbiter]

Compression algorithms can get you so far , they need more memory bandwidth just as much as AMD.

The biggest bottleneck inside a GPU comes from accessing what is referred to as global memory (GDDR5 , HBM etc). The issue is not only memory bandwidth but also latency. HBM offers improvements on both of these fronts. Only thing that prevents Nvidia from using HBM is cost and very limited production , trust me as soon as it is viable for them they will switch to HBM for the consumer products regardless of what AMD does.

I don't think so, gddr6 is around the corner which will put it on same field performance wise as HBM. Even gddr5x is near HBM and its not even been push to its max yet. Issue with HBM besides the low yields atm is the inter-poser and mounting the chips to it. It does add possible failure point for more wasted chip's. I see no reason for them to use it if GDDR6 can match up pretty close to HBM at a much cheaper price.

and they don't need HBM to cut power consumption.

To add on this yea they don't need to cut power draw, they got insanely high performance for very little draw. Yea it could lower draw more but no point given cost's and very little performance gains would likely see.

Since kepler AMD has needed every mhz and every GB/s to be on even grounds at the expense though of power draw.