Anyone else getting that feeling Vega will be the next R9 290X ? No one really expected that card to be as savage as it ended up to be. It was so powerful they could afford rebranding it to R9 390X and it was still competitive against brand new NVIDIA cards with all new (or at least highly refreshed) architecture.
Until we have the actual specs we will not know, but I will try anyway, because i have been drinking.
The power of Hawaii (the chip for 290x/390x) comes from brute force, AMD showed as many cores as they dared into that chip together with an unheard of 512 bit GDDR memory buss with what was at the time fast chips, this resulted in a card that has the potential to melt plastic under oc, and loves water cooling, basically a chip hellbent on being fastest and doing it with brute force, since the power is there driver optimizing has good headroom and that is why the 290x launched against the 780 ti, but sill plays all games on 1080p just fine, as long as you do not care that it might break some standards (max 300 W power? ha). It is interesting to note that the last time Nv tried that it resulted in the GF100 powering the GTX480, it took Nv half a year to stamp out the GF110 powering the GTX 580 help, after that Nv went back to the drawing board and came up with the Kepler architecture in the GK100 powering the GTX 680 that finaly could match the WLIW 4/5 architecture from ATI/AMD in power/performance.
Vega on the other hand, has a different approach from Hawaii, first page, second paragraph:
The idea behind "Vega" is that conventional approaches to making GPUs, so AMD believes, will not be able to cope with emerging workloads.
Therefore they have completely changed the design philosophy from previews GCN chips, where the old bread relied on the fact that AMD had the theoretical computing advantage over the corresponding Nv architecture they were only able to match the smaller Nv chips. Now AMD is trying to spend less silicon on sheer compute power (the memory bandwidth is still massive) and in stead have introduced an local cash structure to feed their admittedly superior crunching cores.
That leaves us with a core that is less like what we have seen from GCN previously, in stead it relies more on the drivers and other tricks to get speedups. This will require closer supervision from AMD to ensure that the chip preforms optimally. therefore it will actually be the most Nv like chip from AMD in a long time, as Nv ever since the GTX 680 have been hard on the optimizing game.
Vega will NOT be at its optimal when lanced. the architecture is built to be smart, not brute force. Therefore it will not be as god as the 290X. that been said, a lot of the smarts is in the silicone, wile Nv still does most of its optimizing in the driver.
So in short, no, I do not think Vega will be a new 290x.
I am still going to seriously consider getting one after i see the benchmarks.
But 6 month away :-(
