AMD Radeon VII Announcement and Discussion

Nevertheless, for the moment, these are excellent news! It would be very depressing if all AMD had until Navi was the Vega 64.

Regarding it competing with RTX2080, nvidia made it easier this time around (not on purpose of course) directing resources for Ray Tracing instead of further pushing performance on traditional rendering.

I wonder if the profit margin on the Vega 64 is actually very close or higher than what nvidia gets with the much larger RTX2080 die... They can make more on each wafer at least..

 

What are you basing that assessment on?

 

Well, I admit, I didn't see this coming.

Thought it would be way too expensive for them to ship a competitive 7nm chip, even a lower binned one like this. Then again I didn't anticipate that they'd charge $700 for it.

Will people buy it, not caring about raytracing? I dunno, maybe. Let's... wait for sales numbers!

 

So at the same price and performance of a 2080 the choice is clear: for gamers, the choice is going to be the 2080: for RTX and DLSS. For compute/AI folks, the Vega will be better for the 16GB HBM2.

 

Probably goes hand in hand with the wider memory bus? Wonder if they doubled L2 cache as well then.

 

DLSS is just a rather convenient lie. Temporal upscaling looks just as good, a bit better really, and provides just as much performance. Well, depending on how you do use temporal upscaling, it can look better and get much more performance. And considering DLSS can only be used on a limited number of games, and only looks good at 4k generally... meh?

Raytracing support on the other hand, well I'd want that. Actually I'd want mesh shaders just as much, if not more. They're not "sexy" like raytracing, but odds are they'll be straight up required for more games come next gen consoles than even raytracing will be. So yeah, given equal performance per dollar, I'd take a 2080. Ah well, what are you supposed to do with lower binned chips anyway?

 

IMO, neither option is particularly appealing at their price points. If Vega VII had been priced at $599, it would have presented consumers an interesting choice. TBH, I don't think it's their intention to either make or sell Vega VII in volume, though.

 

Nvidia is not going exclusive with Samsung 7nm EUV they will also have 7nm parts manufactured at TSMC just like they are doing now with with Pascal (TSMC and Samsung). The article about Nvidia only using Samsung 7nm EUVin 2020 was pure speculation that Nvidia was only going to use Samsung.

 

I agree. This card may end up being hard to find and more expensive because of that.

 

Maybe they have primitive shaders and NGG now activated? At Vega 64 bandwidth increase doesn’t changed much the performance.

Will we see beyond3d results from you.

 

No, NGG might be enabled in next gfx iteration, and VII is still gfx9

 

But why not. It’s a complet new Chip and there was enough time to fix it.

 

Yep. +25% real-world performance and 2x memory bandwidth for x1.5 the street price of Vega64... nah, not gonna fly with anyone but very hardcore gamers.

Still waiting for mid-range Navi (and high-end Arcturus), which should bring new (or heavily revised) microarchitecture....
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There are actually five major new features that were presented for Vega:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7jfrta/request_official_statement_about_dsbr_primitive/dr6rikf'
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:vega-whitepaper.pdf
https://www.anandtech.com/show/11002/the-amd-vega-gpu-architecture-teaser
https://techreport.com/review/31224/the-curtain-comes-up-on-amd-vega-architecture

... and as of now, it looks like these features either do not integrate well into existing drivers/APIs, or the required hardware is not working as expected.

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/for...opengl-proprietary-driver?p=970697#post970697
https://techreport.com/news/33153/radeon-rx-vega-primitive-shaders-will-need-api-support
https://www.techpowerup.com/240879/amd-cancels-implicit-primitive-shader-driver-support
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/no-ngg-for-current-gen-vega.2553043/

We do not know what exactly is broken in the first place.

 

I doubt they'll produce more than happens to fall out of the binning process for the super expensive MI cards.

Was hoping to see Navi at CES, but no such luck.

 

They will be useless unless SE's raster engines are also doubled in width. These should rasterize and export 128 pixels per clock now and it's to be confirmed yet

 

There was an email exchange with driver developers concerning why attempts to allocate memory for NGG were failing. It was stated that drivers were not ready to support NGG for GFX9. Vega 20 is a new chip, but it's still GFX9.
It was promised that support would come for a next generation GPU.
Vega 20 is potentially GFX9.something, but keeping the base number the same normally denotes a variation of the same generation.

 

Leaked footage of the dual gpu card.

 

$699 is not a volume price point. There's a reason that people went bananas buying up all the 1080ti stock as soon as this price point was announced for this level of performance for the 2080.

 

So base clock is 1450MHz, and peak clock is 1800MHz, and avg boost clock will be lower than peak. The card has two 8 pin power connectors.



I have my doubt this card will match the 2080, the benchmarks shown were highly selective, even showing a game with a broken Vulkan path (Strange Brigade), even though it's DX12 path is working properly, but we shall see.

That's assuming NVIDIA will not redesign the architecture as well.