AMD Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 12 and Vega 20 Rumors and Discussion

I mis-remembered the diagram then, with in-flight pixels needing to reach export before preemption can occur.

My position is that there are trade-offs and that the developer must decide. That doesn't leave much room for the HWS to infer what the tradeoffs are.

Full preemption of the graphics context is very costly, and it's generally the best choice when there aren't alternatives.
Compute is able to preempt at a far smaller granularity, which is where discussing this often requires stating what is being preempted, and at what granularity. There are vastly different things operating under the label of preemption.

That's called QoS, and predictable with overall performance being poorer is often what real-time entails.
It is not about outperforming a solution that is highly unresponsive, it is about making the hardware acceptable for task types that will not tolerate typical GPU latencies or safe from having the system reset the device due to timeouts.

Gating off whole SIMDs is not new, while going down to the lane level has not come up for architectures in general discussion.
Doing per-lane voltage adjustment on top of that also hasn't come up for current architectures.

 

Rumors? 2 separate shops already listed the cards on their page (at least one if not both removed the prices, possibly now the pages too, but they were up quite some time)

 

Newegg still has the listing w/ price.

 

That's what they aimed for, not sure if it's implemented yet. In DirectX, it isn't. There it's pixel level for graphics and primitive for compute.

 

The 375 watt figure is really odd. Not only is it easily the largest GPU TDP I've ever heard of (how many power connectors is that?) but it also, bizarrely, signifies Vega would go down significantly in perf/watt figures from Polaris. Or at least the Frontier Editions would.

For reference Polaris gets about .046 teraflops per watt (at 11.5 teraflops for 250 watts). Under the assumed TDP it'd go down to .034. I can't really see the newer GPU losing 26% of its efficiency. Now one possibility is that the Frontier Editions are basically uselessly bad early cards AMD is hoping to make money off of anyway. It's not like they haven't done new types of chip binning recently (Nano). And the right sort of customer might want to take an order of 13.1 teraflop GPUs regardless of tdp, it being at least near Nvidia's not deliverable for several months/way too expensive 15 teraflop Volta stuff.

But the other possibility is that it's just some typo someone from AMD made and it's supposed to be 275 watts. A 10% increase in TDP from the usual 250 watt high end, for a roughly 5% increase in clockspeed from the earlier performance figures of 12.5 teraflops seems entirely reasonable. Especially for a "Gold plated/high end bin" ridiculous kind of GPU like the $1800 one is supposed to be. Don't know which of these is true but I'd bet it's one or the other at the very least.

 

My bet is that it's just what the cooler can dissipate, and not the tdp.

 

The Fury-X-cooler was rated at up to 500 watts. Why would they step down? 375 Watt is just the number the PEG and two 8-pin connectors can officially supply. It does not have to be related to any figure that's somehow connected to power draw, as we know by now.

 

Oh - and btw, selective/selected previews popping up:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3202...vega-frontier-edition-vs-nvidia-titan-xp.html

 

So, in the preview, the AMD official clearly states the FE card is for professionals, it may not be using certified drivers, but they are definitely using some kind of pro drivers. They are even using a Radeon Pro renderer API in the CAD application. The guy actually outright admits it, the FE card has the advantage of workstation drivers, compared to TitanXp which lacks them. Will be curious to know about the difference between the FE edition and the WX line, now that they are very similar.

Also they did gaming comparisons, but with no fps counter, which is a curious omission!

 

The positive thing is that gaming performance was apparently indistinguishable from Titan Xp, which sounds good for RX-version which is supposed to do better in games
(though gametests were limited to 3 games)

 

Maybe, but you can't really distinguish 65fps from 75fps, or a 100fps from 90fps with the naked eye. You need fps counters fort that, which was curiously lacking here.

This is actually suspicious, the fact that AMD can't get a clear performance advantage in 2 AMD optimized games using AMD optimized Vulkan and DX12 paths is clearly telling. Fjij was faster in Sniper Elite 4 than 1070 and 980Ti, despite being slower overall. I expected Vega to at least show a clear advantage in this title. FuryX was also faster than 1070 and remains faster than 980Ti in Doom, before NV drivers uplifted the 1070 performance above the FuryX.

 

Did not knew that. Thx.

 

I always found the whole "But it's not a pro card!" line of thought somewhat puzzling, considering:

http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/frontier/

 

So these FE:s seems to have "semi-pro-drivers" that isn't as optimized as the real "Radeon Pro" Vegas will be that comes later, and "semi-gaming-drivers" that isn't as optimized as the "Radeon RX Vegas will be that also comes later?

Strange product launch. I don't get it?

 

It seemed fairly clear in the article. They've been comparing to consumer Titan Xp because that is the targeted professional market for FE.

Why is that at all suspicious? It's exactly what would be expected given what we know so far and the PC World article explained as much.

Those AMD "optimized" titles wouldn't have been well optimized for an unreleased architecture running incomplete drivers. Why would anyone have expected AMD to present numbers that aren't final, likely to increase significantly, and aren't on the gaming clocked part? They simply ballparked current performance against Titan Xp as that appears to be Vega's target. That's been known for a while based on theoretical specs.

 

Or maybe... FE-edition is with an early batch of the silicon? RX and Pro from a newer?

 

Why would that be?

Frequencies difference? That's the result of the same chip, different binning

 

What seems clear is that they have a professional card that they absolutely positively refuse to compare to competing professional cards at any price point.

 

It's probably the same hardware, but unfinished drivers with no certification targeting a price sensitive market. They even stated as the use case Xp wouldn't have had pro drivers because of cost. The WX line would be the comparison for Nvidia's pro line and we haven't seen that yet.

 

And Yet an 800$ castrated GP104 Quadro is equal or better than Vega FE.

Because they have done so in the past? and multiple times already? To just not do it now in the presence of the competitor is a huge omission on AMD's part, one that signifies total inconfidence in their product.

Who said they are unfinished drivers? they are just uncertified, meaning direct support from AMD for these pro apps is not available. Also please stop quoting the article, AMD statements in the video are clear enough on their own