So on "ToTTen's Scale of Underwhelmingness" that goes between 0 and 10, AMD managed to turn this keynote all the way up to 11.
Not only did they show that Vega's "H1 2017"
availability actually means "
last 3 (three) days of H1 2017", their only game demo only served to actually make Vega look
worse.
They have their latest high-end 16-core/32-thread CPU and future top-end graphics card working in Crossfire. That's nice, but then somehow the folks over at AMD thought it'd be a good idea to show all that using
the least demanding AAA game of 2017 that uses DX11 and
gets zero performance gains above 6-cores/6-threads. And they did it at 4K, which a single non-overclocked 1080Ti can handle at 60 FPS.
And the cherry on top is they didn't show performance numbers,
but forgot to turn vsync on.
I get that you don't want to turn vsync on if you want to show raw FPS output, but if you're not showing FPS numbers then you're simply being stupid or very ignorant by showing tearing in a demo made for tens of thousands of potential customers.
Even if their contract with Bethesda demands they have to show Prey in all their keynotes and shows (which is terrible if true), they should have at least shown the setup working in an unknown value 8K or 3*4K in an Eyefinity arrangement.
And then what they formally showed was what all the motherboard makers had been showing for 2 days, which are the specs for the Threadripper platform. But then they showed zero description of SKUs and pricing for the new processors. So apart from spouting a couple of launch dates (which were pretty underwhelming themselves) they managed to bring exactly zero news of their own during this keynote.
Oh and turns out the Asus Ryzen laptop that was being teased is just a large laptop using a Ryzen 7 AM4 CPU and a Polaris 10 GPU (is anyone going to buy this thing over a laptop with a GTX1070?).
Only positive thing I saw was the 4-core + 11CUs Raven Ridge being shown up and running in a 2-in-1 convertible. Though it was only an AMD prototype, Having an actual OEM showing a future product would have shown a lot more confidence.
And almost all the slides they showed were the actual same slides they had in Taipei. They couldn't even bother to make new slides?
I'm glad I was asleep during this thing.