AMD Vega Hardware Reviews

His conclusion is that ~20% of Canada might work for AMD?

Regards,
SB

 

That kind of headcount would at least explain their financial performance.

 

Anyone else loosing HBM OC with 17.9.1?

 

Any msaa changes under 17.9.1?

 

One day impressions of Vega 56:

Stock fan curve gets HBM temps >80C, have changed it to keep it below 80C. The fan is quiet at stock settings but gets quite audible around 3000rpm.
The highest boost I've seen is in the low 1500s, in firestrike it hovers at 1330-1370 and scores around 19-20k(graphics). So while I'm not pleased with AMD's advertised boost clocks never happening on stock, there's good potential in the card since you can be sure that the card can run the advertised boost clock and a bit more if you're willing to tinker.

I've a custom 1070, which has a stock boost of 1950Mhz, in the other PC so will do some comparisons once I get some time. The other PC has 2500k at 4.2Ghz while this one has 1600 at 3.5Ghz, so hopefully there isn't that much of disparity and it doesn't affects many games.

 

I blame bad cooler contact and too much vGPU feed to chip. I ran my card happily at 1530MHz in Hellblade with 1.1V instead of stock 1.25V. Card pretty much stayed fixed around 1500MHz More tweaking to be had once I get over my stomach bug

 

It seems to be a firestrike problem, it's not going above 1V on vGPU, so likely running against power limit there.

 

simple question: how good are the thermal paste/pads of Vega reference? Last time I had an AMD GPU with reference cooling (HD 6950) I earned 5°C simply changing the thermal paste with a mediocre 3y old ceramic paste...

 

So, I've my Vega FE too, after pissing on AMD, I was weak, and had a very good deal on it (approx 450euro, brand new air cooled Vega FE).

I put a EK-WB on it, and it took the place of my Fury X, which I loved, but was vram limited in more and more games. Anyway, I love the card, but the drivers are not really ready, for FE at least. My best "thing" for me is the blockchain driver from august 23. They're is no game mode or wattman, but the power target can be modded with wattool, and it survive a reboot. I'll have to wait other drivers to play with undervolting. But, with +50% PT, the card is locked at 1600mhz on load, so that's a good start, and it's pretty stable with this driver. But damn, the HBM2 is hotter than the gpu. Like, my gpu peak at 42-43, and the hbm around 50 in memory stressing scenario. I'm glad I wc'ed the card when I see the temps on air cooling, or even with the AiO LC version.
I had a long session of xcom2 war of the chosen, not a very demanding game (but eat more than 4gb of vram, so, I see the gain compared to my Fury. I saw a peak at 5500mb+), but no crash after 2-3 hours.

Honestly, without this awesome deal, I probably wouldn't have jumped to Vega, but, having basically a RX 64 16gb at this price, well... I'm very happy with it.

EDIT : Oh and, HBCC is buggy for me. I can enabled it, but the numbers under the slider are crazy, like the lowest value is 24113mb, the highest 24xxx, it make no sense, so, I've disabled it.

 

How much do you have RAM? The numbers on the slider apparently depends on amount of system RAM

 

16gb

 

Depending on whether it counts HBM in it too it might actually be sensible numbers then, except obivously the range should be far bigger

 

It is counter intuitive, but you have togive card full power +50% and then set two top pStates to desired freq. and volts. Otherwise card will run in lower pStates and apply stock vgpu/freq curve. In other words you have to unlock 250W TDP to save power Hope this makes sense.

 

Yeah I guess it count vram too. On RX reviews, the minimum HBCC settings was like 11gb I believe. So I guess it's 8+3. Here its 16+8... Or it's a visual bug, I don't know how to test that.

Min :




Max :




And when I apply it, it's showing 23888 MB...

 

Will tinker with the settings in a week or two, in the meanwhile I'm looking around forums and seeing people doing 30-40% better on various benchmarks with Vega 64 overclocked beyond 1.7Ghz/1Ghz. I've seen first hand how these cards throttle on clockspeeds at stock settings but it's still surprising to see Vega64 can do that much better and approach almost 1080Ti stock performance.

HBCC minimum shows up as 11.6GB here, so they're doing 1.5 x VRAM perhaps? It can go all the way up to 24GB. I've 32GB in my system.
My firestrike scores were swinging from 19k to 19.9k at stock, while I thought it was HBCC first doesn't look like it now.

 

On a Vega FE you'd probably need at least 32GB of system RAM for HBCC to start making sense, and I'd think 64 for it to work really well.

 

Yeah with 16gb of vram, it's not really needed, but I believed that HBCC improves memory usage, data streaming, etc, even when you're not vram limited, but I guess I'm wrong ?

 

That is quite an incredible deal, even Vega 56 would be an attractive buy at that price, let alone a 16GB FE. Good catch!

Can you monitor HBM temps or are the sensors still not exposed?

I'd be interested in seeing how it performs at stock and after tweaks in something repeatable like FFXIV heavensward bench, it's not used very often presumably because it's particularly impressive graphically but I've found it to be an excellent test case for OC/UV validation. Test results between runs are very consistent and it responds well to small tweaks made to the card,its also very very demanding and actually pushes power consumption far above what looping 3dmark would.

 

Yeah I can monitor HBM temps, since I already talk about them in my post By the way, I move from blockchain to beta 17.8.2 for FE (which are 17.8.1 in reality I believe), and I can control frequencies and voltages too now with wattool.

You mean this benchmark ? https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/final-fantasy-xiv-heavensward-benchmark-download.html
It won't really be "stock" for me, since I've already a waterblock on it. You just want scores ? Or temps too ?

 

Has anyone tested how the Adam demo from unity runs on Vega? I've tried searching but found nothing so far, could anyone with an rx vega or fe give it a run out of curiosity?

Download link to Adam demo.