RzrTrek:

It looks alright on paper, but it's very noisy, hot, draws a hell of a lot of power and it's definitely starting to show its age in the games I play. I also don't believe a refresh of Polaris is the way to go. AMD will have to come up with a new architecture to counter the aforementioned problems. Plus their drivers has been pure garbage since the launch of Adrenalin back in December of 2017 - not to mention my gripes with AMD Settings and ReLive.

This mostly goes to what brand have you chosen. If I would have chosen Asus or Gigabite over my Sapphire card, then yes I would say the same, but as I didn't then my observations are completely different. My card, even though Vega64, is not hot or noisy. But that is mainly due to the fact, that I have chosen to buy Sapphire card. And regarding the drivers... well I have owned nVidia card for past 3 years and let me tell you that after 3 different updates in a row that basically bricked my PC and forced me to reinstall Windows, I had to postpone any new driver installation at least 2 weeks to wait if they release a hotfix for any new release. In the end I was skipping updates completely and upgrading only if they released driver for a game I really wanted to play and had bad performance in. Otherwise it was not worth the risk. Ok it's not fair comparison, but I own my Vega 64 for 3 weeks now, installed 3 different versions of drivers and so far I've seen no problems. Hopefully it will stay like this.

pimpineasy:

Nvidia releases RTX & AMD response is to rebadge polaris? scallywags re badge that flop vega. AMD has 2 platform for your revisions gpu laptop and apu that need 1080 asap not 1366x768 13 fps. stop cutting into the desktop platform with toaster upgrades for $1500. 1500 my car get like real turbo boost upgrades. $1500 nos kit easy add 500hp. yeah i get ticket and cant reg but crap aint no toaster. This needs to be at vega 56 level period. 4500 3dmark points x 15% = 650 ish points not worth it buy a used 1070ti for $200 man it will get even cheaper and use less power. trash gpu see you guys 2020 when i still donnt care about what amd is calling new tech rebadged vegas instead of putting them in peoples houses 2017. Stop cutting into the desktop platform with toaster upgrades trying to floating your intel & nvidia inferior product. all your gonna do is piss off your customer with a garbage product.

Not sure what you're saying at all...It's kind of a ramble but vega wasn't a failure, and where are you getting this $1500 price from? 1.You can't really count used cards in market shares, they don't do much for either company. 2. $200 for a used 1070ti? You need to post this source, but go ahead and buy one for $200. See how well it runs. Don't complain when you don't have a warranty. 3. This is not a vega rebadge, Vega is separate from Polaris. You have 2 posts in this topic just trolling AMD, no more of that.

Vega lost a few features due to well I guess we don't really know the full circumstances (Primitive shader stages seem to be coming in with Navi again though for recent Vulkan code commits for AMD's Linux patch submissions ranging from Vega 12, Vega 20 and Navi support and other stuff.) but overall up to 30% faster than Fury and a bit more via tuning although it seems to stabilize more from having a higher power limit or possibly undervolting due to AMD squeezing out those last "up to" percentage gains (3 - 5% or so.) via the default settings. (And that overdrive clock profile should just be tossed out really.) I can't really see it as a failure but it couldn't quite close the gap to NVIDIA's lead and the pricing at it's worst made the 1080Ti *cheaper* while around having 15 - 20% or above performance lead. (Up to 30% in a couple of games actually.) Remains to be seen what Polaris 600 could be or what the GPU will be called, if it closes in or matches Vega 56 to 64 that would be interesting too although without going for a even higher clock speed or GDDR6 I wonder how much room there is without majorly overhauling the GPU core and features which then wouldn't really be Polaris. Would slot in nicely with the Vega cards still in low availability if it can get close though even if it might not outmatch the 1070/1070ti or 1080 from NVIDIA's side assuming pricing isn't a issue due to the newness of the 12nm fabrication and whatever the initial availability there will be. (Probably not the most complex chip compared to the upcoming Navi GPU but still going to be a new process though I guess it also tests this fabrication node out a bit before full production with the new GPU arch.) Don't really have too much knowledge about this sort of thing myself though but I'm curious how it'll end up though without more info it's mostly just speculation for now and what might be a good position for AMD. 🙂 Price against performance and whether it'll match Vega or not, I'm thinking it might get close but we'll see since it's different from the 300 series and Fiji this time with Vega now having similar or additional architecture improvements. (Even if it sticks close to the standard GCN setup for cores, ROPS and such.) EDIT: I do find it ridiculous how Vega can shave of almost 200mv of voltage or more depending on GPU quality / binning too. My own settings for Vega 56 use 850Mhz for the (Hynix) memory and 1450 to 1500 Mhz for the GPU core at 1.0v instead of 1.2v for the GPU core instead of 1500 - 1590 but that reduction barely registers though the power draw and heat reduction certainly helps. Also helps with the HBM and it's temp sensitivity. 😀 Though I would expect AMD to be a bit less aggressive with Polaris stock settings although anything goes for Navi if AMD is trying to bridge the gap to the 1080Ti or above and positioning their higher-end models of that around NVIDIA's 2000 series lineup but that's something we'll see next year, maybe. Ha ha. (And the die shrink should reduce power usage further plus maybe improvements to HBM2 could help with availability and it's power and clock speed efficiency.)

i agree with the analysis by AlmondMan. spot on. imho, refreshed Polaris is going to be a real thing...at the low end. 7nm is not "far away" it is here. the AMD lineup will look like this - refreshed Polaris (at higher profitability as well due to die shrink and proven architecture/drivers) at the entry level with the elimination of all models not fully 1080p/60fps and full Polaris being 1440p with a price drop. Navi will destroy the mid-market with 4k performance at the lowest price we've seen ($350-450) and then a wait for the refreshed and tweaked Vega 7nm. i get this from AMD's prospectus, road maps, and earnings calls. and the 2080/ti will still be comfortable...barely. AMD is far more profitable (at the fab) with higher yields than either Intel or Nvidia. and to the point of Nvidia, be very afraid when the fabs can accommodate more contract production...they most definitely have something waiting...they're just behind the 8 ball atm.

user1:

it makes sense, if 7nm is still fairly far away, moving to 12nm is an easy thing to do in the meantime to keep things moving

Since AMD has all their 7nm planned for TSMC, they have freed some capacity at GloFo. And they kind of have to consume at GloFo due to contract. And yes, I am late 🙂

PrMinisterGR:

I hope this is just trolling, and not how your reasoning processes work. For the actual point of this, I feel that AMD wants to use as much as possible of the GloFO capacity, since they will most likely penalties for not using it by practically shifting everything to TSMC next year.

At the right price, I'd get one right now. I couldn't get an RX570/580 because of miners and I'm currently with a tiny RX560 (that performs the same as my old R9 270X). I can't afford cards over 250€ so this refresh is what I've been waiting since the beginning of the year.

AlmondMan:

With a poor cooler sure.

MSI Radeon RX 580 Gaming X 8GB ($400).

AlmondMan:

Draws a little extra power, but nothing meaningful in the big picture.

Don't pick a fight you can't win.

AlmondMan:

It runs fine in most games. Turn down the settings a little and you'll be even better off.

Not with inadequate drivers and delayed "game ready" support it isn't.

RzrTrek:

Not with inadequate drivers and delayed "game ready" support it isn't.

I think it's funny when same person always have same issue. Have you considered that since there are really not people around replicating your issues, they may be isolated to your system? We usually call it PICNIC. You even restarted that horrid train where randoms did ask 3 times a month: "When is next driver coming?" I hope you realized that we no longer have AMD's representative/community manager around. My humble advice: "Get your system back in order."

@PrMinisterGR & @vbetts Well pimpineasy so far all his latest posts follow the same stracture , presenting arguments in a confusing way! I mean literally i was really trying to make sense out of it . Also he follows a golden rule ...if the word amd is on his post then trash or garbage is always there ! And vice versa!

So this topic isn't to argue on power usage and what not, nor to down talk anyone or anything here so...Let's hop back on topic boys and girls!

vbetts:

So this topic isn't to argue on power usage and what not, nor to down talk anyone or anything here so...Let's hop back on topic boys and girls!

Really? Do we have to wait for an exact headline before we can have a discussion about a specific topic? Power usage is 100% relevant, by the way, when discussing changes in semiconductor manufacturing, including existing shortcomings. Do you "moderate" too when people bash Nvidia and especially Intel?

SniperX:

Really? Do we have to wait for an exact headline before we can have a discussion about a specific topic? Power usage is 100% relevant, by the way, when discussing changes in semiconductor manufacturing, including existing shortcomings. Do you "moderate" too when people bash Nvidia and especially Intel?

Hey look, this is an example on how to get points.

I don't think this news will pan out.

I always wondered what polaris would have been capable of if it had been able to clock as high as Nvidias cards, It's not good that AMD has to sell larger die GPU's to compete in terms of profitability for them.

Oh common AMD you can do better then that,.. I wonder why they kept 7nm exclusive to professional ecosystem.. I would like to see a 96 ROP and 6144 core vega96 @ 7nm , that would do some serious shizzle 😀 Vega64: 4096:256:64 "Vega96": 6144:384:96, that looks doable from 16nm to 7nm no? or might that be Navi? I'm pretty sure this imaginary Vega96 would rival 2080rtx and 2080ti np 😀

-Tj-:

Oh common AMD you can do better then that,.. I wonder why they kept 7nm exclusive to professional ecosystem.. I would like to see a 96 ROP and 6144 core vega96 @ 7nm , that would do some serious shizzle 😀 Vega64: 4096:256:64 "Vega96": 6144:384:96, that looks doable from 16nm to 7nm no? or might that be Navi?

Actually, not really - At the speed Vega runs, memory bandwidth becomes a real problem - that's why performance doesn't scale linearly at all going from Vega 56 to Vega 64 (and the former has a better price/performance ratio). If AMD could clock HBM2 higher, they wouldn't even need to spin a new chip to gain 10-15% more performance. Moreover, latest Vega chips use 12nm - the jump to 7nm would not bring that much more max frequencies. Power draw, though... As for keeping 7nm for pro cards, it's probably because the main interest for 7nm is lower power use for a given processing power - pro tasks can be massively parallelized and 2 cards running not-too-fast are better than a single card running as fast as the two other combined for 2.5 times the cost and 3 times the power draw. This might just be why they didn't go with a "Vega32" for the new mid-range : Vega is more geared towards general computing when Polaris is a gaming-only chip. And maybe it doesn't work well with GDDR. Polaris 30 could also be a reduced cost OEM only chip for laptops. Funnily enough, no one suggested that - while before then AMD always announced a "cut down" version of the Polaris chip for entry level.

Memory accounts for a part but there's something else. Hopefully whatever upcoming design AMD has planned will resolve some of these issues whatever the core cause is, although it might also be part of the driver software limiting things a bit for DX11 compared to VLK and DX12 where the GPU's start really working to their utmost. 🙂 (OC'ing memory does give results though but from the tests I've been reading up on at a 30% overclock from 800Mhz up to 1040 Mhz and a slight boost to 1700 Mhz for core clocks up from 1598 Mhz then there should have been more than a 8% total performance increase although memory alone accounts for about 5% so it's certainly a boost although not that big of one compared to the clock speed increase.) Hmm and I see now, AMD is using up the 12nm they have for this and then it's all focused on 7nm after that I suppose. I was thinking about 7nm entirely but that's not the case at all. 🙂 And I guess Polaris gets GDDR5 or maybe GDDR5X unless AMD spends the time and money on a GDDR6 design but I suppose that's a bit less likely although it would probably bump up performance a bit more and might give a nice total bandwidth even it falls short in other areas compared to HBM, though it should be less costly. 🙂 (Hopefully that also goes for the retail product ha ha.) EDIT: Hmm wonder if a 580 with a die shrink and some tweaks would be what to expect realistically, guess it depends on what 12nm can do and what AMD will do with Polaris30 here if anything beyond shrinking it down to a smaller node. Just have to wait and see I suppose.

AMD is doing this because they have nothing new for the holiday season while nVIdia will have brand new, top to bottom cards out by then. The best part is seeing the reaction from those who spent so much time criticizing nVidia for the RTX which at least is a new product, while saying this is a good move by AMD. I guess they had to so something considering Navi wont be around till 2H, 2019

RzrTrek:

It looks alright on paper, but it's very noisy, hot, draws a hell of a lot of power and it's definitely starting to show its age in the games I play. I also don't believe a refresh of Polaris is the way to go. AMD will have to come up with a new architecture to counter the aforementioned problems. Plus their drivers has been pure garbage since the launch of Adrenalin back in December of 2017 - not to mention my gripes with AMD Settings and ReLive.

AMD doesn't have to do a thing but offer a bit more proformance at a good price. Nvidia made their own bed.

They really should not bring out a other refresh with a 5 to 10% increase in performance , what they need to do is bring out a GFX card that is as fast as a gtx1080 but under 300$(and that should be the price in stores) while not eating more power then a vega56 , that would sell like hoot cake.