Nvidia Gets SALTY

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Seriously Perm?

If it was just a die Shrink plus increased clock speeds and more bandwith, then it wouldn't have outperformed the old Vega 64 by such a large margin. Radeon VII has some architectural improvements, because the numbers don't add up otherwise. It's certainly not the Bandwith, as many of these games listed weren't limited in that domain to begin with.

Vega 7's clockspeed increased by 16.4%. - That means the Render Output Pipelines (A big limiter on Vega), Texture Mapping Units operate that much faster. - The ROPS is a big one as AMD always seems to be ROP starved.

Compute increased by 9.5% over Vega 64.

Bandwidth increased by a whopping 112.27%.

The 25% or so increases is more or less from increases in clockrate and that bandwidth boost... Vega was never compute bound to begin with.

So yes, seriously. Vega 7 is just like RX 590, few enhancements... Bulk of the gains due to clock increases thanks to the smaller fabrication process opening up extra headroom.

Is there some secret sauce hidden somewhere? Possibly, but we don't know at this point in time... And it is best to leave such speculation until Anandtech has done a thorough analysis on the hardware when it releases.

Bofferbrauer2 said:
And you got the wrong keyword. The keyword is also, as like I said it's for someone who plays games, but who uses his GPU also for other things, like work for instance. It is what the Titan series was on NVidia's side of things... until the RTX Titan that is, which got turned into a pure gaming GPU without any productivity extras while keeping the huge pricetag.

They still marketed it to Gamers. - AMD has a different brand for non-gamers... You might have heard of them under the banner of "Fire Pro".

AMD could have also done what they initially did with Vega... And called it the "Frontiers Edition" - Which WAS marketed towards gamers+professionals.

Drawing comparisons to Titan is a bit silly, they both have vastly different price points and targeted audiences... I mean. The Titan is actually a good card for professionals, gamers and prosumers.

WolfpackN64 said:
I think some people dont get the Radeon VII that well. Perdormance on par with the RTX 2080 for games is impressive at the same price. Ray tracing at this point doesn,t matter. DLSS at this point doesn't matter.

AMD can't just be "on par" with the RTX 2080.

The issue is... By the time the Vega 7 launches, the RTX 2080 may have dropped a notch on the pricing ladder.
...Plus the RTX 2080 isn't even nVidia's fastest GPU, the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan sit above it, let alone what Pascal offers.

The Geforce RTX 2080 not only gets essentially "Free" Ray Tracing and DLSS... But does everything whilst consuming less power... For the gamer, there is little value in what Vega 7 offers... And this is coming from someone who generally only buys AMD GPU's.

WolfpackN64 said:

The problem is that this card will absolutely clobber NVIDIA in the prosumer market. The massive amount of memory bandwith combined, combined with Vega's compute prowess and appearantly untouched FP64 performance (remember this card is a repurposed datacenter card) will eat into Titan V and RTX Titan sales.

You can get monster workstation performance for a lot less then what NVIDIA's charging you for and that hurts them. This card does just ok for gaming, I think AMD knows fully wel the real meat and potatoes is to be found in the mid range when they'll release Navi later on.

AMD has always offered GPU's with surprising amounts of compute... Hence why they were gobbled up left, right and center by crypto currency miners. - But games generally need more than that. - Vega 7 should do well in those markets that are looking for more compute.

What AMD really needs to do is ditch Graphics Core Next and move onto Next-Gen already.

WolfpackN64 said:

At this point, NVIDIA's response is like Apple: "No one does what we do, so the competition doesn't compare". To bad NVIDIA's distinguishing features (RTX, DLSS) are clearly suffering from 1st generation syndrome. AMD can let NVIDIA do all the work cracking open the initial market for ray tracing because it'll be years from now untill the feature will be mainstream and widespread.

I don't actually like nVidia's approach to Ray Tracing. - Ray Tracing is generally a compute and memory constrained issue, so nVidia has taken what seems to be a fixed-function route which is efficient from a transistor point of view with the amount of performance it offers, but it also means those units cannot be leveraged for general rasterization tasks... And lets face it, we still live in a rasterization world.

Hopefully AMD takes another approach to Ray Tracing.

It smells like the Geforce FX all of again.... Lots of fixed function stuff at the expense of other hardware... And the irony was... It is the perfect Storm for AMD to pull another Radeon 9700 Pro all over again.
However... Despite nVidia essentially crippling itself, AMD still cannot get a decisive victory even at 7nm, it's a testament to how efficient nVidia's GPU's are right now, AMD is years away from even matching them.