AMD’s RX Vega isn’t even out yet but already has an extensive and very interesting history.
We first learned of the chip in March of 2016 from a roadmap that showed Vega AND Navi for
the first time.
Interestingly this was just days after rumours of a Geforce 1000 series, putting a release
date of May that year . Now roadmaps aren’t meant to be taken literally, pixel-for-pixel,
but it was pretty clear from this that Vega would arrive AFTER Nvidia’s 1000 series.
Polaris would help ease the wait by being launched first.
POLARIS also ended up coming out a month after, but was never intended to compete with the
high end.
Instead it did a nice job of covering the low to mid end of the market, with better
power efficiency than older AMD designs.
The relation between Vega and Polaris was never made entirely clear.
Normally you get a new architecture that replaces the older one, but AMD’s strategy changed
a bit with Vega.
It wasn’t intended to replace Polaris, but rather to complement it as a ‘follow up’
family, presumably to bridge the time gap between Polaris and Navi.
Since Polaris was to take the low and mid-end, and Vega the high, it wasn’t even out of
the question that Vega could complete the 400 series’ lineup, perhaps being called
the 490 as was expected following the naming schemes of previous AMD generations.
But AMD never officially said anything about that and as we all know now, Vega didn’t
become the 490.
Polaris later got re-released as the 500 series, the 90 performance tier was never reintroduced
and still, Vega was nowhere to be seen.
Like I said, roadmaps aren’t meant to be taken literally, pixel-for-pixel… but if
you DID do that, a few interesting things happen.
Firstly, the pixels here indicate a Vega release at the end of 2016 or early 2017.
Secondly, Vega’s positioning makes it out to be the most ahead of its time compared
with the other architectures listed.
Of course, we know now that its actual launch in August of 2017 puts it a lot more in line
with the others…
if the performance per watt is still to be believed.
A 2017 release was also hinted at way back in May 2016, where at a JPMorgan conference,
Ruth mentions a follow-up to Polaris in 2017.
This is assumed to be Vega, judging from the roadmap she referenced.
And later on in 2016 they said they would launch Vega in the first half of 2017 .
And Vega was indeed officially announced on January 5th, 2017.
Though not before some interesting teaser information was released about it.
The previous December, Star Wars Battlefront 2 Rogue One was officially shown running on
Vega.
And although no FPS figures were shown, Lisa herself said that it was running at 4K at
greater than 60 FPS.
What was more interesting – and a lot more controversial- was Tekknological’s video
which showed Vega running Doom at 4K . This time, the FPS was shown.
Its scores placed it at, or slightly above, the Geforce 1080.
Which let’s not forget had already been out for 6 months at this point, so it was
easy for people to compare it . And people did.
And were downvoted and mocked for it.
And who could forget the countdown?
On January 1st, AMD released a video on their Youtube channel called ‘After the Uprising’.
The video itself showed a boy with a drum walking around for a while before finding
lots of drums and being very happy about it.
But the video also doubled up as a teaser for Vega and is where the ‘make some noise’
and ‘poor Volta’ memes come from.
It linked to the announcement countdown which ended on January 5th.
I think people were expecting the announcement to include a release date or some benchmarks
from this but we mostly got talks about Vega’s new design and how new and improved it was
. The closest we got to a benchmark was another video of Doom running at 4K . We had already
had this the month before, but I think that this one is more important since it was shown
from AMD themselves.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that it was chosen to show Vega in the best
possible light.
Oh, and we also got the making of that drum video .
As well as the Doom benchmark, a few days prior to Vega’s official announcement we
also got an FPS demo of Star Wars.
Since it was locked at 60, we can’t see how much higher it could achieve, but it did
occasionally dip below that figure . These both indicated performance slightly
above that of a Geforce 1080 and were topic of hot debate.
On one hand, you could say that these were hand-picked games and demos to show Vega at
its strongest.
But on the other, you could argue that they were using early drivers that could be improved
a lot more before release day.
Some speculated that AMD was sandbagging, where they deliberately underplay how good
their graphics cards are.
This would keep Nvidia guessing and would give us all a nice surprise come launch day.
But AdoredTV stated that if they were sandbagging then they had only just started using that
strategy with the official announcement . It’s true: when AMD has had a good product they’ve
proudly shouted about it!
And why shouldn’t they.
Vega’s silence until just weeks before its actual release is a very different story.
Anyway, Adoredtv concluded that overclocked 1080 performance, so many months later, wasn’t
good enough.
I like what AdoredTV did.
He got existing information about the product, then used common sense and reason to come
to a level-headed conclusion about Vega.
Which I think is smart!
Even if I were to disagree with his conclusion, at least I could see where he was coming from.
Really, since Vega’s announcement I’ve been amazed with the creativity I’ve seen
in the community.
The mental gymnastics required to dismiss or to downright contradict the evidence we’re
presented with is truly next-level stuff.
AMD and Nvidia are truly blessed to have such a devout and blindly loyal fanbase.
I’m sure these are only a loud minority but they really have made some noise this
year and is part of the reason why the information leading up to Vega’s release is so fascinating
to cover.
At the end of February, at GDC 2017’s Capsaicin & Cream event, they announced that Vega’s
official name would be…
RX Vega . I mean, AMD didn’t promise any sort of announcement but you can understand
the community would have excitedly watched that hoping for something.
Then, mid May we saw Vega running Sniper Elite 4 at around 60 FPS, some bits faster, some
bits slower, which Adoredtv stated as being roughly 10% slower than an overclocked Geforce
1080.
Once again, rather than to simply argue for what he wants to be true, he instead uses
framerates from the AMD events and comparable Nvidia systems to help reach this conclusion.
Later, at the end of May during the Computex press conference, Prey was shown running at
4K, using Threadripper and 2 Vega’s . This could be argued that it was to show off Threadripper
and that the 2 graphics cards were there to represent a super-enthusiast rig.
This didn’t stop the showcase from being the topic of deep reddit discussions, where
individuals tried to calculate the FPS from the tearing present in the stream- which I
thought was a pretty cool idea.
But WHY did AMD have to use crossfire on a game that could just about be handled using
a single 1080?
The presentation ended with Lisa announcing that the Radeon RX Vega would be launched
at the SIGGRAPH event on July 30th . But then at that event it was revealed that
it wouldn’t be launched until August 14th, 2 weeks later.
But AMD did hold up to their earlier promise of Vega in the first half of 2017 because
the Frontier Edition came out on June 27th, 3 days before the H1 deadline.
But although still Vega, the FE is designed with professionals in mind and its higher
price puts it out of reach of most gamers.
Still, you’d think that this would have been the end of it!
That reviewers could just have benchmarked this and gotten answers to Vega’s performance
once and for all.
If you must know, in games it was found to be somewhere between the Geforce 1070 and
1080, depending on title . Which is disappointing, and if anything, even lower than what we saw
back in January.
But it isn’t that simple.
I’ll explain how performance could improve in a bit, but right now I want to cover how
the RX Vega is being marketed because it’s quite clever.
It’s been showcased in a number of places next to an nvidia setup . The audience isn’t
told which is which, only that the nvidia one is more expensive.
I’m guessing they want both systems to feel identical so they can say ‘see?
You can get the same experience for less money with AMD’.
We’re not told which Vega or Geforce cards are being used so this has been a topic of
speculation as well.
They’ve also moved away from comparing ‘average’ framerates and towards ‘minimums’ . This
was even hinted to on ‘Poor Volta’… though I’m probably reading too much into
it.
But still, I don’t like this changed approach to benchmarking.
Not because it’s wrong to do- I’m sure there’s a lot to be learned from comparing
minimums in this way- but because it implies that they HAD to do this to make Vega seem
better, whether that’s the case or not.
As usual the graphs aren’t to scale and unusual cut-offs are used, like 40 and 48
Hz which conveniently place Nvidia below and AMD above.
It’s worth noting that this figure isn’t even the cut-off point for either freesync
or g-sync; there are monitors for both technologies that can go down as low as 30 .
Plus, the way the graphs are done implies that the previous-gen Fury X has faster minimums
than the Geforce 1080.
Even if that’s the case there’s something suspicious going on here!
The 1080 is undisputedly a much faster card.
They shouldn’t even be compared so seeing the Fury X as being 20% better makes me question
the testing methods rather than the results and I think only serves to undermine the message
that AMD’s trying to get across with this slide.
Regardless of what happens though, there’s no such thing as a bad card, only a bad price.
And we now know that RX Vega starts off at just $399.
A little late to the party, perhaps.
And maybe not much consolation to people who have held off upgrading in the hopes that
Vega would be a pascal-killer.
But there are some good points that need mentioning.
Firstly is Freesync.
I disagree with Nvidia’s closed and expensive G-sync technology so I think it’s great
that so many monitors are instead choosing to adopt Freesync, which AMD openly supports.
And as resolutions and game requirements progress there will be increased demand for GPUs faster
than the 580 with support for freesync.
And Vega will finally give people an option for this.
Secondly are the bundle offers.
And these have really surprised me because they make complete sense!
You spend an extra $100 on the Vega cards to get these bundles, but with them you can
get $100 off a Ryzen 7 mobo combo, $200 off a specific freesync monitor and 2 free games,
which according to AMD comes to a dank total of $420 saved.
Or $320, if you factor in the extra $100 you spent to get the bundle deal in the first
place.
If I was in the market for an entirely new system then this would certainly be very appealing
to me.
Just bear in mind that the monitor deal isn’t available in most places and that this particular
model appears to have some issues with freesync.
Oh dear.
And third trick that Vega may have up its sleeve is the possibility of AMD Finewine.
Super ripe finewine.
I don’t like to buy something in the hope that it gets better in the future.
But there’s something very exciting known as tile-based rasterization that has the potential
to massively improve gaming performance.
It’s a feature that Nvidia has had for several generations but until now been missing from
AMD GPUs.
But Vega has support for it!
It hasn’t been enabled yet, but AMD says it will be for all Vega GPUs come the RX’s
release date on August 14th . As well as some power saving features absent from the Frontier
Edition.
I very much hope that the delays have been so that AMD can ready these features for release
day and that they improve the cards.
Like I said, I don’t like buying into something in the hope that it gets better in the future
but there is at least a glimmer of hope that we haven’t seen the full potential of the
Vega cards just yet.
Honestly, I’m tired of the waits and teasers and hopes that there’s some secret tech
that AMD’s waiting to unleash.
Right now, all I want are proper benchmarks and reasonable prices, as this will benefit
everyone.
Except Nvidia.