The embargo on Vega benchmarks ends on August 14th. I've been looking at analysis of the cards versus nVidia's cards, and while its looking like Vega falls short of enthusiast expectations, the real story is that the RX Vega 56 may be a direct answer to the GTX 1070 in both performance and cost. http://www.techradar.com/news/leaked-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-benchmarks-pegs-it-as-a-gtx-1070-killer I've noticed this with a lot of hardware media acts like we are all using 1080Ti cards, but most people will not spend that kind of money on a graphics card. If you look at Steam's hardware survey, the original 1080 doesn't even crack the top ten of most used DX12 cards. I think AMD is smart not bleeding money trying to unseat nVidia at the top, when that is not even a large piece of the pie. The strategy of being competitive on performance and value has certainly been very positive so far with Ryzen and Threadripper. Its going to be much harder to do the same thing in the graphics market, but I think its smarter than trying to unseat the industry leader by focusing on the 1% enthusiast market.
This is the main problem though. Alot of people forget that short period after the 1080ti came out and before the mining surge. The Geforce cards were in their prime pricing point. gtx 1080s were selling in the mid $400's and gtx 1070's were selling in the mid $300's. AMD is crazy trying to go after nvidia's old msrp from over a year ago. And then looking at their vega 64 liquid cooling solution going for $699 which is 1080ti territory for 1080 performance. AMD needs to drop their MSRP for these reference cards by 10%. Hopefully the 3rd party solutions will offer the proper pricing for these cards to succeed. Because looking at that TDP makes you go crazy.
Vega will certainly be a bizarre launch. RX Vega 56 looks like a winner and in theory will be a better choice than the 1070. The RX Vega 64 will probably only trade blows with the 1080 while using a lot more power and there is nothing to compete against the 1080ti. AMD's main problem is these cards are 16 months late. Nvidia could be less than 6 months away from releasing their next line of cards which will probably include re-branded 1070 and 1080 with price drops. That means AMD will only be competing on the low-high-end again. However, that's more of an image problem than a sale problem because like you said, not everyone is buying a 1080ti. Of course all the discussions and benchmarks might not even matter. The early rumors are saying these cards will be the new mining kings. If that's the case, gamer will never get their hands on them. Vega could even be a huge turd for gaming and AMD will still sell ever last one of them. AMD is already trying to counter that by selling packages for CPUs and monitors which will be nice for people building a whole new systems but not so much for people who just need a new graphics card. In this launch you're also going to see AMD hammer Nvidia on their G-Sync prices. The angle they are taking is that AMD systems will always be $300 cheaper than Nvidia because of FreeSync. HardOCP conducted a blind gaming performance test similar to what AMD has been demonstrating. It's a RX Vega with FreeSync vs a 1080ti with G-Sync. The AMD system in total is going to be about $500 cheaper. The results of the 10 testers - 6 saw no difference, 3 preferred AMD, 1 preferred Nvidia. The 3 that preferred AMD also said they would pay $300 more for that system.
AMD has already been adjusting Ryzen prices to what works on the market, so its not unreasonable to think that they will be aggressive with Vega pricing as well. The real problem comes down to two factors: 1) nVidia has all the leverage. They sit on top of the hill as far as hardware and brand-power. 2) Marketshare is so small that optimization isn't going to work in AMD's favor outside of deals with publishers, like what they did with Bethesda. That or suddenly developers embrace Vulkan, but once it starts catching on, nVidia will probably have compensated with upgrades to their hardware to overcome the architecture disadvantage with new APIs. From what I've seen, nVidia already seems to be much more equipped to effectively deal with competition than Intel has been on the CPU side in the short run.
Intel had become complacent, especially with mainstream CPUs. It had been over a decade since they had any real competition from AMD. They had forgotten how to compete, so Ryzen caught them totally by surprise. nVidia on the other hand will be much tougher competition. nVidia has dominated in the last 5 years, but prior to that the graphics market was a tough back and forth slugging match. They always seem to have something impressive up their sleeves ready to go the minute AMD shows any signs of competing again.
looks like vega 56 is the savior. http://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-and-56-review makes you curious what the purpose of the vega 64 is. vega 56 too good for its own good.
Yup. It seems like Vega 56 is a competitive card. It might have a slight edge on the 1070 and once the non-reference boards come out with ~5% OC it will get even better. Vega 64 is unfortunately just like the Fury X. Overpriced and power hungry. Only people who want the fastest AMD card for their free sync monitor will buy it. If you factor in the price of a sync monitor it's a much better value than the 1080 but on it's own it's a let down. I'd say $500 1080 wins over a $500 Vega 64 pretty easy. Now lets just see what miners do to the price. Newegg sold out of every Vega minutes after launch.
High noise and power consumption and performance between a 1070 and 1080 1.5 years after those cards came out. Vega is a fail. I'm glad I bought a 1070 almost a year ago and didn't wait for this. https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/08/14/amd_radeon_rx_vega_64_video_card_review/17
I wouldn't call it a hard fail though. Considering how Ryzen came out, I think it's fair to say everyone knew Vega would also be a generation behind nvidia. And considering radeon's reputation, everyone knew it would be loud and power consuming, although the power consumption in this is quite ridiculous. Ignore the vega 64 and you'll see the win in the Vega 56. That is a valid alternative to the geforce 1070. Also AMD is banking on people in the market for a new adaptive sync monitor. Joe is in the market for a new gaming display and upgrading his GPU. He sees the huge price difference in gsync and freesync displays. Now he learns he can pair his freesync display with an amd card. AMD has him in their pocket now.
AMD hit the fail mark by not having anything in this segment for so long. At some point releasing anything was better than releasing nothing.
Well miners have done their damage. Vega 54 is nowhere to be seen. The few Vega 64s available are going for $700 and the Limited edition and Water Cooled ones are selling for $1000 and $1500. It's what I expected. MSRP and benchmarks were irrelevant. Gamer's may never get them. Here is an interesting article about miners renting their own Boeing 747s to get graphic cards shipped faster. http://www.pcgamer.com/cryptocurrency-miners-are-renting-boeing-747s-to-ship-graphics-cards/
Just to derail the thread a little but kind of on subject, I was thinking of getting back into PC gaming next month. I have a spare i5 system at work (around 3.2Ghz) with 8GB RAM that just needs a GPU. Then I started looking at GPUs, nothing too fancy, maybe an RX580 or a GTX 1060 and was shocked to find the prices of these things over RRP, especially on the AMD side. Miners have pushed the prices up so much I am now put off of the idea for now, I'm only looking for 1080p60 gaming, maybe a little 1440p but not sure I really want to spend that much on an entry level card, at that point I'd be thinking more about going to a 1070 or higher.
Nah it's a big issue for budget gaming on a PC. I was lucky to to buy an RX480 for my Nephew right before prices doubled. The 1080 seems like the only card that wasn't affected much. Newegg has one for $525 plus Destiny 2.
The 1080 isn't that great at mining because it uses GDDR5X. Prices on everything have skyrocketed. Glad I picked up a 1070 when I did as those have gone up too.
Wait for cryptocurrencies to crash in value, the market will be flooded with cheap used cards once mining isn't profitable.
Very used. I'm not sure I'd pay much for a card with bios mods that's been run at 100% 24/7 for months or years.
It also means availability and price cuts on new cards to keep sales from tanking. I don't expect to see huge stock issues like the last time, but a flooded used market still affects sales of new cards.
Genesis Mining is one of the companies that is buying every card they can get. Tens of thousands of cards are being directly flown to Iceland where electricity is really cheap. They have whole warehouses dedicated to each type of cryptocurrency.