When are the Vega cards supposed to hit the market? I'm planning on upgrading my ancient GPU and I would love a general price drop.
The only semi-firm date is sometime after the Ryzen release and AMD said that will happen sometime before the last day of Q1. So most think March. AMD has been pretty good about preventing leaks but it looks like there will be at least three cards. One that is faster than a 1080, Vega 10, and one that is slower than a 1080, Vega 11, and a dual-GPU version. Nvidia has also timed the release of the 1080ti for March so my guess is they have been holding it as a performance king spoiler to big Vega. On the downside, Vega might be a very expensive chip to make. Vega is large so yields will be lower and it's been confirmed the cards will have HBM 2 memory. I wouldn't be surprised to see Vega 10 at $600 to $700 and a dual GPU version near $1000.
I hope Vega is amazing, but with AMD's history of delayed and overhyped flops, I'm still a bit skeptical. It's odd to me that they are waiting so long to release Vega. Seems like it should have come out last summer to compete with Pascal. When you see delays with AMD, that usually means they are having problems like they did with Bulldozer, the Fury cards, Radeon 2900XT, etc. Also, if Vega comes out and only matches the Pascal cards in performance, it will be perceived as a flop because it is coming out so much later. And any shortages or price gouging will also be perceived as a flop. Vega needs to beat Pascal in performance, have tons of availability at launch, and have competitive pricing. AMD could even nail all of that and it could still flop if enough people have already bought and settled on Pascal cards. AMD faces a tough uphill battle launching their high-end cards so late and having long since lost most of their market share in the high-end space, and I wish them the best of luck.
I semi-agree with that. Polaris was a success for AMD because it was so cheap to make. AMD took a gamble with GoFlo who is the bargain bin maker of chips and it paid off. Many think GoFlo still messed up but not enough to really matter. AMDs future is really riding on Ryzen's success or failure and right now it looks like a big success. Here is my speculation. Vega won't be the success that either Polaris or Ryzen are and AMD doesn't want to spoil the Ryzen launch. I predict the Fury debacle will repeat itself. Vega is estimated to be about 15% faster than a 1080 much like the Fury X was about 15% faster than a 980. The 1080ti specs are still unknown but you can bet with Nvidia's budget and free time that it will be exactly what takes to crush a Vega 10 just like the 980ti crushed the Fury X. AMD won't be able to enter a price war with Nvida because the chip cost too much to make. Nvidia partners said Nvidia was planning to announce the 1080ti last week at CES but pulled the announcement when AMD didn't reveal Vega. So I think the 1080ti is ready to go but Nvidia has no reason to release it yet. I also read that Vega might not actually come out until June which is a lot further out than I thought.
Ryzen really needs to succeed. You know the CPU market is stagnant when the mainstream Core i7 I can buy today literally offers no more gaming performance than the Haswell chip I'm running from 2013. The last big jump in performance was Sandy Bridge back in 2011. Think about that for a second. Imagine an alternate reality 2007 where the Athlon 64 and Core 2 never came out and Intel and AMD never released anything faster than the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. That's the situation we are in this decade. Zero competition and total stagnation.
I'm trying to figure out why my PCI wireless card in my PC is dropping packets. With a continuous ping I get a spike or packet loss about every 5 packets. The results are the same for 2.4 or 5Ghz networks. My laptop is not having any issues with wireless so it's not the router. I've also got the same PC connected through Ethernet now and there is no loss. It's just my wireless card. Any ideas? The card is an Intel 7260 and I've updated the drivers.
My intel card in my laptop would do that, get a few good pings and then a massive spike. I can't remember the name of the thing it was running but in the Intel control panel I had to disable the thing that creates a new SSID so that you can basically turn your device into an AP off. After that Windows always reported <1ms (I hate windows ping, so crap compared to Linux, <1ms could be anything...)
From what I've read the card is constantly scanning for new networks. I tried to turn it off in the registry and the spikes are less but still there. Lots of people are complaining about this with no clear fix. I can download a freeware app that will fix it but I don't want to mess with it. I've had the card for a year so I'm not sure why it just started.
I'm trying to format a USB stick from exFAT to NTFS. If I try to format it in file manager I get a, "do not have sufficient rights" message. Using Windows diskpart format fs=ntfs, I get permission denied. I also opened the command prompt as an administrator and ran format :i /fs:ntfs and got a message that I need to run the utility in elevated mode. My account has admin privileges. Wuts up?
Do you have bitlocker enabled? It causes unpredictable behavior with USB drives at work. Check the ownership tab under security. Your user account may not own it because bitlocker does.
Got a Dell Precision 3510 laptop for work which has an AMD Firepro graphics card. By default, the laptop is using Intel integrated graphics. I found the Dell switchable graphics option and the AMD catalyst control center but they say no display is connected to AMD products. I've never had a dedicated card in a laptop before. Is there something I have to do in the BIOS to activate it?
My once 100% reliable Chrome web browser has been giving me issues. Sometime youtube videos will freeze the browser for about a minute. When the browser starts to work again that tab remains frozen. Sometimes I'll also lose mouse scrolling in a tab while all other tabs work. If I close the tab and reopen it, the scrolling will work again. This has gotten so annoying that I've been forced to use IE to watch some youtube videos.
it's not just you. I think it's an nvidia driver problem conflicting with chrome. turn off hardware acceleration in chrome advanced settings for a temporary fix.
So I bought a stick of older RAM from Amazon too. It looks so cheap and feels weirdly light... I swear this store has gone to shit... a giant bazaar of shady knockoff vendors.
Amazon does product pooling and it's ripe for counterfeiting. It works like this. Amazon gets 1000 bottle of Suave shampoo directly from Suave. Then, 3rd party vendors want to sell Suave Shampoo too, so Amazon takes up all stock from company B,C, and D, and pools it together with the original product from Company A, which is Suave. But then, it turns out company C was filling old bottles with cat piss and selling them as shampoo. The problem now is that the whole inventory pool is suspect and the chances of getting a counterfeit product are the same no matter who you buy from. There is also the issue of third party vendors existing only to sell fake product. They seem to pop up and disappear before anyone catches up to them. I cam across this awesome review the other day for a phone case. Seems legit.
Chrome/Windows is doing this thing where after awaking from sleep, what ever chrome tab is open appears frozen. Like it seems totally unresponsive but in fact it's working fine but not refreshing on the screen. For example, if I click on a link on the froze page the browser follows the link but the screen doesn't show any change. I have to click another Chrome tab and then go back to see the refreshed page. Kind of annoying.