After seeing the lounge posts about it…
Im buying it.
Based on what seems to be the majority of peoples opinions… negative… I bet the price drops down in 2-3 months and then I am getting one.
Hopefully the price cut comes before driver optimizations, which make it seem more competitive against the rtx2080.
I would bet against a significant price drop. The vega20 is a very expensive chip to produce, and 7nm production is still ramping up to boot. My guess is they never produce it in quantity to keep prices high, as they’d lose money any other way.
Driver optimizations are totally possible though.
Radeon 7: Same outcome as the last Vega cards, underwhelming for the price. Wait for Navi, this is just a place holder. The Vega cards were never meant to be gaming cards really, when the first Vega cards came out, they even had a hard time making proper gaming drivers for it.
It has been the case before that AMD cards are a bit slower at first and on par or even a tiny bit faster later on compared to team green.
Personally I am mostly disappointed about the cooling. With a triple fan design it should be possible to run even a high wattage card relatively quiet.
From the GN investigation, it looks like a lot of the problem is uneven dimensions on the core and HBM forcing AMD to use a thick graphite paste rather than standard cooling paste.
Plus of course, AMD kept feeding it more voltage to get clockspeeds high enough to compete with the 2080. AMD hasn’t been interested in competing on heat/noise since the 480.
my answers are.
no, and no.
With a vega card you’re really covered especially vega 64.
Unless it turns out the radeon 7 is like 100% more effective, the vega chipset will have you coverede unless you’re competing and every fps counts.
vega aint bad, it gets the job done, albeit your e-peen is smaller then your 2080 competitors, but are you really willing to shell out the 700$ for 10-15% increase in fps?
This has already been stated but I am reiterating this is not a general thread
If you look at frame rate minimums in a bunch of titles, vega is actually pretty damn impressive/competitive.
But most people just look at the top end frame rate max/average and whine that nvidia is some number higher.
Whilst totally forgetting that the minimums are what give you the shits when you hit them more than anything else.
Check the numbers for R7 vs. the 2080/2080ti in GN’s review.
It stomps them in minimums and overall less hitching. But the typical mindless gamer (even GN themselves to an extent - though to their credit they are one of the best for frame times reporting) are focused on averages.
When you’re above 60-100 fps average, the minimums are what count IMHO.
Wait for high end Navi? Not this year, and don’t hold your breath. Navi is expected to replace Polaris, so low to mid class of performance.
Only reason to buy Radeon 7 is for the nice FP64 perf, AMD has recently said that it will be 1/4 of FP32, so the fastest AMD GPU for a not too high price (about half the perf of a MI60).
Or because “fuck nvidia” and/or you want open drivers.
Both reasons i have bought 4 radeons in 2 years.
Radeon VII is currently the fastest GPU on the market that i will consider.
I agree with both of these, even though I don’t see myself benefiting from the latter, I DO support the option.
Mine arrives Tuesday. 