Budget, is the quick answer. I decided to go with Threadripper because I was not overly impressed with Vega and Volta is coming, also Navi or Vega 2.0. So I decided to save a few bucks on GPUs, spend more on CPU and see what comes next year and upgrade. The 64s will be put in my wife’s PC next year which will be overkill for her, but you guessed it, the beginning of a render farm.
Now on launch day, when I saw the prices, had I not already purchased waterblocks, I would have bought 1080 Ti x2. But the more I have found out about Vega, the more I am glad I did not go with nvidia this round. And if all goes well with what @Steinwerks is doing right now with HBCC, that will cement my choice.
All done, no hiccups whatsoever after getting it started.
Note to Vega users: set HBCC before launching Blender (or presumably any application that will be using VRAM) as it locked up and I had to end and restart. Not a big deal, but worth remembering I think.
HBCC set to ~11GB, RX Vega 56 flashed to 64 Air BIOS, Win10, 32GB@2933MHz, Driver 17.9.3, Wattman set to Balanced, GPU pegged at or above 1616MHz for all 36ish minutes. Now I’m off to the gym, hope this helps.
Edit: oh yeah, temp lived at 75°C ±1° with fan at about 2000RPM. I should’ve had HWiNFO open but forgot and didn’t want to launch sensors during render.
I’m not sure how HBCC assigns VRAM, as Blender was “using” about 9.5GB, but Radeon Settings (while open of course) sat at ~120MB. I believe that it links the RAM assignment to the application using VRAM though because the usage by Blender dropped to under 1GB immediately as the render ended.
if the only thing you do is video editing then sure, even expensive vega might make sense. if you were doing stuff that was other than that though (i.e. were you need the Pro drivers, etc) the FE would probably be worth the extra $300 per.
That’s great (no sarcasm)
But I look at my library and besides all the half life based games, no Linux support.
Back to Vega though, it’s a day late and a dollar short. Wouldn’t recommend big Vega, would totally recommend 56 over 1080 for shill reasons but if you want to go bigger 1080ti is still king.
No. I use Blender and Fusion 9 as well. Only the extra vram would help and is not worth it to me especially after what HBCC is doing. Also Radeon Pro Render works the same. If price to performance could justify it, I would have bought the FE.
the problem I’ve run into is that things are a bit weird for me still with fedora and the open source stuff, but yeah, civ 6 ranges from somewhat faster to considerably faster under linux now. vs a 1080ti.
We were using the asus strix 1080… hands down vega on linux, it is amazing, but the setup is way not newb friendly
and I’m having some weird problems that I suspect are probably library conflicts.
Ive got both the 56 and the 64 and have dumped probably > 35 hours into this, and the story to tell is still a muddled mess.