AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64 might just be a miner's dream
AMD's Vega has been long anticipated but a bit shaping up to be a bit of a disappointment for gaming, really. The Vega architecture is incredibly potent, and has numerous forward leaning technologies like High Bandwidth Cache Controller, complete DX12 support, intelligent geometry discard pipeline, rapid packed math, HBM 2 etc. Unfortunately it's the same old story with AMD. They shoot for the Moon, while games are still on Earth. They simply can't translate their technological superiority into real world results till much result.
(Boy, is that one beautiful graphics card!)
As a result, the Vega Frontier Edition showed some very disappointing performance results, coming in between 1070 and 1080, while consuming as much power as 1080 Ti.
The RX Vega 64 is turning out to be far more competitive, and will probably end up in the same ballpark as GTX 1080 for games. It's still disappointing, because given the specifications this card should really be taking on the 1080 Ti.
Fortunately, mining is one application that's easily optimized for the Vega architecture. The Vega FE was doing only 30 MH/s in Ethereum, but it was well speculated that the drivers were holding it back. This thing's a monster, with 12.5 TFlops of computer power. The real clincher, though, is the FP16, which offers a startling 25 TFlops. I don't know how Eth's algo works, but it's quite possible some aspects of it can be optimized for rapid packed math (FP16). Combined with the high bandwidth and extremely low latencies for HBM2, we might be looking at an Ethereum hash rate of 70 to 100 MH/s. Pretty incredible for a graphics card costing just $500!
Then there's the Vega 56, which might offer similar performance for $400 and ~200W. Given how undervolting friendly Vega FE and even Polaris is, we could be looking at >50 MH/s at 100W!
This rumour comes from two independent and very reliable sources. Gibbo @ OCUK and Videocardz.
Of course, this spells disaster for gamers. I'm not a miner at all, but more of a gamer. Just really intrigued by graphics technology. Despite all its drawbacks, it was still shaping up to be a competent alternative to GTX 1080, and far more future proof. One day, gamers might even see performance as incredible as its mining performance from Vega, who knows? There's an immense amount of potential in this graphics card.
Sadly, I doubt I'll be able to buy one anytime soon. It's a race against the miners, one that I'm destined to lose.
That is no joke! What a beautiful piece of machinery! AMD has been pretty solid in my opinion.
I think vega is more actually focused on gaming than on mining i mean yeah it one beast of a card but i think they focused more on the actual fans of amd this time than just selling all their stock for miners, it sure does get them a lot of money but the community isn't quite happy with the high prices gpu's been getting lately due to cryptocurrency mining but it's just a matter of waiting. Nice post Up'd and if you compare price/performance AMD would still beat Nvidia if it wasn't for crypto mining...
Yes, AMD's marketing is squarely aimed at gamers. They are going out of their way to say that "our customers are gamers", "RX Vega is all about gaming" etc. etc. They even admitted to delaying the launch from Q2 so gamers had enough stock. They are also limiting it to one card per buyer.
All of that also implicitly admits that the product will be killer for mining.
Well yeah but it can also not be the best and i think one of the vegas consumes almost 400 Watts so yeah it is unpredictable what we will see from these but AMD always packs a punch
The TDP for Vega 64 is 295W, but we know that this is outside the efficiency range. There's actually a Vega Nano coming, which is rumoured to be only 150W-180W. Same specs as Vega 64, just lower clock speeds. But not that much lower.
Hmmm a nano version would be interesting less power consumption less heat output as long as the hashrates are stable might be the most wise choice
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it's designed for deep learning and stuff like that first, gaming second.
At 399$ for the 56, it might be quite good for miners, but those prices will skyrocket if there's no supply.
It really does look a beautiful piece of hardware and it was obviously designed for miners rather than gamers.Thanks for sharing.
Its a very aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware. On paper, the mining potentual looks good. I saw some leaked benchmarks that suggest the Vega 56 is about on par with the 1070; however there are higher lower minimum framerates at 1440p.
I feel like nvidia will counter with a price drop to the 1070 to keep it as the first choice for gamers.
The driver development story will be interesting to follow for the vega chips as I feel we will see real improvement as these mature.
Excellent post. :)
Fairly certain Vega 56 will be faster than the gimped 1070. I agree about the development story. Not just drivers, but as games start to utilize Vega's new features. Particularly in the coming years, I can see the Vega 56 outperforming even the GTX 1080 - the raw specifications are just so far ahead.
AMD is awesome, I don't know how they keep their products priced so competitively.
By keeping less profit for themselves :)
Haha, right.
100 MH/s ? I don't believe :)
belive it! winter is comming and im heating with GPU!
Even if it's 70, that's pretty amazing!
cant wait!