RadeonSI Lands Primitive Binning Support For Vega

[bridgman]

The RX-570 started from 150eu in Europe and now starts from 300eu, plus the ITX version has almost extinct. A GTX-1060 ITX starts from 200eu, i don't understand what is happening with AMD's GPUs, AMD doesn't give me the chance to buy a decent one.

It's not us AFAIK. We are still selling them at low prices to the retailers.

[finalzone]

The RX-570 started from 150eu in Europe and now starts from 300eu, plus the ITX version has almost extinct. A GTX-1060 ITX starts from 200eu, i don't understand what is happening with AMD's GPUs, AMD doesn't give me the chance to buy a decent one.

It is a typical supply/demand issue as retailers set the price, not AMD.

[finalzone]

vey likely, vega sucks for gaming

Vega performs decently on PC gaming. PC gaming engines need to optimization to take advantage of the hardware.

[juno]

It's not us AFAIK. We are still selling them at low prices to the retailers.

Doesn't help the customers, though. It has been the case for half a year now that no customer can't really buy Radeons. Of course AMD doesn't (have to) care who buys their cards.

Would be nice if AMD sold their cards directly on their page, limiting the amount per customer. Like Nvidia does with their reference cards.

Vega performs decently on PC gaming. PC gaming engines need to optimization to take advantage of the hardware.

Decently, yeah, but not very well. They won't adapt Software to a single chip with that little market share. Also Vega doesn't perform as it should even without the new features that have to be leveraged by devs.

I would have loved to buy Vega, but it's a disappointment. But the free drivers aren't there anyways, so I can wait...

[davidbepo]

Vega performs decently on PC gaming. PC gaming engines need to optimization to take advantage of the hardware.

given die size, consumption and gflops it should be rival of the 1080 ti / titan X (pascal) and it strugles to beat 1080

[pal666]

We are still selling them at low prices to the retailers.

but you shouldn't.

[pal666]

given die size, consumption and gflops it should be

no, it shouldn't. smart people look at cost and open drivers, not at irrelevant metrics like die size and gflops

[juno]

no, it shouldn't. smart people look at cost and open drivers, not at irrelevant metrics like die size and gflops

Smart people look behind the obvious things. Those are not irrelevant metrics at all.

Die size affects manufacturing cost, yields, margin as well the total number of chips that could actually be produced, leading to the supply/demand issue we have. You can fit substantially more 314mm² dice on a wafer than 484mm² dice. You get more products in the same time and with lower cost. Add HBM and the interposer to that cost. Add to the equation that AMDs graphics cards have been sold out for months. Add that for GlobalFoundries the Zen mass production is just beginning.
In the past, AMD GPUs have been superior when it comes to FLOPs/mm². They've been able to put more units onto the same area, allowing them to compete by building wider, but similarly expensive, chips. Now not even that is the case anymore, forcing Vega to compete with a much cheaper GP104 instead of GP102. Altogether, you could conclude that AMD is further behind than ever in the past years and gets thrown back even more because of low margins.

Your argument of cost is completely wrong and I'll explain why: I could buy a GTX 1080 for 500€ right now. I should be able to buy a Vega 64 at 509€, but I'm not. 649€ is the price for cards in stock.
Even if i was able to buy one at the MSRP of 509€, it's virtually the same price for both cards and both perform very similar. So I would be able to play games in the same quality. Assume I would be playing only one hour per day, I'd have to add 15 € to the Vega per year because of higher electricity cost. Not to mention the noise and heat, I would possibly feel constrianed to use liquid cooling. But let's ignore that for the moment.
So with Vega, basically I pay 150€ + 15€*n(years) more for the same performance and you call that smart?

Coming to your next point: open drivers. Seeing it pragmatic, it's not worth anything because you can't just use it ootb with upstream software. And you also have missing features. Seeing it with ideology, you still have firmware blobs.

There is more than enough reason to be concerned, smartly looking beyond "cost" defined by the MSRP, which is the actual irrelevant metric here.

[nanonyme]

but you shouldn't.

Agreed, it's irritating to hear that retailers are profiteering on demand when they do absolutely zero investment in making the chips actually work (drivers done by AMD + partners + community, repairs done by manufacturer). Here in Finland one of the biggest retailers even appears like their only purpose was to run a web store and be disrespectful to customers on returns

[bridgman]

It's not us AFAIK. We are still selling them at low prices to the retailers.

but you shouldn't.

Yeah, worst case it seems there should be some kind of margin-splitting mechanism so that (a) when cards get sold way above our target price some of the benefit can go back into R&D, and (b) hiking the selling price gets less attractive for the retailers.

With the current model it seems likely that retailers can make more money by selling a small number of units at a really high price than by selling high volumes at MSRP, and that is not the behaviour that should be rewarded.

Here in Finland one of the biggest retailers even appears like their only purpose was to run a web store and be disrespectful to customers on returns

Right... we could do that ourselves

Doesn't help the customers, though. It has been the case for half a year now that no customer can't really buy Radeons. Of course AMD doesn't (have to) care who buys their cards.

We care a lot - getting cards into gamers hands is what drives game dev support, which in turn drives performance & robustness.

Would be nice if AMD sold their cards directly on their page, limiting the amount per customer. Like Nvidia does with their reference cards.

I didn't know NVidia was selling reference cards that way. It might be a nice way to put a soft limit on what retailers charge.