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posted by martyb on Monday July 31 2017, @04:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the graphic-news dept.

AMD has announced two new GPUs, the Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56. The GPUs are named in reference to the amount of "compute units" included. Both GPUs have 8 GB of High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 VRAM and will be released on August 14.

The Vega 64 is priced at $500 and is said to be on par with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080. The GTX 1080 was released on May 27, 2016 and has a TDP 105 Watts lower than the Vega 64.

Previously: AMD Unveils the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
AMD Launches the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition


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  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday July 31 2017, @05:30PM (9 children)

    by Justin Case (4239) on Monday July 31 2017, @05:30PM (#547258) Journal

    Last time I went down this path I found some comparison site that offered to rank cards from the major manufacturers by raw graphics performance and other specs. I carefully compared several and selected one nearer the top end of the moderate price range.

    It sucks.

    On a good day I get maybe 7FPS. On a bad day the graphics lock up entirely for 30 seconds. Can't even alt-tab to see what's going on.

    Task Manager shows all 4 CPUs at around 50% to 70% but never saturated. Plenty of RAM. Disk IO does not seem to be a bottleneck. It really seems to be all on the graphics card.

    I'd like to have a stack of them to swap in and out until I get one that is "fast enough". I'd be willing to pay somewhat more, but not just to get ripped off again.

    Is there any way to know in advance that what you are considering will be worthwhile?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Monday July 31 2017, @05:39PM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 31 2017, @05:39PM (#547264) Journal

    Let the Lunatic Fringe buy the fancy graphics cards. After a year or two, when the drivers have stabilised, choose a few from those charts then google what the people on the forums are saying about them.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @06:39PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @06:39PM (#547287)

    the only way to not get ripped off (or treated as a digital slave by your precious slavewareOS) is to educate yourself. anything less and you will be victimized.

    • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday July 31 2017, @06:43PM

      by Justin Case (4239) on Monday July 31 2017, @06:43PM (#547289) Journal

      So I guess asking for thoughts from people I consider my technical peers (or at least some of them) does not count in your world as one way to educate myself?

  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:14AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:14AM (#547437)

    What the hell did you buy, and what the hell are you running that gets 7 FPS? I think you can get better than that with integrated graphics on almost any game these days. And the "locking up for 30 seconds" makes me suspect an entirely different issue is behind it all - that sounds more like thrashing swap than a GPU issue, despite your claim that you had plenty and no disk bottleneck.

  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:17AM (4 children)

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 01 2017, @12:17AM (#547440)

    Gamer here. What card did you get? What games couldn't it play? What games do you want to play?

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    • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Tuesday August 01 2017, @04:02PM (3 children)

      by Justin Case (4239) on Tuesday August 01 2017, @04:02PM (#547685) Journal

      Thanks for offering clue.

      I got a Radeon R7 240 (*1). At the time it was one of the highest rated -- and available -- "High Mid Range" AMD cards per www.videocardbenchmark.net. I also saw advice to get something a couple years old so the drivers had a chance to "settle in". From what I hear that is still good advice today.

      I chose AMD over NVidia because I've heard NVidia is more linux-hostile. Not that linux matters in this case, because the game only runs on Windows (where have we heard this before?) and IMHO any type of virtualization or emulation layer could only be expected to slow things down.

      I dug up one of those Windows 7 SP1 hard drives that comes with the computer when you buy it; never booted until I decided to try this game. Given my decades of professional experience with Windows, my personal policy is that a Windows instance will never see a live network connection. So installing drivers, patches, etc. all happens via an airgap-hopping thumb drive.

      The game (Trainz A New Era) requires at least ATI 5550 (*2) but recommends AMD HD 6950 (*3).

      *1: Rated 967, higher is supposed to be better
      *2: Rated 539
      *3: A "High End" card. At the time of purchase, what was available was priced out of my range.

      So today, I could drop $BIGBUX on a higher-rated card, but my fundamental question is how do I know in advance that it will deliver? What I got supposedly had 1.8 times the power (rating) of the minimum, but still barely works.

      In case you're curious, the game is somewhat like SecondLife. (Is that still a thing?) Lots of user-created content; long sight lines leading to potentially millions of polygons to render. The game does have settings to pare down the more distant objects, but that kinda ruins it.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:25PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:25PM (#548039) Journal

        The R7 240 is not high mid range. It is low end, a hint being the $70-80 price tag. You were fooled by the "High to Mid Range" description of the list at videocardbenchmark.net. From what I can tell it's more like the middle of a long list with the bottom being goddamn old and slow cards. You have to be careful with PassMark period, as the numbers can be misleading.

        http://www.anandtech.com/show/9217/the-amd-a8-7650k-apu-review-also-new-testing-methodology/7 [anandtech.com]
        http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html [tomshardware.com]

        Nvidia's GT 1030 [videocardbenchmark.net] is around that price and more than double the PassMark at 2281.

        Linux hostile? Maybe more like open source hostile [pcworld.com].

        Now we could call this an epic fail on your part right here, but from the AnandTech benchmarks linked above and this video [youtube.com], you can see that the R7 240 can run modern games at well over 7 FPS. So what's the problem then?

        I can only conclude that Trainz: A New Era is a crappily coded title. Lo and behold [steamcommunity.com]:

        Brand new system:

        Intel 5930k
        Asus X99 Pro MB
        16 GB Corsair 2666 MHz
        2x 980GTX (SLI)

        Fresh Win 7 Install, fully updated, newest drivers all around.

        Max settings both in launcher and in-game.

        Result: 8 FPS

        Total system price: 3000+ $

        So sad...

        Yeah that is a real tear jerker. On the bright side, no other game should give you any problems.

        let me guess...........you maxed out view distance and set shadows to 4096.........DON'TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT until it's patched more.

        Same here high end PC SLI 4GB cards and horrible FPS. People have been complaining since day one, this was nothing but a money grab and the next time they release something remember this. Burn me once shame on you burn me twice shame on me.

        Well. Back in 2015 and 2014, the game was poorly optimised for everything. SP1 Hotfix 4 makes the game a lot better. You only need to be patient.

        I know shadows are not the best yet, but what
        I noticed the most is, that 1920 x 1080 : 60Hz is the maximum resolution to get good FPS (30) Less than 30 FPS means lags. I can run the game with no lags. Shadows off, tree detail normal, scenery detail highest, post procesing low, draw distance 15 000 + meters (yes I ovverrided the distance)
        These are my current settings. Simply, download and install SP1, you get performanced trees. When you upgrade to SP1 HT4, you will get the best performance in entire game.

        Give it little time, and this game will be a lot better than any other trianz game.

        Back in July 2015 I was one of the people complaining about Trainz and how badly it looked and run but I have to say, after SP1 and now SP2 Trainz has improved hugely. I'm enjoying Trainz very much now, I think it looks very good, especially with some addons and runs very smooth.

        User created content and long view distances probably hurt too, but you picked the wrong title to judge the state of GPUs by. Make sure you update Trainz to SP2 (horrible patch names for a reason that should be obvious) and come back.

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        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday August 06 2017, @03:00AM (1 child)

        by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 06 2017, @03:00AM (#549357)

        I've got an extra HD 6970 and R9 270. SN doesn't have priv messaging but if you can post a way to contact you then i'll mail you one. Just let me know which you'd prefer.

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        SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
        • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday August 06 2017, @03:38PM

          by Justin Case (4239) on Sunday August 06 2017, @03:38PM (#549544) Journal

          This is a generous offer, thank you. I hope at least I can reimburse your packaging and shipping costs.

          Please send an email to imbrie2 who is at the domain zotline doubt com. (Of course I hope you will doubt part of that address.) I will then reply with a mailing address.

          It looks like the 270 is the better card, though I've already proven myself pretty poor at selecting. This page makes me think there are only drivers for WXP. (I'm on W7.)

          https://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Radeon-200-Series-Drivers.aspx [amd.com]

          For the 6970 I hear it runs hot and the fans are loud. Has that been your experience?