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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

AMD's Vega 64 GPU is an underwhelming chip that competes against the GTX 1080 [soylentnews.org], which is a 15 month old GPU. Nvidia could lower the price of the GTX 1080 and 1070 to better compete against Vega 64 and 56, or launch Volta-based consumer GPUs in the coming months. But Vega 64 is sold out everywhere due to cryptocurrency miners.

AMD has released an updated driver called Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute [amd.com]. The driver improves the hash rate for Ethereum [wikipedia.org] mining significantly, and Vega 56 performance may even exceed that of Vega 64 [hothardware.com] (it is a beta driver so these results are subject to change):

As you can see, we're getting some pretty significant gains already (at stock speeds) with this beta driver. We wouldn't be surprised if there are even further optimizations to be found, once AMD is ready to go with a production driver, but we'll take what we can get right now. We did have one performance anomaly that we ran into, however. When cranking up the memory speeds, the Vega 56 actually vaulted past the Vega 64, cranking out 36.48 MH/s. That's not bad for a card that's supposed to retail for $399.

Unfortunately, there is some confusion over the true price of Vega 64 [wccftech.com], although they are out of stock anyway aside from some hardware and game bundles.

Nvidia's market cap hit $100 billion [fudzilla.com] on the day of the Vega 64 launch. Nvidia's CEO told investors that the company has the ability to "rock and roll" with the volatile cryptocurrency market [pcgamesn.com] (implying less shortages).

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