Rumor Has It Vega Mines Ether Like A Beast, But It Could Be Fud (Updated)
Update, 8/4/17, 11:16am PT: Editor's Note: Whether or not Vega is a mining "beast" or not, we should point out that it's clear AMD is concerned about miners gobbling up Vega cards once they go on sale. From our original Vega coverage earlier this week:
Recognizing that the Polaris-based cards in its product stack are being gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners and largely unavailable to gamers, AMD came up with the concept of Radeon Packs. These packs promise discounts when PC builders buy certain components at the same time as their new graphics card.
Scott Herkelman, AMD's gaming business unit VP & GM had this to say more specifically about mining optimizations during a presentation last weekend:
These guys who do this professionally, let's just say they are hackers more than you'd think . . . Since ours [GPUs] are based on OpenCL, they can go in there and manipulate and do things that are outside of our bounds. . . . That can really increase the hash rate.
There are public numbers [hash rate]. . . And there are private hash rate numbers that we see and just kind of go whoa. . . It's kind of crazy what you would see from crypto-currency guys that do this for a living. They hire tons of software folks . . . And they hack into the firmware.
We would never disable anything in our GPU that would hurt anything anywhere, especially for gaming. It's a very delicate balance as you look at hindering anything, especially in compute . . . You would have to hinder something in compute, which would then hinder your game performance, or other alternatives for other industries that might be using our gaming cards to solve other things . . .
Original article, 8/3/17, 3:30pm PT:
AMD’s Vega 64 and Vega 56 graphics cards are slated for release on August 14, and the rumors of their potential performance are gaining attention. The most recent tease suggests that Vega could be a powerhouse at mining Ethereum, which could be true, but don’t get fooled by the hype.
Earlier today, Overclock3D.net and Videocardz.com released reports that suggest that AMD’s upcoming Vega cards would offer incredible Ethereum mining performance, the likes of which no single GPU could ever dream of pulling off before Vega. Overclock3D.net reported that Vega cards would offer 70-100 MH/s of Ethereum mining performance, whereas Videocardz.com reported that its source said 60 MH/s.
Those figures are mighty impressive, but you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for those results. To put those numbers into perspective, a GTX 1070, which is currently one of the most powerful Ethereum mining options available, can usually mine between 27MH/s and 32MH/s. AMD’s Fury lineup offers comparable performance to Nvidia’s GTX 1070. A 100MH/s mining machine would typically require three to four GPUs. We expect the Vega cards to perform well, but not as well as the rumors suggest.
It should also be noted that Overclock3D.net’s source is an employee from Overclockers UK known as Gibbo, who posted “Seems the hash rate on VEGA is 70-100 per card, which is insanely good,” without himself offering any form of source for the information.
Videocardz.com’s prediction is somewhat tempered compared to Overclock3D.net’s report, and what it suggests is somewhat more plausible. Even so, we would still suggest you wait for proper tests before you believe the hype. AMD recently started shipping the Vega Frontier Edition, and at least one crypto-mining-centric website took one for a spin to see how well it would perform: 1stminingrig recorded 38.5 MH/s with its Vega Frontier Edition card. We would expect the gaming-focused Vega cards to offer somewhat less mining performance than the $1,000 workstation card, but 30+ MH/s wouldn’t be a surprise.
Apparently, the latest version of Radeon Software Crimson ReLive doubles the hash rate performance of Vega-based GPUs. If that assertion proves true, it could push the Ethereum mining performance of Vega chips into the 70+ MH/s range.
The idea that a driver could double the performance of a GPU isn’t unprecedented--Nvidia just released a driver this week that tripled the compute performance of Titan Xp cards. It’s also not unfathomable that AMD’s next-generation GPUs would offer significant gains over previous generations. Since the genesis of GPU-based crypto mining, AMD GPUs have always offered higher performance generation over generation than Nvidia.
The Vega lineup, especially, has the potential to shake up the cryptomining scene. The algorithms that GPUs crunch through to uncover cryptocoins are much more memory-intensive than they are GPU-intensive. Many cryptominers tune their cards to boost the memory clock as high as possible and undervolt the GPU to keep the power draw as low as possible. The faster the memory, the better the performance. And Vega GPUs are equipped with 16GB of HBM2 memory that offers nearly 500 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
There’s no reason that Vega wouldn’t offer better mining performance than previous generation GPUs, but it’s a little too early to believe that these cards would offer such a dramatic performance jump. Vega launch day is less than two weeks away, so it won’t be long before we know the truth.
We’ve reached out to AMD for comment, but we don’t expect the company to confirm or deny the performance claims ahead of the review embargo.
AMD even claim that HBM 2 is having huge impact on minimum FPS. Well, that's a good selling point if this is true.
fear, uncertainty and doubt
I just watched a couple of minutes ago some guy with 2x Vegas doing 28 and 41.. ah heres the link
AMD Vega Ethereum Mining Hashrate Update IIII by Crypto Nerd
https://youtu.be/9rRFlqcP1x8
They're really vague about exactly what they sped up:
So, I'm not sure if they flipped the switch to enable the same OpenGL rendering performance on it as their professional cards (which would make sense, if you see how well Vega Frontier does against their $5000 Quadro P6000) or what.
How does this not warrant an entire investigation in its own right? If a car company did some tweak to an engine management system which tripled the fuel economy, there'd be a giant WTF, have they been crippling the tech in the past? Why is in the computer tech industry an article can say something like that and the response is, meh, whatever, expect that sort of thing these days.
Come on tech journalists, dig into this stuff! What's going on here? Is the tech being deliberately held back? Is it legal? (baring in mind btw that such a change means the original stated performance claims must be misleading)
Another thing is when certain features Are locked and you can pay more to get new features to your equipment. For example Intel cpus where you can pay xxx$ and get raid feature etc.
That is harder to judge. Nowadays you can go to car shop. Pay xxx dollars and They blug a Computer to you car and vola you have 50 horse powers in your engine. And that is completely legal.
Nobody needs to dig into it, Nvidia were crippling the cards. The professional Quadro cards had the drivers and the performance, the Titan XP didn't. Nvidia also has the drivers on lock down for anything below the Titan XP say a GTX 1080 for example. This is all known and doesn't warrant any investigation.
For the longest I couldn't remember where I had heard Vega before.
Then it came to me last night ... Street Fighter.
http://streetfighter.wikia.com/wiki/Vega
To be fair, it's probably worth at least looking into whether the "3x performance" claims are true, and not just writing that they are in an article and linking to Nvidia's press release as a source. And more specifically, Nvidia only claimed 3X performance "in applications like Maya" so those numbers might only apply in very specific workloads in a limited selection of software going by what they said, so it might be inaccurate to claim that they "tripled the compute performance" in general. I'd at least like to see this article link to a source that tested these performance improvements.
Yes because it makes perfect sense to purposely hold back a GPU when competition is nipping at one's heels. Well let's just get an international government consortium involved and fine Nvidia into bankruptcy because they released GPUs to the world that had governors on them until owners paid a driver ransom. That'll learn 'em!
Oh wait, what's that? Nobody is being forced to pay for driver improvements? Absurdity. Everyone sees the architecture breakdown of every new GPU release and what a GPU is capable of in a review. If you like what you see, you buy it. If you do not like what you see, you do not buy it. It's as simple as that.
I wonder why these accusations only apply to Nvidia GPUs and never AMD GPUs when driver or OS updates mysteriously show gains? I submit to you Fury X and a driver update showing gains over the 980Ti in certain apps when previously it was behind that GPU it targeted:
https://www.eteknix.com/windows-10-drivers-gives-amd-r9-fury-x-advantage-over-nvidia-980-ti/
The last time that I'm aware of a GPU maker ever "lying" about its GPU capabilities was Nvidia and the GTX 970. Nobody can prove if that was intentional or a massive breakdown in communication between the marketing department that puts the words out there or engineering that built the GPU. What we do know is that they paid a heavy fine for that mistake. Unless the outside of the box says things like "Guaranteed to hit 60FPS in Dues Ex at 4K" and it doesn't, what difference does it make what performance improvement driver updates mean to the GPU?
It's long been known that both companies crippled OpenGL performance of the drivers for their non-workstation GPUs.
AMD's decision to offer their professional GPU driver for their Vega FE cards was the game-changer, here. That allowed a $1000 AMD card to compete with Nvidia's $5000 Quadro P6000. So, that forced Nvidia's hand in unlocking the OpenGL performance of their Titan Xp driver.
The winner is anyone needing to run these professional applications. They can now use a GPU costing 1/4th or 1/5th of what they previously had to pay, and they now still have a choice of AMD vs. Nvidia.
..
yes it is. they are called as product segmentation. and both AMD and nvidia did this. but in this case it is not being held back. the capabilities have always been there. only the specific optimization for specific application not included in initial driver. just that this time AMD decided to provide pro drivers on their semi pro card. nvidia is merely responded to it by giving similar treatment to their semi pro card. (though the target market for AMD Vega FE and Nvidia Titan is quite different to begin with).
Supply will eventually catch up (and possibly even surpass) demand.
He makes it sound more esoteric than it even is.
AMD opensourced most of their driver & software stack. Their Pro driver contains a few proprietary bits, but largely they're moving to an opensource model, where Clang is used as the OpenCL compiler. This means anyone can tune: the driver, the compiler, and the mining software specifically for one hardware platform.
You still have to know what you're doing, but gone are the days of actually having to reverse engineer anything. This is not hardware hacking, like in days past, so much as an exercise in optimizing and tuning various parts of the software stack for a specific workload.