Like most here, my interest in this card is going to be purely academic. I ain't spending $700 on a videocard (the total cost of my last CPU/Mobo/RAM/GPU upgrade combined) no way no how. I get that someone at AMD looked at the number of dies they had, the recoup cost, and figured it didn't make sense to price this thing any lower, but geez. HD 4870 this thing is not.
With that out of the way, there are a couple things that really did pique my interest:
- AMD being "nimble". Its heartening to see that AMD is aware enough of their GPU mindshare to fairly quickly convert their defective M125 dies into a "competitive" (a word that can be broadly interpreted) product. Its a good reminder to the faithful and the consumer GPU space as a whole that AMD isn't content to wander the desert for the next year while Navi bakes.
- 128 ROPS. Wat. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I was sure there was a whitepaper out there stating the GCN arch maxed out at 4096SP/128TMU/64ROP. Anandtech is just casually dropping the 128 ROP thing and walking away like its no big deal. Did I misunderstand or did AMD have to build in a workaround so the 128 ROPs won't double pixel throughput as expected? Interested to know more about this.
- AMD's branding is ****ing garbage. Radeon VII?! Has AMD just totally given up on the entire concept of a "GPU Generation" and we can look forward to all their cards having some cutesy one off name with nothing to inform the consumer where in the GPU landscape the card falls? We're looking at Radeon VII, Vega 64, Vega 56, Radeon RX 590, 580 etc... Aside from price, its anyone's guess how all these cards stack up.
- Possible Radeon "V" further cut down die to compete with the RTX 2070. An additional 25% off the shader cores would land us in 48 CU territory. Nothing terribly new or exciting in terms of moving the performance bar, but I have to imagine AMD has to have a pile of even more defective chips that they can try and move if only for the purpose of keeping themselves at the front of tech websites during the 2019 year.
If nothing else, we got something new to argue about for the next couple months...