Doubt it. AMD likely assumed like many others (in mid 2017) that there *may* be a cut down gamers Volta. Did they really make that comment "poor volta" in their marketing campaign for Vega? I think I recall some marketing blurbs to that effect but couldnt tell if serious or just some fan made photoshopping.
I think they likely did.
People constantly railed on AMD for that, and some of them called Vega (even after it released) vaporware (because it didn't meet their performance expectations and because it was bought up by miners).
Titan V is Volta plain and simple. And it is vastly faster than the Vega 64.
Idiotic marketing out of sync with expectations.
And it costs vastly more than Vega. Its what, 4-6X the price? In gaming I don't know that it offered even full double the performance other than some instances (4K with 8xMSAA?) maybe? The thing is, a lot more gamers benefited from Vega than they did Volta. In fact that image (think it was a bunch of drums in a warehouse or something?) ended up perfectly encapsulating the difference in the amount of gamers that got Vega vs Volta.
Call it stupid, but simple fact is, Volta never really materialized for gamers unless you run a popular YouTube channel like Linus. Did anyone that didn't have a commercial reason for getting it, get Titan V?
I'm saying, AMD knew Volta was not ever going to be a gaming chip, hence that line. People were acting the same on the Nvidia side for Volta as people were for Vega on the AMD side in 2016. In fact if Nvidia hadn't released the 1080Ti, there were people that would've lost their mind with no new Volta cards to buy later on (especially with the mining). I remember several people saying they were waiting for Volta but that the 1080Ti was good enough that they decided not to wait. Both sides would've been going stir crazy, but AMD actually released Vega, so Nvidia fans would've been left with Pascal (which really isn't bad, but after many of them were hyped about Volta - I recall some people saying that Volta was going to offer over 50% higher performance than Pascal too, and those same people constantly criticized people hyping expectations of Vega).
It is in fact possible for there to be two groups being stupid.
I don't recall it being a real ad campaign, just one or two dumb images posted to one of AMD's marketing wiz's dumb Twitter.
Point being: it was very dumb.
Unless there was context for it. Which is what I'm saying we now have. I think AMD found out early on that Volta was a compute chip as they found out that Nvidia was putting in all the money and effort for their special 12nm process and knew that would be very costly so it'd be awhile before gaming cards came out of it (if they ever did; look at the just announced ones, and without them being usable for Quadro, I don't think they get released at all for consumers as the price would've been too high). I think they might have actually known that there wasn't going to be a real Pascal replacement in 2017, and this wasn't a dig about performance but rather that Volta would be nearly nonexistent for gamers.
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