Question XFX Radeon VII DirectX 12 RX-VEGMA3FD6 16GB 4096-Bit HBM2 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card $569.99 @ Newegg (Radeon VII fire-sale happening?)

[VirtualLarry]

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

 

[n0x1ous]

Makes sense. If you need it for compute or the vram its a nice deal, but any gamer should stick with Navi or Turing

 

[thilanliyan]

Damn, doesn't apply in Canada I think.

 

[EXCellR8]

$469.99 I'd already have one on the way... or two

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I'd be worried about getting stuck with a "driver orphaned" card. Yeah it might not officially be unsupported, but how much driver love do you think AMD is really putting behind the VII at this point?

Navi, Navi 2, and Vega 3 or whatever comes next for prosumers and Enterprise will keep AMD's overworked driver team very busy.

 

[Despoiler]

I'd be worried about getting stuck with a "driver orphaned" card. Yeah it might not officially be unsupported, but how much driver love do you think AMD is really putting behind the VII at this point?

Navi, Navi 2, and Vega 3 or whatever comes next for prosumers and Enterprise will keep AMD's overworked driver team very busy.

What driver love do they need? Why would anyone expect a past architecture from any company in any industry to be the focus of development? When Raja took over graphics AMD started doing maximal driver optimization from launch day. That's why you rarely see bigger gains than 8% on a new driver for a new game unless the game specifically exploits a new feature in the architecture. Also, can you cite a source for AMD having an overworked driver team?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

What driver love do they need? Why would anyone expect a past architecture from any company in any industry to be the focus of development? When Raja took over graphics AMD started doing maximal driver optimization from launch day. That's why you rarely see bigger gains than 8% on a new driver for a new game unless the game specifically exploits a new feature in the architecture. Also, can you cite a source for AMD having an overworked driver team?

- Disclaimer: I didn't mean to put anyone on the defensive, I've owned plenty of AMD cards and always had good luck with them. I know AMD and driver's can be triggering given AMD's history of shoddy driver accusations.

That being said, overworked driver team: Navi launch drivers. They were inarguably rough around the edges and while I've heard they've gotten better, they're about where they should been when Navi launched. They now have old GCN, Navi, and upcoming Navi 2 to all support simultaneously. That seems like an absurdly tall order for a company that has legitimately had issues with day 0 drivers, let alone bug hunting for older cards.

As far as part arch support: VII was launched at the start of the year, it's not some ancient relic of a card, but you can already see it start to fade into the background now that Navi essentially matches it in performance.

If your driver team has to work on bug fixes, launch drivers, etc are they going to focus on the future Navi arch or the past niche products?

I'm not saying Vega needs some major ground up driver improvements, but thanks to there being about a million ways to skin a cat nowadays, launch drivers and driver updates are fairly important in avoiding serious software bugs and incompatibilities.