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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

300W power consumption, and it still only caught up with Nvidia cards drawing less than 200W on gaming performance

>300W vs 200W

That's not measured. That's manufacturer spec, which is best ignored.

NVIDIA's TDP is not the thermal design number as you'd expect, but rather, the "typical" as in measured while running some arbitrary loads.

It's dodgy, but that's how NVIDIA rolls.

Always do refer to measurements for actual numbers to compare.

Manufacturer specs are best not trusted.

Discovered this the hard way when building quad GPU servers. 1080Ti has TDP of 250W per spec, yet most "1600W" power supplies will crap out and shut down your system if you fire up 4 1080Ti's simultaneously. The only brand I've tried that didn't crap out was EVGA. Supposedly Corsair 1600W PSU is also OK, but I haven't tried it. Even in nvidia-smi (which I think still averages things out somewhat and never shows the momentary peak power), 1080Ti will often jump way over the 250W "limit" when it's at 100% utilization.

This is classic AMD... medium performance for medium pricing.

Still kind of shocking that $700 is "medium pricing" now.

AMD's pricing tends to tumble kinda quick.

Expect a $500 cost in 6 months and $300 in a year.

The $700 dollar is probably due to low yields right now.

That's very unlikely. 16 GB of HBM2 alone probably costs AMD around $300, and HBM2 prices are unlikely to fall soon (they've actually been trending up, if what I've read is to be believed).

Navi is expected by late H1, and at that point VII won't matter.

Isn't Navi expected to be more of a mid-market Polaris replacement, rather than a Vega successor?

It was about pricing, above.

As I understand it, Navi's meant to be very aggressively priced.

> AMD's pricing tends to tumble kinda quick.

Not sure that's really been the case with the Vega Line has it?

Yes, the RX series has been good price cuts.

This begs the question of whether the VII is considered a RX series card or Vega card.

The Vegas are currently on sale at Newegg for $100 less than the price quoted in the article. I don't know what their regular price is, though.

Yeah, I guess I have to adjust my expectations now. Fortunately, I don't yet have a compelling need to replace my GTX960.

I splurged last year on a card that could play Elite: Dangerous, DOOM and The Witcher 3 in 4k and spent about that much. Now that card is "medium"? (not that I'm complaining about the onward march of PC gaming demands and power, just that $700 was very much the highest end last year)

If you drop down to 1080p you can save a ton of money and it still looks great.

4k = ~8million pixels 1080p = ~2 million pixels

bumping up to 4k is like running the game 4 times at once from a pixel shader perspective

I'm still using an RX 380 (mid-range in 2015), and I'm still able to get quite decent performance on modern games on my 1080p projector. The most recent titles are only in the 40-50 FPS range with settings turned up, but still totally playable. I'm not sure what practical benefit there is to the high-end cards outside of bragging rights.

more winning if you do shooters competitively. but yeah if you are playing single player, 50fps is fine for most people.

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