Vega Is An Efficient Architectural: Fill & Download for Free

Architectural efficiency and lowest building costs. You can fit more rooms onto each story than in any other configuration, and the central “core” of the ‘Y’ can house all of the chase for electrical and plumbing as well as the elevators shafts, without the need to duplicate across the building.

No.The Quadro FX 5800 is a very old (released in 2008) workstation graphics card, so is optimised for professional rendering tasks, and has much lower compute performance and a less efficient architecture than modern graphics cards. As it is more than a decade old, the FX 5800 currently has much more value as a novelty or collector’s item than it does for actually being used as a graphics card.Even midrange integrated GPUs (e.g. the Intel iris pro or Radeon Vega 8) will have better gaming performance than the FX 5800.

A long time ago, AMD was a more common choice. But then, something happened. Or, rather, nothing happened on the AMD front. Before the Athlon, AMD was quite competitive for the money, comparing their K6 to the Pentium MMX. They were very popular with enthusiasts at the time. Intel took that all away with the Celeron. It wasn’t even close.When the 7th generation of x86 CPUs came, AMD had a slight advantage with the Athlon, pushed it forwards with the Athlon XP, and the Athlon X2 was competitive until the Core 2 Duo came out. It was still a solid choice in the lower mid-range, but any thought of AMD coming close to the performance crown in more than a tiny handful of benchmarks went out the window. As Intel improved the Core 2 Duo/Quad architecture, AMD slipped further behind.Then in 2011 came Sandy Bridge, the second generation Core architecture.AMD couldn’t come close to matching it. For years.In 2014, AMD released the FX-5950. This was a monster of a CPU. 4 modules - that is, essentially, 8 CPU integer cores (4 floating point cores, one per module). 5Ghz turbo clock speeds. It had a 220 watt TDP compared to the 3 year old i7 2600K with a 95 watt TDP.AMD finally made something that was, well, occasionally faster than the old i7 2600K. It was only 3 years late and used twice as much power. See for yourself - the FX-5950 did fine in heavily multithreaded applications, but any time single threaded performance was important, forget about it. Even with a significant clock speed advantage, it was still generally slower.AMD had an inferior architecture, didn’t have anything faster coming down the pipeline, and they were behind Intel in manufacturing processes by years. The only thing they could do to compete was to push a piece of silicon to its absolute limit.http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/287?vs=1289Before Ryzen came out, it had been a decade or more since AMD offered a competitive CPU. If you weren’t in the super budget market, there was literally no reason to purchase a computer with an AMD CPU.Ryzen has changed that equation. Now, a lot of people are building computers with Ryzen chips. But unlike the past decade, it isn’t a cut and dry, simple decision. Ryzen CPUs offer more cores for the money - and performance in less threaded applications is FAR superior to AMD’s old CPUs… but clock for clock they are still behind Intel. So there’s an interesting dichotomy. AMD is offering nice 8 core CPUs at reasonable prices, and 6 core/12 thread CPUs at extremely good prices - but there are many applications where Intel offers better performance.Threadripper was just released, and it continues the same theme - but in many-core systems, Intel’s clock speed advantage is much less, and AMD’s quad channel memory support and additional PCIe lanes offer real functionality to the few that need it.For the first time in over a decade, AMD isn’t just competitive with Intel, they are offering products that are a superior deal for a lot of use cases. They aren’t superior across the board, but it’s not just small niche cases where an AMD CPU offers slightly better performance than a 3 year old Intel CPU. Today, AMD offers a real performance advantage at a lower price - for some (many) applications.In the GPU world, AMD never really made their own until they bought ATi.ATi was generally playing second or third fiddle to Nvidia (and 3Dfx in the early days). Occasionally they would take advantage of an Nvidia misstep, and they have generally been competitive if not at an advantage. But the moments when they have clearly been ahead of Nvidia have been uncommon - there were really just a couple of them - the biggest being the Radeon 9700/9800 versus the Nvidia FX5800/5900 - at that point in time the majority of the high end was ATi.Anyway, there was a turning point - Maxwell. Nvidia quietly made a huge architecture change when Maxwell came out. Their GPUs began using a tile based renderer. Tile based rendering was used in the old PowerVR video chips, but driver issues did them in. Mobile GPUs tend to have tiling architectures too. Essentially, tile based rendering architectures use less resources as they don’t waste resources rendering things that you can’t see. Maxwell was an absolutely tremendous improvement over Kepler - even though both were made on the 28nm manufacturing process. Here’s an article about it:Hidden Secrets: Investigation Shows That NVIDIA GPUs Implement Tile Based Rasterization for Greater EfficiencyThe thing is, in GPUs, power is everything. More power means more heat. Too much heat and you need to resort to more and more exotic cooling solutions, such as water. For a couple generations, AMD didn’t even try to compete with Maxwell and its successors.AMD still hasn’t moved to a tile rendering based architecture.Because AMD hasn’t moved to a tile based renderer, their GPUs are going to be significantly less efficient. Because they’re less efficient, it takes more raw computing power to generate the same performance. Ever wonder why AMD GPUs are often preferred for compute based tasks? It’s because when they’re rendering graphics, they’re doing less with more.Now, Vega has come out, at least on paperIt’s a new architecture, so performance will improve as drivers mature. In Doom at 4k resolutions, Vega 64 manages to slightly outpace a GTX 1080, and the Vega 56 matches it.The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 & RX Vega 56 Review: Vega Burning BrightIn other cases, Vega 64 is a bit slower than a 1080.The real indication that it’s not a tiling renderer? The power consumption. Vega 56 uses nearly the same power as a 1080Ti. Vega 64 uses significantly more. But the performance doesn’t quite match the power usage.Now, there might be something good that comes from Vega for gamers - with cryptocurrency miners currently buying up a lot of GPUs, if Vega is an inefficiently expensive GPU purchase for mining, prices will not inflate on it, and it will be a good deal relative to the market. But if prices come down, the power consumption bear is going to hurt AMD again.