Not my Preferred Price, but I Got One

I didn't get it at launch, but I was lucky and caught some Gigabyte Vega 64s on up for order Amazon Friday morning at the MSRP for the Black pack. That means instead of the $499 price of just the card I paid $599 for the card with two games. Well, one of the games I definitely want, so in effect I'm only paying $40 more than I would have preferred (I want Wolfenstein II which will be $60 for a time).
Now, I do want to comment on the Vega pricing story, which personally I am seeing more as a non-story that a few actors have put forward and the Internet is running with. The idea is that AMD gave an MSRP of $499 for Vega 64, but had only little intent to sell many at that price point, so 'in effect' the actual MSRP is $599. Basically people are upset there were so few at the $499 price, so instead of being rationale and patient they are attacking AMD and every second AMD does not respond to their liking is another reason to despise the company. I am very glad I interpret the world differently than this as I'd quickly exhaust my emotions. Here's my take on it, based on some of the available facts:
The card-only and Radeon Pack versions of Vega 64 have different SKUs, meaning they are supplied differently and possibly also ordered in bulk differently. (Not an expert on SKUs but they would be ordered differently, it is more I am not sure how much the wholesale prices differ.)  So a company may have gotten 100 total Vega 64 GPUs, but only 10 of the card-only SKU and 90 for the more expensive Radeon Packs. This means you have a lower chance of getting the cheaper SKU and better chance of getting the more expensive SKU (which happened to me, but I'm not upset about it). AMD has issued an official statement saying they are trying to restock all the SKUs, so with patience you will see the card-only SKU come back in stock, but they might be bought up quickly. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people, including crypto-currency miners trying to buy them up as well, which is making some of the gaming community super-salty, because it means less product for them, which drives up costs.
Now for my, I think rational take on this. AMD had stated the Radeon Packs were meant to counter the hordes of miners trying to purchase up the cards. Personally I don't think the packs were very interesting (most people will probably have the CPU and motherboard already, and a monitor too while games we already expect to be free), but I want to look at the intent here because that is much simpler to consider (I do not want to guess about the internal politics to cut the deals necessary to arrange the deals between the different manufacturers). AMD likely made a calculation that assumed miners just want the card-only version while gamers would be more accepting of the more expensive packs that give them something extra (I personally would have rather saved the $100 and purchased the games separately, but I'm not complaining because I do want one of the two games, and will probably enjoy both. Plus, I chose to purchase now instead of waiting and hoping for a better offer in potentially months) and that calculation skewed how many GPUs went to the SKUs. If they already wanted to target gamers over miners, then they would put more into the Radeon Packs.
One's gut might say AMD was wrong about balancing the SKUs, but let's add a dash of reality to this. They were going to sell out fast, across the board, and once that happened the prices would go up. This has already been happening with GPUs and it was going to happen here. It didn't matter what the balance was, this would happen. AMD, according to my guess, was hoping the extra $100 would dissuade enough miners to leave some for gamers, and while it may have worked for some, there are two things that worked against them. One was rumors that Vega was going to be amazing at mining (looks like this isn't true, but then not all of the hardware features are currently driver-enabled either, so we'll see what happens, plus AMD has long had a powerful compute side, so there would be interest anyway) and the other is the prices were going to skyrocket regardless. New tech almost always sells-out immediately because it is new and exciting and in limited quantity. Those who want it are going to get it, whether it is a miner or a gamer like me. I have a specific reason for wanting it beyond just gaming, which NVIDIA GPUs could satisfy just as well (I want it for comparisons in game performance analyses and to do some technical analysis). When someone has a specific goal in mind, higher costs are less an impediment. Consider game prices and how they start expensive, when the people who want to play 'that' game are buying it, but once this group is satisfied, the target shifts to those who want to play games like that, but there is more competition for this group's money so prices have to fall. Vega is new and definitely in that first phase. Mining has disrupted GPU prices in part because it extends the length of that phase significantly, so prices cannot come down for those who just want a good GPU, and not a specific GPU. NVIDIA's less compute-capable GeForce cards receive an advantage here then, because they are just not so good at non-gaming tasks, and the smaller, gaming-focused architecture allows it to be cheaper (and use less power, as some have been attacking AMD for) hitting AMD twice.
Now, here's my guess for the future: the card-only SKU is going to be restocked and sell out almost immediately. This will continue for months, and during those same months the Vega drivers will improve and people will come to realize it is a better architecture than the attacks suggest. People also attacked Ryzen when it launched, and now it is widely seen as a tremendous success for several reasons, so with time will come some clarity. Now those new drivers might make them more interesting to miners too, so that issue will not be solved, but something else is also going to happen. Technically two things will happen, with the public one being the Radeon Packs coming to an end. Some are decrying AMD, claiming that when this happens the card-only SKU will go up in price, but considering this would be stupid economic move and at best a rumor, I suggest we dismiss that concern unless it happens. When that happens, chances are the card-only SKU will keep its current price, but also the manufacturing cost of the GPUs will have come down, so there will be more profit at that MSRP too. Basically, if the Radeon Packs are making more money for AMD, they might be giving them a stop-gap measure to bring in more revenue while the manufacturing process improves, making the lower price more affordable to them. Might take longer than the packs will last, but the packs could change before leaving, and what profit comes in might carry the losses as the price drops.
Be patient. Things will improve. (Also, don't start attacking the unreleased Navi architecture, claiming the same will happen there. We don't know and at least I had a silly idea that would ease this issue if true. In addition to the ability to mass produce one die cheaply for an entire stack, like we see with the Ryzen CPUs through EPYC, my crazy and uninformed idea is that maybe Navi will be able to have additional compute components attached to it. This would mean there could be graphics focused and compute focused versions, allowing AMD to have the different classes of GPUs, like NVIDIA does currently, but without having to produce a lot of different dies. It is a crazy idea, but may be it is possible.)
Huh, that's a long one... sorry about that, but seriously, stop freaking out and attacking AMD. Be patient and see what happens. Chances are it will be less malicious than the hate requires and the harm from the hate will be regrettable.

Just Hours to Go

It might sound weird, but I actually enjoy digging into frame time data with R. You can find some interesting patterns, and of course improving the design of the graphs is also rewarding on its own. Hopefully I'll be able to get an RX Vega soon so I can continue my data collection with it, including FRTC, Chill, and Enhanced Sync. The resulting data of these different frame rate impacting features might be quite interesting.

Looking Forward to the 14th

Last week AMD launched its RX Vega GPUs, after much anticipation, with an availability date of August 14. While the GTX 1080 currently driving my display is plenty for my needs, I still think I will try to pick up a Vega 56 because there are some technologies and capabilities I do want. Among of the first things I would do after getting one installed and set up would be to do a second part to the Serious Statistics article I wrote, but this time looking at the different features in AMD and NVIDIA drivers, as then I would have access to both. Should end up taking some time to compile all of that data, but I do want to see frame data for technologies like Radeon Chill. I think it could be very interesting, and then I will be ready for upcoming titles that may take special advantage of other AMD technologies. Hopefully I'll be able to get one before prices skyrocket because of the mining craze.
One thing I am not so looking forward to next week though is that my current job ends the end of the week. Hopefully, with a lot of luck, something will come up, either a separate opportunity or something to let me continue on where I am, but either way, next week will be a different week in one way or another. At least that will be next week, as for now, I need to focus on this week.
Something else coming up is the release of Ryzen Threadripper, and I am very much looking forward to reviews and more information on RAM support, motherboards, and full-plate coolers because I do want to build something around 32 threads. Oh the things I should be able to do with such a build are truly wonderful.
This is looking to be an interesting month (and SNES Classic pre-orders should go up sometime this month making it even busier).