NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Radeon VII: "Underwhelming (...) the Performance is Lousy"; "Freesync Doesn't Work"

 

PC World managed to get a hold of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, picking his thoughts on AMD's recently announced Radeon VII. Skirting through the usual amicable, politically correct answers, Jensen made his thoughts clear on what the competition is offering to compete with NVIDIA's RTX 2000 series. The answer? Vega VII is an "underwhelming product", because "The performance is lousy and there's nothing new. [There's] no ray tracing, no AI. It's 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we'll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we'll crush it." Not content on dissing the competition's product, Jensen Huang also quipped regarding AMD's presentation and product strategy, saying that "It's a weird launch, maybe they thought of it this morning."
 
Of course, the real market penetration of the technologies Jensen Huang mentions is currently extremely low - only a handful of games support NVIDIA's forward-looking ray tracing technologies. That AMD chose to not significantly invest resources and die-space for what is essentially a stop-gap high-performance card to go against NVIDIA's RTX 2080 means its 7 nm 331 mm² GPU will compete against NVIDIA's 12 nm, 545 mm² die - if performance estimates are correct, of course.

The next remarks came regarding AMD's FreeSync (essentially a name for VESA's Adaptive Sync), which NVIDIA finally decided to support on its GeForce graphics cards - something the company could have done outright, instead of deciding to go the proprietary, module-added, cost-increased route of G-Sync. While most see this as a sign that NVIDIA has seen a market slowdown for its G-Sync, added price-premium monitors and that they're just ceding to market demands, Huang sees it another way, saying that "We never competed. [FreeSync] was never proven to work. As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync. The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD's graphics cards." In the wake of these word from Jensen, it's hard to understand the overall silence from users that might have their FreeSync monitors not working.

Reportedly, NVIDIA only found 12 out of 400 FreeSync-supporting monitors to support their G-Sync technology automatically in the initial battery of tests, with most panels requiring a manual override to enable the technology. Huang promised that "We will test every single card against every single monitor against every single game and if it doesn't work, we will say it doesn't work. And if it does, we will let it work," adding a snarky punchline to this matter with an "We believe that you have to test it to promise that it works, and unsurprisingly most of them don't work." Fun times.

 
Source
 

starsmine
The amount of salt I thought I was at Morton for a second there.

 
 
The comments everywhere about this are hilarious.  

Funny that he should comment this way on a video card he's never seen. I understand that an RTX 2080 with DLSS enabled might indeed prove stronger than a Radeon 7, but the fact that a Radeon 7 can match an RTX 2080 without DLSS is a super feat from AMD. He knows it but will play the whole thing down.

He's not wrong.
#TeamJensen

rjohnson11
Funny that he should comment this way on a video card he's never seen. I understand that an RTX 2080 with DLSS enabled might indeed prove stronger than a Radeon 7, but the fact that a Radeon 7 can match an RTX 2080 without DLSS is a super feat from AMD. He knows it but will play the whole thing down.

Plus AMD matched the 2080 price and doubled the Vram...

I'm unimpressed with the Radeon VII. Like many others, I was hoping for a miracle, but again AMD has failed.
                        Radeon VII | 1080Ti              | 2080
Release Date    Feb 2019    | March 2017      | Sept 2018
TDP                  300W         | 250W               | 215W
Price                 $699           | $500-600 used | $699
Performance                     Approx. Equal
 
So the Radeon VII matches performance of the 1080Ti/2080, but, it consumes more power, released much later, and is more expensive than a 1080Ti. Also comparing to a 2080, lacks DLSS/RTX, if anyone cares about that. At the current price of $699, the card will be a flop. If it were possible to sell at $499, AMD could sell many cards, but the 16GB HBM2 is likely way too expensive to turn a profit.

 
I thought 7nm was going to give AMD a performance/power edge, but it has not at all.

Comments come from the guy who was hypnotizing the crowd and the listeners by mentioning the same thing over and over throughout his speech.
 
Your forgot to mention...the RTX cards run hotter, hotter, hotter than the Radeon, Radeon, Radeon. The RTX will save you lots of money but give more headaches, headaches, headaches when they die, die, die (can't you understand what i am saying by now?) die, die, and will still die when you get another, another, another...

Planned the presentation the night before. Lol. Did amd's presentation play off like the rambling drunk uncle on Thanksgiving? That's what I remember from the rtx release stream. That and the jaw dropping price hike. At several points it was obvious that Jensen was just randomly reading details engineers wrote down that he had at best a rudimentary understanding of.

Also I find it funny that he claims nvidia invented adaptive sync. Gsync was released in 2013 right? I found references to vesa adaptive sync as far back as 2009. Maybe it wasn't a display port standard but the tech was functional well before gsync if those articles are to be believed. Based on that vesa or it's associate's invented it. It just wasn't adopted until after Nvidia released gsync.

As much as I respect Jensen, he sure can come off as a pompous prick at times. I'd love for Intel to knock him down a few pegs on the humility ladder when arctic sound releases in a year or two. Unfortunately, he is probably right. Intel's past gpus were not nessecarily failures but they were far from top of performance charts. Even with taking amds people on they probably won't be chart topping till at least gen 3-4 and that's if they keep making gpus that long.

Haung vs Su. They sound like a divorced Asian couple bickering. 

The 16GB will come more into play on the higher resolution screens and this would give AMD a slight advantage in that respect. 

MSim
The price of video cards these days, it's causing people to put of upgrading.

A small part of that price increase is due to the trade war with China. 

Brad_Hawthorne
Haung vs Su. They sound like a divorced Asian couple bickering. 

 
Apparently they are related.  Jensen is her Uncle.  She is his niece.  Family Wars! LOL!  I could only wonder what Thanksgiving dinner is like....

rjohnson11

MSim
The price of video cards these days, it's causing people to put of upgrading.

A small part of that price increase is due to the trade war with China. 

That is incorrect.  I think price fixing comes into play here and the cost of R&D costs more now than ever as we are nearing the end of Moore's Law.  The price jump we've seen since 200/400 series is something I think we'd see in 15-20 years, not less than 10 years.

GTXJackBauer

Brad_Hawthorne
Haung vs Su. They sound like a divorced Asian couple bickering. 

 
Apparently they are related.  Jensen is her Uncle.  She is his niece.  Family Wars! LOL!  I could only wonder what Thanksgiving dinner is like....

rjohnson11

MSim
The price of video cards these days, it's causing people to put of upgrading.

A small part of that price increase is due to the trade war with China. 

That is incorrect.  I think price fixing comes into play here and the cost of R&D costs more now than ever as we are nearing the end of Moore's Law.  The price jump we've seen since 200/400 series is something I think we'd see in 15-20 years, not less than 10 years.

Nvidia brute forced this series of cards and it's reflected in the die size and overall production cost which is passed onto customer. There are some price fixing issues related in this too. Especially in the VRAM used on the cards.

These are standard Nvidia tactics. Attack the opposition with direct slander rather than performance numbers. It's a good strategy which AMD should adopt. Pushing their products compute capabilities when their game play numbers are behind, for example, and attacking Nvidia in kind. This is another reason Nvidia holds such a commanding lead in the market.
 
Nvidia: "This has RTX technology.:
 
Consumer: "...I'm still skeptical about this."
 
Nvidia: "It just works."
 
Consumer: "......I'LL TAKE TWO!!!"
 
This is how propaganda takes hold of a mind when you pound the cerebellum with enough force.