every once in a while i get my hands on something so special so unique that not
only does nobody have one almost no one
even knows that it exists and today is
one of those days thanks to rare tech collector yuki ons
i'm gonna go with yuki on our forum i
have this a hopefully working prototype of the
long lost vega 16 a graphics card from
AMD that never saw the light of day was it
for the best does it suck well we're gonna find out
aren't we ladies and gentlemen
this is crazy sometimes you'll see a prototype card
that you look closely at and you go yeah that was basically a qualifying sample
this not so much this thing is dev board af
so all these leads up here on the top edge of the board so you'd be able to
plug like some kind of custom proprietary harness onto them these are
all soldered on so they would use that usually for things like monitoring the
thermals or the power consumption of the board while they are developing the
drivers for it on the other side we've got just the right mix of what i would call
professional cluj this is a proper-ish
cooling solution you can see there's Radeon branding on the fan and this
heatsink here looks to be actually custom made for this board but then in
terms of how they're keeping it cool well it's just like yeah there's you
know this random fan kind of bolted onto it and we've got a theory as to why it's
set up like this now with a desktop card you would create a reference cooler for
it at the same time that you're creating the reference board
but check this out the bottom edge of the card only has enough pins for a pci
express 8x interface so it's got a 16x
connector on it because they would have been validating this GPU in a desktop
motherboard they would have needed to just chunk it in there but
this would have been a laptop product at
the end of the day and until very recently pretty much all dedicated gpus
and laptops ran 8x interfaces another
oddity is this check this out it's got all displayport ports no HDMI so that
would mean that this board if it was ever destined for release would have
probably been like a workstation board or something like that like there's no
way this would have ended up in a gaming GPU eight pin power connector oof
on like a a low tier vega 16. i mean i guess you would just put it on and then
we've seen this before actually finished reference designs that just have the
contact pads for a connector but it's just not on there so maybe it's just in
case hoping for the best oh
we're lit up ladies and gentlemen oh wow
that's gross okay so this seems to be running at 24.
it hurts i don't even think that's 30.
one hurts
that is 24 times more cinematic than your favorite films the only option in
the basic display adapter properties here is 64 hertz yeah wait no that can't
be one hertz that's not even right what's even going on right now 4k 24
hertz i believe that i don't believe 1 or 64 looking at this
wow that is that is some tearing ladies no one so we've just got the microsoft
basic display adapter driver uh Anthony did you have any AMD drivers on this
before like did this have an AMD jeep unit before would it have had a chance
to grab it uh no no okay no okay so that
makes sense uh let's go ahead and fire up GPU z and see what this thing picks
up as normally even if we're talking about graphics cards that have had their
firmware tampered with by you know wish scammers or
pre-production cpus it'll normally be able to grab things
like you know how much cash is on the CPU or whatever else like
half of these fields are not populated directx support unknown shaders unknown
rops unknown it just has no idea what's going on
so it knows default clock but not GPU clock it can't read it
it knows it has hbm2 memory but it thinks it has zero megabytes even many
of the fields that are populated are clearly wrong it says it's running at
PCIe 16x 3.0 but we know it doesn't even
have enough pins for that these are the latest adrenaline drivers from AMD's
website if there's anything that would know what this card is it would
obviously be AMD's own drivers right i
doubt this is going to work normally they have to manually add the ids for
every card that the driver works with so if there was some way for us to know
what that was and add it in i don't know maybe but probably not lttstore.com
oh something wrong now that's interesting though that error message
it did detect AMD graphics hardware
but just not supported AMD graphics hardware
we might not be defeated yet this wouldn't be an Anthony video if there
wasn't some reason to have Linux come in and save the day where's my Linux boot
drive i'm legitimately excited about this i had no idea that any of that
random grab mega stuff yuki sent was going to actually fire up
and nothing we are not defeated yet though vega owners even the ones who
bought finished cards have had some issues in Linux and there's kind of a
list of tips and tricks that we can try starting with unplugging our display
cable from the graphics card and plugging it into our onboard GPU which
means we need an HDMI connection
HDMI to the rescue hrvg oh look at that
oh interesting vga compatible controller
nba ti vega 12.
huh like vega 12 uh that's that's a finished
notebook GPU isn't it it's uh i believe
it's built into the apus the high-end apus but i'm not sure at
this stage we could attempt to use our vega 16 but it's very unlikely to work
without a couple of kernel parameter changes AMD GPU dot vm underscore update
underscore mode equals three is going to tell the driver to use the CPU to update
video memory when needed we also need to turn dynamic power management off we
need to disable some more power management features we need to make sure
the system doesn't try and continue running the card if it runs into a
problem we need to provide more information for troubleshooting that's
not strictly speaking needed but it may help us diagnose any further issues and
we need to disable GPU recovery in the case of a crash now this isn't going to
let the card just boot up like it was able to in Windows but we should be able
to render our games on the card and then pass through the work that's been done
to the integrated GPU kind of like we did when we got that mining card running
in Windows in games Anthony prepared all that stuff in
manjaro Linux vega 16. it's our own special branch of Linux just in case you
know you've got one of these cards that you need to run
glx gears is a simple render test and we're going to run the vega 16 version
of it to make sure that the rendering is done on the graphics card rather than
the onboard like i described before and that is some really ugly artifacting
like what does that look like does that look like a memory problem to you yeah
it kind of looks like it but it's working
yeah that's wow
okay the only way to know if it's working for sure is to know that it's like heating up do we know for sure that
that's rendering on this one so here we have all of the information saying the
gl renderer is currently the AMD vega 12. if i ran it without that parameter
it would just run on the standard integrated graphics
it really isn't running very warm apparently this is running with vsync on
though so that could be part of the reason it's just not working that hard
let's fire up a game shall we roll cs go all right let's do it
we're playing some vegas 16 cs go someone at home
is like from that lab it's gonna be like what happened to that thing given that
weird artifacting we saw on the render test this is way better than i would
have expected oh and it's definitely heating up now we are looking at 50 60
FPS running at 1080 all high anti-aliasing off
i mean it's playable like well playable
it's not great but it's playable
unreal sorry source source source engine a
gamer joke to put those performance numbers in context we went ahead and
fired up the same game running at the same settings on the onboard graphics
this time we're looking at about 30 to 35 frames per second
so yeah given that that's a comparison to
onboard graphics you know the vega 16 is not exactly a high performance part
but it's working let's go back to our non-modified kernel Linux and try one
more thing this is a little tool called core control we can pull up the system
tab and have a look at what we got in here
uh yeah that doesn't really oh hey you know we've got a new piece of
information apparently it has four gigs of RAM
fascinating i mean it might be right it also might not because it thinks it's a
vega 12 and all that but okay anyway
more interestingly we can go into our profile here
fire up GPU one okay and check this out
we can take this slider and move it all
the way to the right
pretty cool this may give us more performance
i mean going from 300 megahertz to 1300 megahertz assuming those numbers mean
anything should be a pretty significant performance bump dang
it's real working now this is crazy
so what is this thing
it's a it's got 16 compute units which makes it more akin
to a mobile part but it's got like
you know 1300 megahertz core clock speeds hbm2 memory what is it maybe it
was gonna be like a mid-range fire gl card but then if that four gigs of RAM
is right that wouldn't be enough for work so it crashed
in fairness it wasn't you know done right now there are a few more things
that we could try what we suspect is that by dragging the sliders all the way
to the right we were actually putting the card in kind of an overclocked state
like it's its maximum possible turbo and so the way that AMD would probably be
working on this card is they would be trying all these different power
profiles monitoring voltages monitoring temperatures monitoring power draw using
all these leads on the back and you would eventually end up with a driver
that's tuned so that it will it'll burst up like that but won't necessarily try
to stay there so we're not going to try and do the entire AMD hardware
engineering and software driver teams jobs with this one
engineering board so that's pretty much the end of our
experiment then i'm sure you guys would love to see us pull the cooler off take
off the thermal paste like really dig into this thing and look at what's there
but remember guys we didn't pay for this we do need to return it still as
functional as it is so i'm just gonna leave that alone and just
thank yuki for lending us this card thanks for watching guys if you're
looking for something else to watch why not check out our sort of similar-ish
video where we got an old mining GPU so one with no display outputs whatsoever
and used it to run games babyface me is gonna see you there