 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 Ians? 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 it and you go, Oh, that was basically a qualifying sample. This? Oh, not so much. This thing is DevBoard 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 kludge. 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. 8-pin power connector, oof, on like 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! Roll it 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. 1 Hertz! 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 1 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 some tearing, ladies and gentlemen. So we've just got the Microsoft basic display adapter driver. Anthony, did you have any AMD drivers on this before? Like, did this have an AMD GPU unit before? Would it have had a chance to grab it? No. No, okay. No. Okay, so that makes sense. 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 cache 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 suckas. Oh, someone 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 am legitimately excited about this. I had no idea that any of that random grab-Bega-stuff-Yu-Ki-Sent was gonna 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. Oh, look at that! Oh, interesting. VGA compatible controller, NBATI, Vega 12. Huh. Like Vega 12, that's a finished notebook GPU, isn't it? It's, 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.VM underscore update underscore mode equals three is gonna 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. It'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 gonna 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 gonna 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. 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. 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 CSGO? All right, let's do it. Playing some Vega 16 CSGO! Someone at home is like from that lab is gonna be like, What happened to that thing? Given that weird artifacting we saw in 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. Unreal. Sorry, source, source, source engine. A game or two. 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. Yeah, that doesn't really tell- Oh, hey, you know, we've got a new piece of information! Apparently it has 4 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 1. 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- see 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 FireGL card, but then if that 4 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- it's 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, you know, necessarily try to stay there. So we're not gonna try and do the entire AMD hardware engineering and software driver team's 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 Yu-Ki 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.