AMD Launches Radeon RX Vega Graphics Cards

Published: August 1, 2017 9:30 AM /

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AMD has given details on its highly anticipated Radeon Vega cards. Three models were officially announced: Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition, Radeon RX Vega 64, and Radeon RX Vega 56. While not officially announced in the press release, AMD also teased a Nano version, a successor to the Fury-based Radeon Nano, a physically smaller card made with small cases in mind.

Vega is the follow up to AMD’s Polaris architecture, which was released last year. With Polaris, AMD targeted mid-range cards and mobile. Vega marks a return to the high end, although AMD is comparing its performance with Nvidia’s GeForce 1080, not the more powerful 1080 Ti. The new generation introduces new hardware features, most notably second generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), which is faster than GDDR5 and GDDR5X, as well as physically smaller. AMD claims that HBM2 is twice as fast in bandwidth-per-pin compared to HBM1, and has 60% more bandwidth than GDDR5. The use of the newest version of High Bandwidth Memory also makes it a successor to AMD's Fiji architecture. Other notable hardware features include the introduction of tile-based rendering and a cache controller that allows for quicker access to the memory.

Vega Liquid

The entry level card is called RX Vega 56, and feature 3585 Stream Processors, 56 compute units and a clock speed of 1471MHz in a TDP of 210W and price of $399 USD. The air-cooled RX Vega 64 features 4096 stream processors, 64 compute units, and a clock speed of 1546MHz with a 295W TDP and price of $499 USD. The flagship card is the liquid-cooled RX Vega 64 Liquid, with the same hardware as the air-cooled version, but at a higher boost clock of 1677MHz, and a TDP of 345W.

AMD also announced bundles for the new cards in bundles called Radeon Packs, which come with Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus and Prey for free. The bundle also includes a $100 discount on a Ryzen 7 1700X or Ryzen 7 1800X, with a choice of an Asus ROG Crosshair VI Extreme, Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming K7, or MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium Motherboard. A $200 discount is also given for a Samsung C34F791 display, which is a 34” ultrawide curved WQHD monitor. At launch, the Radeon Aqua pack will be the only way to purchase the liquid cooled version of Vega.

Both the standalone cards and Radeon Packs will be available on August 14th. AMD did not give any hard performance numbers in their information release.

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