Gigabyte's Radeon RX Vega 64 kicks ass at 1080 and 1440p

Check out this AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 deal, a high-end 1440p Graphics Card, with 35% off.

Yes, yes, both Nvidia and AMD have just unleashed new ‘Super’ and RT series of updated GPUs. And any AMD Vega-based board is arguably yesterday’s technology. But this Gigabyte Radeon RX VEGA 64 GAMING OC 8G board is still one hell of a bargain for just £325, and it ain’t even Amazon Prime Day yet.

That’s because it’s a bonafide high-end GPU priced barely half way up Nvidia’s updated graphics card tier - and that’s if you don’t count the ridiculously silly Titan card too. If you do, the Gigabyte Radeon RX VEGA 64 GAMING OC 8G almost looks like a budget board in comparison.

Performance-wise, AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 is among good company, equally matching the likes of Nvidia’s GTX 1080, the RTX 2060 Super, and even the newly released AMD Radeon RX 5700 as well. This makes the Vega 64 a prime candidate for those looking for a 1440p gaming GPU on the cheap. It wins some comparisons, loses others, depending on the game in question and the settings used of course, but for the money, you’d be hard pressed to find a better performing GPU at this £325 price point.



The Gigabyte Radeon RX VEGA 64 GAMING OC 8G is available now from amazon.co.uk for £325 (35% off RRP)

Specs-wise, you’re getting 8GB of 2048-bit High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) (higher spec memory versus the GDDR6 found on the RX 5700), 4,096 shaders, 256 texture units and 64 render outputs. As for clocks, this board runs ever so slightly faster than the reference GPU at 1,247MHz base and 1,546MHz boost.

Specifications

GPU AMD Vega 64 Stream Processors 4,096 Texture Units 256 ROPs 64 Base / Boost Clock 1,247 MHz / 1,546 MHz VRAM 8GB HBM 2.0 Memory Bus 2,048 Memory Clock 1.89 Gbps Transistor Count 12.5 Billion

Gigabyte's twin fan design should help keep the Vega 64 cool even in the toughest of fire fights.

No need to catch some rays

Of course, the obvious objection to any AMD board right now is that it lacks support for real-time ray tracing. But then how many games support that currently Nvidia-only tech? The answer is a very small handful. More pertinently, the actual performance of RTX boards with ray tracing enabled is very poor by conventional raster graphics standards. So it’s debatable whether the technology really is usable at all. What we can say for sure is that the cheapest RX 5700 card right now is a good £35 more, for similar performance, and the closest performing Nvidia card is a not-so-subtle £50 more than it too.