

RX Vega—AMD's long-awaited followup to the two-year-old Fury and Fury X high-performance graphics cards—launches on August 14 in two core versions: the $499 Radeon RX Vega 64 and the $399 Radeon RX Vega 56 (UK prices TBC).

A limited edition version of RX Vega 64, which features a slick aluminium shroud, costs $599 as part of a bundle that includes discounts on a Freesync monitor, X370 motherboard, and free games. A watercooled version of RX Vega 64, dubbed Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition, also comes in a similar bundle pack priced at $699.

According to those in attendance at Siggraph, where AMD made its RX Vega announcements, much of the focus was on the value proposition of RX Vega bundles and features like Freesync rather than all-out performance. Anandtech has been told Vega 64 will "trade blows" with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080, which launched way back in May of 2016. The launch of Vega Frontier Edition (a production-focused graphics card) in June hinted at such levels of performance—RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 are based on the same Vega 10 GPU and architecture.

To that end, the core specs of RX Vega aren't surprising. There are 64 compute units made up of 4,096 stream processors at a base clock of 1,247MHz and a boost clock of 1,547MHz. Feeding the GPU is 8GB of HBM2 memory—making RX Vega the first reasonably priced consumer graphics card to sport the technology—which offers up to 484GB/s of bandwidth. Peak FP32 performance is rated at 12.66 teraflops. RX Vega 56 offers 56 compute units and slightly slower clock speeds for 10.5 teraflops of performance, while RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition ups the clock speeds for 13.7 teraflops of performance.

RX Vega FE RX Vega 64 Liquid RX Vega 64 RX Vega 56 R9 Fury X Stream Processors 4,096 4,096 4,096 3,585 4,096 Texture Units 256 256 256 224 256 ROPs 64 64 64 64 64 Boost Clock 1600MHz 1677MHz 1546MHz 1471MHz 1050MHz Memory Bus Width 2,048-bit 2,048-bit 2,048-bit 2,048-bit 4,096-bit Memory Clock 1.89GHz 1.89GHz 1.89GHz 1.89GHz 1GHz Memory Bandwidth 483GB/s 483GB/s 483GB/s 483GB/s 512GB/s Memory Size 8GB HBM2 8GB HBM 8GB HBM 8GB HBM 4GB HBM Typical Board Power 295W 345W 295W 210W 275W Launch Price £1,000/$1,000 £?/$699 (in bundle) £?/$499 £?/$399 £549/$649

While sharing many core specs with the Fury and Fury X graphics cards, AMD has implemented a number of architectural tweaks. These include support for double-rate FP16 "half floats" and a new high bandwidth cache controller that allows for fast, low latency access to the on-board HBM2 memory and system memory. Coupled with the much higher clock speeds of RX Vega, AMD claims that minimum frame rates on an air-cooled RX Vega 64 are higher on average than on an Nvidia GTX 1080 when benchmarked at ultra-wide 1440p resolution (3440x1440). RX Vega 56 is expected to perform similarly to a GTX 1070.

Minimum frames are something AMD has struggled with in the past, and ultimately those matter more to the average player (since minimum frames indicate how smooth a game feels) than a crazy-high average frame rate. If AMD's performance claims hold out once reviews hit, they could make an RX Vega 64 a compelling graphics card even if peak performance and power efficiency (RX Vega 64 sports a 295W TDP versus 180W for a GTX 1080) doesn't reach that of Nvidia's pricier GTX 1080 Ti.









Alongside the reference card designs—which use a similar black plastic design to the RX 480—partner cards with more exotic cooling solutions are expected in Q4 of this year. A smaller, mini-ITX-size version of RX Vega, similar to the R9 Nano, is also due for launch later this year. That will sport a small 150W TDP.

As for those bundles, paying a $100 for the RX Vega 64 or 56 gives buyers a $200 discount on a 34-inch Samsung CF791 curved ultrawide FreeSync monitor, $100 off a Ryzen 7 CPU and motherboard combo, plus two free Bethesda games. That's not a bad deal at all if you're in the market for a full system upgrade.

Thanks to Ryzen, AMD can sell you a complete system competitive with its rivals at Intel and Nvidia—that's a huge turnaround from just a year ago. While AMD hasn't yet confirmed what bundle deals the UK and Europe will receive, they will at least receive them at launch.

While it's great to see AMD once again competing in the high-end graphics card market—and to see that it's offering good value with RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56—from a technical standpoint RX Vega is less impressive. Nvidia has led the GPU market in performance for some time, and more importantly the company has led in power efficiency, too. AMD is doing with 295W what Nvidia is doing with 180W. Even accounting for the discrepancies in how AMD and Nvidia measure TDP, that's a big difference.

AMD, however, seems realistic about Vega performance, telling Hexus Vega is "great performance today, more to come."