AMD has revealed most of the final details for its Vega 10 cards during its Tech Day held just before SIGGRAPH kicked off in Los Angeles. The followup to the two-year-old Fury and Fury X high-performance graphics cards has two core versions – the $499 Radeon RX Vega 64 and the $399 Radeon RX Vega 56. The Vega 64 is taking on Nvidia’s GTX1080, while the Vega 56 takes on the GTX 1070
There is also the A limited edition version of RX Vega 64, in 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.
Spec Time
From the spec above the Vega 10 looks to be a big step forward for AMD. While the Vega has the same number of streaming processors as Fiji, 4096 cores, each core is clocked much higher. On raw clock speed alone Vega is nearly 50 percent faster than Fiji.
There are 64 compute units powered by 4,096 stream processors at a base clock of 1,247MHz and a boost clock of 1,547MHz. Feeding the data pipe line is 8GB of HBM2 sporting to 484GB/s of bandwidth. the HBM2 delivers up to 8x the memory capacity per stack, giving Vega 8GB or 16GB of VRAM using two stacks, compared to 4GB using four stacks on Fiji. 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.
AMD is very proud of Vega’s High-Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC) that optimize memory accesses along with the HBM2 memory should improve minimum frame rates and help to eliminate stutters while gaming, a problem in the past for AMD cards. While everyone looks at max frame rate, it is the minimum frames rates that give smoothness and enjoyment while gaming or using VR.
The geometry and shader pipelines have been reworked to be more efficient too, AMD has added 40 new instructions to its ISA, and Vega will be the ‘most complete’ implementation of the DX12 and Vulkan APIs. That includes things like conservative rasterization tier-3 (Nvidia’s Pascal architecture only does tier-2)
Thee new cards also pack FP16 math, potentially doubling the TFLOPS for workloads that don’t need the increased precision of FP32.
Power Use
Sadly the news is not what we had hoped for. The power efficiency look to still to be behind Nvidia. The New Vega cards draw 295W while Nvidia’s 1080s and 1070s use 180W. Yes, there are the discrepancies in how AMD and Nvidia measure TDP, but it is still a big gap for those people that live in areas where power isn’t cheap.
Radeon Packs
There are three packs available, and each bundles Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Prey. Radeon Packs also include a $200 discount on Samsung’s 34-inch curved ultrawide FreeSync monitor, and a $100 discount on some Ryzen 7 1800X processor and 370X motherboard combos.
- Radeon Red Pack – Featuring the Radeon RX Vega 56, an air-cooled card priced at $499.
- Radeon Black Pack – Featuring the Radeon RX Vega 64, an air-cooled card priced at $599.
- Radeon Aqua Pack – Featuring the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition priced at $699.
These packs include ‘limited edition’ versions of the air-cooled RX Vega 64 that use a brushed aluminum shroud. the standard cards pack the standard black shroud like the ones from RX 480 reference design. The air-cooled cards use blowers, though AMD notes the Vega cards will use 30mm blower fans compared to 25mm fans on previous generation cards, which should improve noise levels and cooling. AMD’s reference Vega cards will also use high-end isothermic vapor chambers to improve cooling performance.
Are We Happy?
The Internet went a little nuts when the first results of the Vega Frontier Edition came out. The Nvidia’s GTX 1080 beat in most gaming tests, Sometimes the GTX 1070 beat, as well. Not that card is designed for 3D content creation and pro gaming. So some negative comments, were not fair to AMD.
But until we get to run tests, we can not say, if we are happy or not. We are happy to see a return tot he high end for AMD and that is a good thing for all gamers. If these cards have soliid frame rates on the low end, as well as the high end in testing, this could mean we have a battle for the upper tier of gamers in our hands! Let’s just hope that the miners don’t buy all them up before gamers even get to play with them
