After months of rumors, leaks, and anticipation, AMD on Sunday finally revealed its Vega gaming GPU lineup that is expected to put the company back into the high-end graphics card game. The Radeon RX Vega 64 is said to compete with the Nvidia's monster GTX 1080 card.
AMD did not reveal full performance benchmarks of the Vega series. However, some tests, prior to its launch event on Monday, suggested that the Radeon RX Vega 64 can mostly go toe-to-toe with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080.
The $499 AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 will boast 64 compute units, 4,096 stream processors, and 8GB of HBM2 memory with 484GBps of bandwidth. The latest card from AMD will be running at 1,247MHz base clock with a boost clock of 1,546MHz. The card is rated at 12.66 TFLOPS of performance, which is a bit more than the Nvidia GTX 1080.
The Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition features 64 compute units, 4,096 stream processors, and 8GB of HBM2 with 484GBps of bandwidth. With its liquid cooling, AMD will increase the base clock to 1,406MHz and its boost clock to 1,677MHz and this card essentially costs $699, as reported by PCWorld.
Both the AMD cards feature a DIP switch setup on the rear similar to that of the Radeon Pro Frontier Edition. All cards also offer three DisplayPort 1.4 ports and a full-size HDMI 2.0 port. The AMD cards are said to be available August 14.
Playing several games on an ultra-wide-angle 3440x1440 monitor, AMD said the Radeon RX Vega 64 hit between 53fps and 76fps, while the Nvidia GTX 1080 could push 78fps on the top-end. And the minimum frame rate of the GTX 1080 dipped a little lower to 45fps, as reported by Ars Technica.
The higher minimum frame rate of the RX Vega 64, as said by the AMD officials, can be credited to its use of the high-bandwidth cache controller and HBM2 memory. AMD also mentioned that in more than 100 games playing at 4K resolution, the Radeon RX Vega 64 can push more than 60fps, which is a bit lower than Nvidia's card.
Fans seem to be disappointed that the Radeon RX Vega 64 appears to only pull even with the GeForce GTX 1080, rather than greatly surpassing it. However, pricing could be in AMD's favor. The mining craze has pushed pricing of the GeForce GTX 1080 to $699, with the GeForce GTX 1070 hovering in the $500 range.
