The folks at Radeon have just revealed key details regarding its upcoming Vega GPU architecture. The red company’s new GPU architecture is said to feature plenty of significant improvements compared to its older GPUs, including a briefly mentioned HBM2 memory controller.
According to Radeon, Vega GPUs will come with an improved bandwidth cache, which allows data to be transferred to and from the GPU much faster. This is possible thanks to the High-Bandwidth Cache Controller of Vega GPUs, which, again, allows low latency and quicker data transfers.
Another significant upgrade done to Radeon’s Vega GPUs are its Compute Engines. Radeon mentioned that its upcoming GPUs will be utilising the company’s Next Generation Compute Units, which are made specifically with these things in mind: faster clock speeds and greater operations per clock. This, of course, would result in significantly faster consumer-based Radeon graphics cards in the coming years.
The crème de la crème of Radeon’s Vega GPUs has got to be HBM2. Radeon mentioned that thanks to HBM2, Vega GPUs are able to have two times more bandwidth per pin when compared against HBM1 and GDDR5. Besides that, HBM2 occupies 50% less space compared to GDDR5 as well. That said, the company did not mention whether all Vega GPUs will come with HBM2 – we think this is highly unlikely.
Also mentioned during Radeon’s Vega presentation are improvements done to the GPU in terms of memory bandwidth management. This is done via a new technology called Draw Stream Binning Rasteriser, which somehow enables Vega GPUs to have an increase in performance whilst reducing power consumption and memory bandwidth; resulting in a much more efficient way to output power from the GPU.
Don’t worry, if you don’t get any of the above, at least know this: Vega coupled with Ryzen is very, very powerful. A demo was set up earlier by AMD that showcased both its upcoming GPU and CPU running Star Wars Battlefront at a steady 60fps in 4K (capped due to V-Sync). That should at least give you an idea on how powerful Vega and Ryzen will be when they’re released.
Meanwhile, here’s a video of an unspecified Radeon Vega GPU running Doom in 4K:
Unfortunately, no actual new Radeon graphics cards were showcased during the event. It looks like we’ll just have to keep waiting, folks.
