They’re finally here, folks: AMD’s lineup of Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. The company has unveiled four different variations of its highly anticipated RX Vega graphics card during its Siggraph Capsaicin 2017 event including the air-cooled RX Vega 64, RX Vega 64 Limited Edition, and RX Vega 56 alongside the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition.
Before we get into the specifications, let’s first talk about the design of AMD’s Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. The reference RX Vega 64 graphics card comes with Radeon’s signature all black cooler shroud, along with a blower-style cooler. Meanwhile, the RX Vega 64 Limited Edition and RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition are endowed with a premium “metallic silver” cooler shroud, which, according to AMD is made out of solid metal.
When it comes to specifications, the air-cooled RX Vega 64 graphics card feature 64 CUs (compute units) which translates to a stream processor count of 4096. Besides that, base and boost clock speeds are rated at 1247MHz and 1546MHz respectively. Memory bandwidth stands at 484GBps.
In addition, the RX Vega 64 has a FP32 (single-precision floating point) and FP16 (half-precision floating point) compute performance of 12.66 TFLOPS and 25.3 TFLOPS respectively. Oh, and also not forgetting the fact that this graphics card features 8GB of HBM2 memory.
As seen from the table above, it can clearly be seen that the performance output of the RX Vega 64 when gaming in 4K is pretty similar to that of Nvidia’s GTX 1080. Surprisingly, the GTX 1080 even managed to outperform the new AMD graphics card on some games, albeit not by much. Similar results are seen when gaming on an 3440×1440 ultrawide resolution.
Meanwhile, the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition is pretty much a souped-up version of RX Vega 64 that is running at a much higher clock speed. Not surprisingly, it offers higher amount of performance which is rated as 13.7 TFLOPS/27.5 TFLOPS although it also consume more power at 345W.
According to AMD, its reference Radeon RX Vega 64 will come with a price tag of US$499 (about RM2,137) – which is about US$100 less compared to the launch price of the GTX 1080 (about US$599). There’s also another, more Vega option in the form of Radeon RX Vega 56 which will be available for US$399 (about RM1,708). Unfortunately, performance benchmarks for this particular card was not mentioned.
Here is how the general specifications of each Radeon RX Vega cards look like when compared to each other:
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Interestingly, AMD has also announced Radeon Packs which is currently the only way to obtain the RX Vega 64 Liquid Edition cards. In general, each Radeon Packs offers USD 200 discount on 34-inch Samsung CF791 curved FreeSync monitor as well as USD 100 discount on selected Ryzen 7 1800X and X370-based motherboard combo.
These Radeon Packs will also include Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Prey for free. In terms of pricing, the Radeon Aqua Pack which features the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled card goes for USD 699 (about RM 2,992) while the Radeon Black Pack that includes RX Vega 64 air cooled card goes for USD 599 (about RM 2,564).
For the Black Pack, customers can choose to grab either the standard black version or the Limited Edition metal card. There’s also the Radeon Red Pack as well which features Radeon RX Vega 56 and is priced at USD 499 (about RM 2,137).
AMD says that its lineup of RX Vega graphics cards will be made available for purchase starting from 14 August 2017. That being said, we have yet to receive the release and pricing information for RX Vega in Malaysia.
So, now that AMD has finally let the “Vega” cat out of the bag, what do you make of them? Does AMD’s lineup of RX Vega graphics card live up to the hype? Let us know what you think.
