After months of teasing and keeping the entire tech scene speculating and salivating at the prospect of there being a legitimate competitor to what Team Green has to offer, AMD has finally announced the consumer line up for their much awaited GPU line up, Vega.
With the Radeon RX Vega 64 AMD is setting its crosshairs on the the NVIDIA GTX 1080 market. With a starting price of $499 for the RX Vega 64, AMD can actually cause mayhem in the market for those looking to buy new GPUs right now. The RX Vega 64 features 4,096 stream processors, 256 compute units, a 2,048 bit memory bus and 8 GB of HBM 2. The most interesting feature about AMD’s announcement was that they have launched three different versions of their new flagship. One is the standard model with the reference cooler and the plastic shroud priced at $499, the “Limited Edition” RX Vega 64 with an all metal shroud with a brushed aluminum finish, priced at $599 and the piece-de-resistance, a liquid cooled RX Vega 64 with a brushed metal finished priced at $699. While there is no difference in the terms of performance of the standard version with the others. It is astounding that AMD has managed to add more than 400Mhz on the base clock of the card just out of the box with the liquid cooled version.
In all the hype surrounding the many faces of the RX Vega 64, what gets neglected is what may just end up being the sleeper hit, the RX Vega 56. With a slightly lower number of stream processors (3,585) and texture units (224), the RX Vega 56 is the card that will end up in most of the check out carts. Starting at $399 the card offers the same 8 GB of HBM 2 memory as its elder brother the Vega 64, with slightly lower clock speeds of 1,156 Mhz (Base) and 1,471 Mhz (Boost).
With the tremendous success of Ryzen, it’s the ideal time to unleash their newest creations on the GPU front and allow for some true competition to blossom after what seems like years of NVIDIA monopoly.
