After months of leaks and delays, the wait for Vega is finally over. AMD has released Radeon RX 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56, which will hit the stores on August 28. And for the first time, the Red Team is fielding high-end graphics cards capable of challenging Nvidia's enthusiast-class hardware.
AMD's Radeon RX 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 are the first high-end Radeon chips built using the 14nm technology process, following in the footsteps of AMD's mainstream-focused Polaris graphics cards. The Vega provides an intriguing, alternative to the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080.
Vega 64's technology mirrors that of the Fiji GPU found inside older Radeon Fury X in many ways. Both Radeon RX 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 packs 4,096 steam processors, with 64 compute units (hence the name), 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs. Likewise, the Radeon RX Vega 56's consists those of the Fury X's similarly cut-down sibling, the Radeon Fury. But the compute units in the Vega are "next-gen CUs" and Vega distinguishes itself in more obvious ways, too, according to a review by PC World.
AMD has tuned Vega to run at far higher clock speeds than its predecessor. While the Fury graphics cards floated around 1,000MHz, the air-cooled RX Vega 64 baselines at 1,247MHz, with a rated boost clock speed of 1,546MHz. The AMD Vega's liquid-cooled version pushes that further, to 1,406MHz base and 1,677MHz boost. On the other hand, AMD Vega 56 bottoms out at 1,156MHz and boosts to 1,471MHz. While the boost clocks of previous Radeon cards were a hard maximum, AMD is copying Nvidia's methodology for Vega.
Bearing in mind the price differential between Vega 56 and the top-tier, liquid-cooled Vega 64, the increase in frame-rates is smaller than everyone might imagine. It's also very easy to overclock the Vega 56's HBM2 memory, which will close the gap in games that can use the memory bandwidth, Euro Gamer reported.
AMD has adopted some nifty tricks for the Radeon RX Vega but it is not mind-blowing as compare to its competitors. The Vega 64 and Vega 56 make a good deal for gamers with their thrilling performance and practical price ratio. Interestingly, there is a hope for its successor, Navi GPU, which will make it to the gaming envelope in 2018.
