AMD Confirms Radeon RX Vega To Be Faster Than Frontier Edition, Soft Computex Launch
However, what about those of us who simply want a no-frills, kickass gaming card; one that will go toe-to-toe with the best that NVIDIA has to offer with its GeForce GTX 10 Series? AMD hasn’t forgotten about us, and confirmed that it will soft launch the Radeon RX Vega later this month at Computex. During a reddit AMA session yesterday afternoon, Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group, explained that tweaking its High Bandwidth Cache Controller, optimizing the new geometry pipeline and getting adequate HBM2 supplies is not exactly an easy endeavor.
“We know how eager you are to get your hands on Radeon RX Vega, and we’re working extremely hard to bring you a graphics card that you’ll be incredibly proud to own. Developing products with billions of transistors and forward-thinking architecture is extremely difficult -- but extremely rewarding -- work,” said Koduri.
“It’s not like you can run down to the corner store to get HBM2. The good news is that unlike HBM1, HBM2 is offered from multiple memory vendors – including Samsung and Hynix – and production is ramping to meet the level of demand that we believe Radeon Vega products will see in the market.”
Koduri also dropped a subtle hint with regards to multi-GPU configurations involving Vega, writing, “We haven't mentioned any multi GPU designs on a single ASIC like Epyc, but the capability is possible with Infinity Fabric.”
All of this is definitely exciting news, but it was also revealed that while the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will no doubt be a potent graphics powerhouse, the consumer-oriented Radeon RX Vega cards will be even more spectacular with regards to gaming performance.
“Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!”
Unfortunately, we don’t have any firm guidance for a Radeon RX Vega “hard launch”, but perhaps AMD will give us further details on May 31st at Computex. Whatever the case, NVIDIA doesn’t seem to worried about what AMD has cooking in its oven. During an analyst call following its most recent earnings release, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated, “My assessment is that the competitive position is not going to change.”
