AMD Responds To Radeon RX Vega Pricing Outrage, Confirms More $499 Vega 64 Cards Available Soon

Rather than run with the story, which was originally posted by OC3D on Tuesday, we decided to reach out to AMD for further clarification. It took a few days, but the company finally contacted us with an official statement on the matter:

Radeon RX Vega 64 demand continues to exceed expectations. AMD is working closely with its partners to address this demand.  Our initial launch quantities included standalone Radeon RX Vega 64 at SEP of $499, Radeon RX Vega 64 Black Packs at SEP of $599, and Radeon RX Vega 64 Aqua Packs at SEP of $699. We are working with our partners to restock all SKUs of Radeon RX Vega 64 including the standalone cards and Gamer Packs over the next few weeks, and you should expect quantities of Vega to start arriving in the coming days.

Hopefully, this will clear up some of the confusion that has proliferated over the past few days. Yes, Vega 64 is undoubtedly in short supply, and retailers will most certainly try to “adjust” their pricing to take advantage of the incredible initial demand. However, this is not some grand scheme by AMD on its end to kill off the standalone Vega 64 and push for higher prices. Rather, it’s simply a matter of not being able to meet launch demand, which can happen with any new high-profile hardware launch.

When it comes to performance, the Vega 64 traded blows with the GeForce GTX 1080, but many were expecting more given that NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 10-Series has been around for a year. The Radeon RX Vega 56 put up a better showing against the GeForce GTX 1070, and its $399 price point is incredibly attractive.

Setting aside gaming performance, both cards are incredibly adept at tackling Ethereum mining duties in our testing thanks to a new beta driver that was released this week. With some tweaks to memory frequencies, the Vega 56 and Vega 64 put up hash rates of 36.48 MH/s and 35.22 MH/s respectively with our mining test rig.