AMD is officially launching their highly anticipated and flagship graphics product, the Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card today. The card will be aiming at the high-end graphics market and we will be covering the full review roundup in this post too.

AMD Officially Launches The Radeon RX Vega 64 Graphics Cards - Comes In Three Variants Starting at $499 US

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card is based on a new GPU known as Vega. The chip took several years in making and is finally here for gamers to purchase. The RX Vega launch is also the longest time it took AMD to release a flagship successor to their last-gen flagship. AMD's previous flagship, the Radeon R9 Fury X with Fiji GPU was released way back in June 2015 and Radeon Vega arrives in August of 2017. The launch comes more than two years after the R9 Fury X and also more than a year after NVIDIA's first Pascal GPU launch. So the question is, has AMD finally been able to deliver a product that dethrones NVIDIA's fastest from the throne and best their own Fury X by a huge margin?

You can purchase the Radeon RX Vega graphics cards and Radeon Packs from the links provided below:

Samsung CF791 Series 34-Inch Curved Widescreen Monitor + XFX Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB Graphics Card Bundle ($1431 US)XFX Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB Graphics Card + AMD Ryzen 7 1700x + ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero AM4 Motherboard Bundle ($1134 US)

I guess that question can be found out by looking at the multiple reviews that are posted in the chart below. There's another thing to note here, AMD is also letting reviewers test the RX Vega 56 graphics card today so you can see reviews of that card in the reviews below too.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon RX 56 Review Roundup - 'Poor Volta' Still A Distant Dream For Radeon Technologies Group

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56 Reviews Roundup:

Reviewers Quotes:

W1zzard - Techpowerup

Price-wise the Radeon RX Vega 64 clocks in at $499, which is not unreasonable. It is basically the same price as GTX 1080, which does offer much better power/heat/noise levels. There are pricier "halo" variants of this card. At $599 you get the "Limited Edition" card, which is basically the reference card with a fancy brushed-aluminium cooler body, which looks really cool, but has no performance benefits over the reference design. At $699, you get the Liquid Edition card, with an AIO liquid cooling solution, which enables higher clocks. This card is priced higher than the GTX 1080 Ti, and we doubt if it can compete with that card in performance.

Ryan Smith - Anandtech

Unfortunately for AMD, their GTX 1080-like performance doesn’t come cheap from a power perspective. The Vega 64 has a board power rating of 295W, and it lives up to that rating. Relative to the GeForce GTX 1080, we’ve seen power measurements at the wall anywhere between 110W and 150W higher than the GeForce GTX 1080, all for the same performance.

The catch for AMD is that what they need to price RX Vega at to be competitive and what it should be able to do are at odds with each other. The Vega 10 is a large, power-hungry GPU. Much larger and much more power hungry than NVIDIA’s competing GP102 GPU. And while this isn’t an immediate consumer concern – we pay what the market will bear, not what it costs AMD to make a chip with a nice gross margin on the side – from a technology and architectural perspective it indicates that AMD has moved farther away from NVIDIA in the last couple of years. Whereas the Radeon R9 Fury X was almost a win that AMD didn’t get, the RX Vega 64 doesn’t appear to be fighting in the weight class it was even designed for. Instead the power efficiency gap between AMD and NVIDIA has grown since 2015, and apparently by quite a bit.

Jarred Walton - PCGamer

For those who aren't part of the AMD ecosystem, and who aren't interested in becoming part, Vega is far less interesting. Its direct competitor, the GTX 1080, is over a year old now, GTX 1080 Ti is available for those who want even higher performance, and we all know Nvidia isn't standing still. The question at this point is how far away Nvidia's Volta GPUs are from public launch, and how fast they might end up being. If Vega had been able to catch the 1080 Ti, Volta GPUs might have arrived as early as this fall. Having now seen Vega, however, it could be spring 2018 before we get a GTX 1180 (or whatever Nvidia ends up calling it). The good news is that when it comes to high-end GPUs, AMD now shows up in the discussion again.

Ryan Shrout - Pcper

With AMD’s cards now on the table, it’s time to see what NVIDIA chooses to do, if anything. Will they make any pricing moves on the GTX 1080 or GTX 1070 to take mindshare back from an aggressive Radeon marketing team? There appears to be no reason to release a higher performance part than the GTX 1080 Ti with it still holding a 25-30% lead over the GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64. It is also possible that NVIDIA remains confident in its lineup, its software advantage, and its power efficiency and chooses not to affect its own profitability with GeForce price changes. NVIDIA will likely wait and see how RX Vega inventory holds up, and how the mining market shifts in the coming weeks, before considering any major moves.

AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU Specifications – 12.5 Billion Transistors on a 14nm 484mm2 Die, 4096 Cores, 256 TMUs, Max Speed of 1700 MHz and 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM

The Vega chip will be utilizing the latest 14nm core architecture which is based on the NCU (Next Compute Engine) design. It is said that Vega took the evolution step and builds upon the fabric laid out by current GCN cores while adding more features to it. The Vega die measures approximately 484mm2. The Vega 10 graphics core deploys 12.5 billion transistors.

The graphics chip will feature 64 Compute Units or4096 stream processors and 256 TMUs. AMD plans on increasing the throughput of the chip through increased clock speeds. This will allow AMD to pump numbers better than the Fiji GPU which is based on the 28nm GCN 3.0 architecture and comes with the same number of cores, 4096 SPs.

There’s also 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM which comes in two stacks (4 GB per stack). The graphics card has a total rated bandwidth of 484 GB/s which is lower than the 512 GB/s on Fiji. Compared to HBM1, a Vega die features 2x bandwidth per pin and 8x capacity per stack. The bandwidth is not entirely 2x but its comparable as the chips are clocked higher to deliver almost the same bandwidth output. It also enables a 75% smaller footprint than conventional GDDR5 memory and is 3.5x more efficient as stated by AMD.

However, we don't know which variant of GDDR5 memory is AMD comparing to HBM2. GDDR5 is steadily progressing forward with 9 Gbps modules available and up to 12 Gbps modules available with G5X that deliver great performance output and added power savings over GDDR5. The chips also features a pixel fill rate of 90 GPixels/s. Additionally, the cards will feature 4 MB of L2 cache and 45 MB of SRAM across the GPU.

AMD Radeon RX Vega Architecture Presentation

2 of 9

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 Graphics Card Lineup: