It’s been an arsingly very long time coming however AMD lastly has some new graphics tech to flog and for all of us to recreation upon. The new Radeon RX Vega era of gaming playing cards has been introduced. Inevitably, we’ll have to attend just a bit longer to search out out precisely how briskly they’re however we all know sufficient to start answering some key questions and posing a number of extra. Is this the graphics revolution we’ve all been ready for, as an illustration, or is it one derivation too a lot of AMD’s profitable GCN structure? Strap in and let’s go.
Let’s rapidly cowl what precisely has been introduced. It basically boils down to a few totally different video boards, all of that are derived from the identical underlying GPU. Known as Vega 10.
It’s a 14nm chip, when you care about that sort of factor, and packs 12.5 billion transistors. To put that into some sort of intelligible context, AMD’s earlier ‘big’ GPU generally known as Fiji and located within the Radeon R9 Fury X was 28nm and eight.9 billion transistors.
Immediately, you may assume that transistor rely is modest given the most important step change from 28nm to 14nm. However, the GPU on the coronary heart of Nvidia’s mighty Titan Xp graphics card clocks in at 12 billion transistors. So by way of uncooked, dumb complexity this new AMD beast is correct up there. It’s an try at a correct high-end gaming graphics card.
As for the opposite main specs, nicely, we’re speaking four,096 AMD-style and pixel-prettifying shaders, 64 ROPs for outputting pixels and 256 texture items for, ya know, texturing stuff and shit (technical time period, shout if I’m shedding you).
Now the marginally odd factor about all that is that these numbers – the shaders, the ROPs, the feel items – are all the identical because the aforementioned and admittedly moderately aged Fury X. It is just not, in fact, a easy matter of a direct comparability. But maintain that thought.
The new Vega 10 GPU differs, nonetheless, in a few key areas. First, it sports activities a second-generation model of the HBM or high-bandwidth reminiscence tech first seen within the R9 Fury collection. Apart from anything, this second era model kicks off with 8GB of graphics reminiscence the place the first-gen effort was capped at a problematic 4GB.
The different huge change includes clockspeeds. The previous Fiji chip was solely good for about 1GHz. This new GPU is nice for extra like 1.7GHz. So even with all different issues being equal, and a number of issues do certainly look equal, this new RX Vega GPU must be getting on for 70 per cent sooner by no less than some metrics, which is a really good efficiency step.
Of course, at this level we’ve got no unbiased efficiency numbers. That mentioned, the mere reality of the place AMD is pricing this card offers us some indication of the place it sees its efficiency potential.
Notwithstanding some present pricing oddnesses as a result of a spike in GPU demand pushed by crypotcurrency miners, AMD has priced the three variations of the brand new GPU to roughly align with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070, 1080 and 1080 Ti boards at $399, $499 and $699.
Which jogs my memory, I haven’t detailed the three. The entry-level effort is the Radeon RX Vega 56. It will get 56 compute items (therefore the title) and thus three,585 shaders, 64 render outputs and 224 texture items and a most increase clock of 1,471MHz. Next up is the RX Vega 64 with all 64 compute items and thus four,096 shaders enabled, together with 64 render outputs and 256 texture items. It clocks in at 1,546MHz, max.
Finally, there’s liquid-cooled RX Vega 64 Liquid which ups the ante 1,677MHz however in any other case affords the identical numbers because the air-cooled 64. All three pack 8GB of that HBM2 reminiscence on a 2,048-bit bus.
At this level there’s not an ideal deal extra to say aside from wait and see. If you twisted my arm, my spidey sense is telling me that this household of GPUs might be AMD’s long-established GCN graphic structure (and I consider that Vega is basically a respin of GCN, not one thing considerably new) stretched to its limits.
It will in all probability suffice on the excessive finish, however I really feel the battle within the coronary heart of the mid-range will likely be more durable for what’s a moderately aged expertise, at coronary heart. Given that GCN has given AMD a lot success and is certainly discovered inside each of the most important video games consoles, you may perceive why AMD has caught with it this lengthy. But finally it can turn into a legal responsibility in a PC gaming context.
That could not fairly have occurred with Vega. But it could be an in depth run factor.
