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AMD Unveils Radeon RX Vega Series Consumer Graphics Cards Starting At $399 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. Initially, there are four cards in the Radeon RX Vega line-up, the standard air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, a Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition with stylized metal fan shroud, the liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, and the lower-cost Radeon RX Vega 56. At the heart of all Radeon RX Vega series cards is the Vega 10 GPU which is comprised of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process. Vega 10 can reliably reach the 1.7GHz range, whereas AMD's previous gen Fiji hovered around 1GHz. The base GPU clock speed of the air-cooled Vega 64 is 1,247MHz with a boost clock of 1,546MHz. There is 8GB of HBM2 memory on-board that offers up peak bandwidth of 484GB/s. All told, the Radeon RX Vega 64 is capable of 25.3 TFLOPs (half-precision) of compute performance. The Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid-Cooled Edition has the same GPU configuration, but with higher base and boost clocks -- 1,406MHz and 1,677MHz, respectively. The lower cost Radeon RX Vega 56 features the same Vega 10 GPU, but 8 of its CUs have been disabled and its clocks are somewhat lower. Although AMD touts a number of efficiency improvements, the Vega RX series requires some serious power. Vega 56 board power is in the 210 Watt range, while the top-end liquid-cooled card hits 345 Watts. AMD claims top-end Vega cards will be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 series of cards. AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards are expected to ship on August 14th.
When their "low-end" graphics card requires low-end gamers to buy a bigger power supply as the first step, something is wrong.
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Remember when advertisements for graphics cards talked about what the card could show you rather than how many transistors it had and the processor speed?
What I want to know about a new card is what picture it can put out and to how many monitors of what connection type.
This sounds more like it's advertising a CPU than a graphics card.
That's not a "Consumer Graphics Card". That's a gaming enthusiast card. Consumer cards top out at $150 or so, and do not draw 210W. Hell, most "Consumer Grade" PCs don't even have 8GB of RAM.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Mind that "unveils" in this case means a paper launch and the actual video cards will be released after August, 14, 2017. Or even later considering the number of delays to this point.
Given everything that we already know about this AMD's GPU generation one can only wonder why they release these GPUs at all. Underpowered, consuming twice as much power as the nearest competition (~350W vs 180W), costing too much to produce (HBM2) and most likely resulting in a huge write off when the company desperately needs successful competitive products to stay afloat. Consumer Vega is anything but.
I still want to believe that Vega to AMD is like Fermi to NVIDIA and AMD's new generation of GPUs will be actually competitive.
'advanced' games on even the best consoles have lousy framerates and refresh rates when the going gets hard. They lack mosue and keyboard. Their graphics settings are what we call 'low' or 'low-medium' on a PC and look noticably worse in many places. And consoles have much lower resolutions.
On the PC you can experience the best games as nature intended. You can 'mod' games like Skyrim and Fallout to remarkable degrees (and no, the lame limited modding on the consoles doesn't start to compare). And you can rejoice in the games market Steam offers.
If you are lazy, have little time, or are not very smart/technical, consoles are brilliant. If you are a stoner who experiences gaming through the haze of a fogged brain, consoles are brilliant. And if you are a coach potato with zero manual dexterity, consoles are brilliant.
But many gamers want to experience, suprise suprise, ever more amazing game design work at a much higher level. I mean you could watch an 'early' copy of Dunkirk on your phone, or pay more to go see it on an Imax screen. Same film, same story, etc- but are the experiences really comparible?