AMD announces RX Vega cards on May 31, but will not release them until later
AMD has confirmed that it will be announcing Radeon RX Vega cards for gamers in its presentation at the Computex trade show on May 31. However, the video cards are not immediately available. According to AMD, there will be versions that are faster in games than the Frontier Edition.
Raja Koduri, chief executive of the Radeon Technology Group, made this known in an AMA on Reddit. He says that Radeon RX Vega will be shown at the Computex fair, but that the video cards will not be in stores that same week. It is not yet clear when the RX Vega cards will come on the market. Koduri says that AMD is working hard on the release, but that it is a product with complex features, such as the hbm2 memory and the high bandwidth cache controller, and that it also takes time for developers to master the new techniques.
Probably the wait for the release of the RX Vega cards has to do with the availability of hbm2 memory. Koduri states that this memory can currently only be found on extremely expensive competitor GPUs, which are not intended for gamers. He is referring to Nvidia products such as the Tesla P100 and Quadro GP100 for gpgpu applications.
“It’s not like you can walk to the store around the corner to get hbm2,” Koduri says. He does say that it is good news that hbm2 is offered by various manufacturers. The first generation hbm was only supplied by SK Hynix, the second generation is also made by Samsung. Koduri says that hbm2 production is now moving towards a volume sufficient to meet the market demand for Radeon Vega products.
AMD has repeatedly promised to launch Vega in the second quarter of 2017. That promise is fulfilled with the release of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. AMD announced that card last Tuesday and will launch it at the end of June. However, that is not a video card for gamers, but a model intended for scientists and designers.
Koduri also indicates in the AMA that the RX Vega cards for consumers are better optimized for games. He says there will be versions that are faster in games than the Frontier Edition. The announced card has a GPU with 4096 streaming processors and is equipped with 16GB HBM2. In games-relevant fp32 calculations, the card with a score of 13tflops is 50 percent faster than the Radeon Fury X.
The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is the first video card with Vega GPU, but is not intended for gamers