AMD Radeon RX Vega Gaming GPUs Set For SIGGRAPH 2017 Unveiling

The future is looking bright for AMD, and by extension the same can be said about the consumer market. After all, competition is good for everyone, whether you are a fan of AMD or Intel, or are indifferent. AMD has managed to make itself competitive again in the high-end processor market with Ryzen (and soon with Threadipper), and on the GPU side, AMD is getting ready to launch gaming oriented Radeon RX Vega cards.

AMD took to Twitter to remind everyone of its plans to launch Radeon RX Vega cards at SIGGRAPH 2017, which takes place in Los Angeles from July 30 to August 3. That means we are now just a month away from finally getting the full scoop on Vega as it pertains to the gaming market, versus what we already know about AMD's Vega architecture and performance in the professional sector.
We got our first look at Vega with the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition, a professional workstation graphics card that delivers up to 13 TFLOP of single-precision compute performance (FP32) and up 25 TFLOPS of half-precision compute performance (FP16). It also wields 16GB of second generation high bandwidth memory (HBM2).

There are two variants of the Frontier Edition card—one that is air cooled with a 300W TDP, and one that is liquid cooled with a 375W TDP. We have not spent any hands-on time with either variant yet, though early benchmarks are starting to appear on the web and they are casting a mostly positive light on Vega.

Whatever AMD has in store for gamers will perform even better than the Frontier Edition, or at least that is promise from Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group.

"Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!," Koduri stated in a blog post when the Frontier Edition was announced in May.

Koduri left the door wide open with that statement. On one hand, gaming cards are typically always faster in games than their professional counterparts because they are tuned (through drivers, mostly) to deliver faster framerates rather than pinpoint color accuracy. However, Koduri's wording also leaves open the possibility that Radeon RX Vega cards for gamers could have higher specs than Frontier Edition.

We will have to wait and see, though at this point, the waiting period is nearly over.