AMD Radeon RX Vega Reportedly Coming In XTX, XT, XL Models, Liquid And Air Cooled

Like winter in Game of Thrones, Vega is coming. It is already here for professionals, but on the consumer side, AMD is planning to unveil its Vega lineup for gamers at SIGGRAPH Capsaicin on July 30, which is just over two weeks from now. AMD has done a pretty good job in keeping mum about its gaming lineup leading up to the unveil. If you are curious, however, the latest leak suggests that AMD will launch Vega to gamers with three different SKUs.

At the top of the stack is the Radeon RX Vega XTX. This one will feature 64 shader clusters (4,096 stream processors), 8GB of second generation high bandwidth memory (HBM2), and a power draw of 300W for the GPU (375W of board power). The Radeon RX Vega XTX will be the only one of the three to sport an all-in-one liquid cooling solution similar to the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition.

AMD Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition

Sitting in the middle is the Radeon RX Vega XT. This card will also boast 64 shader clusters with 4,096 stream processors and 8GB of HBM2. However, the power draw will be lower—220W for the GPU with a board TDP of 285W. This one will be air cooled, probably with a single fan on the reference design, if we had to guess.

Bringing up the rear is the Radeon RX Vega XL. Only add-in board (AIB) partners will offer this variant. It will bring to the table 56 shader clusters (3,584 shader units) with an unknown amount of onboard memory. Otherwise, will have the same power ratings as the Radeon RX Vega XT and will also be an air cooled card, though custom cooling solutions are likely to vary by manufacturer.

It will be interesting to see how these cards perform, not just against NVIDIA's Pascal lineup, but also compared to the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition. When AMD unveiled Vega for professional users, it dropped some impressive specs on us—25 TFLOPS of double precision compute performance and 13 TFLOPS of single precision compute performance. At the same time, AMD's Radeon Technologies boss Raja Koduri promised better gaming performance from its regular Vega lineup.

"We know how eager you are to get your hands on Radeon RX Vega, and we’re working extremely hard to bring you a graphics card that you’ll be incredibly proud to own. Developing products with billions of transistors and forward-thinking architecture is extremely difficult—but extremely rewarding—work," Koduri said. "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!"

That does not mean the specs will necessarily be higher—they probably will not be—but that the drivers will be tuned for gaming applications.