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Radeon-Vega

When AMD appear that it would launch its upcoming Vega GPU for professional markets before bringing it to the consumer infinite, would-be customers were somewhat less than thrilled. We now know that the GPU volition launch for consumer products in July, with the professional Radeon Vega Borderland Edition available in June. Thank you to SabrePC, which briefly had price listings fastened to the GPUs, we know the air-cooled variant volition cost $1,199, while the water-cooled carte du jour will exist $1,799.

That's a $600 price difference for two cards that are supposedly the same in every other respect. This is assuming that SabrePC's listing is accurate. Only with the card scheduled to go on sale on June 27, and SabrePC existence a primarily workstation-focused shop, the visitor should have some idea what the SKUs are going to wait similar and how they'll exist positioned.

Vega-Frontier

Now, $ane,200 and $1,800 might seem extremely expensive, and those prices would exist for consumer cards. But AMD has been quite clear that Vega'due south Frontier Edition is non aimed at consumers, fifty-fifty though it will run games and be fully supported in that way. And when you consider the pricing on workstation and professional GPUs, $,1200 and $one,800 are relative steals.

Nvidia tends to command far higher prices. In the past, when AMD was chasing professional GPU market share more than aggressively, the company ofttimes priced its cards well below the equivalent Nvidia counterparts. The company may be doing something similar hither, banking on a Vega price/performance ratio that's sexy enough to convince GPU programmers and professional users to accept a hazard on Team Red.

That said, at that place'south still a lot we don't officially know about Vega. Estimated clock speed, based on its TFLOPS rating, is 1.6GHz, and AMD has promised that the consumer variant will be clocked fifty-fifty higher. 1.7GHz seems a reasonable target based on what AMD has said, merely that'south strictly a guess on my part.

One issue I recollect is worth speaking to directly is whether Vega will be significantly faster than Fury X. This is a question several readers have raised in the recent past, evidently based on the thought that Vega is just some other GCN tweak. While we don't know how much faster Vega volition be, it would genuinely surprise me if the card was just 10-15% percentage more than efficient than its predecessor. Just fifty-fifty if it was (and I recollect that number is quite depression), the additional clocks would still evangelize an enormous boost. A theoretical 1.7GHz Vega with 10-percentage-better IPC than Fury X would exist ten percent faster based on IPC and one.62x faster based on clock. Fears that Vega won't manage to exist meaningfully faster than Fury X are overblown — we're going to see a large gap between the two cards, even in a worst-case scenario.

Other factors, like the decrease in retentivity bandwidth, shouldn't exist an issue either. AMD has already said that it increased its retentiveness bandwidth efficiency significantly with Vega, which again would be in line with how past memory bandwidth transitions have played out. It'due south fairly common to see AMD and Nvidia take a beast force approach when they first introduce a new memory technology or standard, only to then walk back the bandwidth equally future GPU generations get more efficient. This happened with the G80 – G92 shift for Nvidia, and we saw information technology in AMD's HD 2000 family versus the later, more efficient Hard disk 3000 series as well. All in all, the specs as listed are skillful — nosotros'll accept to look and see how they stack up side by side to Nvidia's Pascal family, but the comparison should be fairly solid.