VEGA UNVEGALED

Can Team Red stage a GPU comeback?

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on the heels of the successful launch of the marketplace changing Ryzen series of CPUs, AMD has finally announced details of its upcoming performance series of graphics cards, the Vega 56 and Vega 64. There are three base models of the cards. The Vega 56 is air cooled and boasts a base clock of 1156MHz and boost clock of 1471MHz, 8Gb HBM2 memory, 3584 stream processors and a price tag of $399 USD, a move that could potentially put the fear of god into Nvidia. The air cooled Vega 64 is faster with base and boost clocks of 1247MHz and 1546MHz respectively. The most powerful of the new cards, the liquid cooled Vega 64 has a base clock of 1406MHz and a boost clock of 1677MHz. Both the air cooled and liquid cooled models of the Vega 64 have 4096 stream cores and 8Gb HBM2 memory. There are no official benchmarks at the time of writing but it’s expected the Vega range will challenge the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. Presumably AMD will price the more powerful cards as aggressively as the Vega 56.

In a move that seems to be designed to fight back against the shortages of AMD GPUs thanks to them being snapped up by Bitcoin miners, AMD will be releasing the Vega cards as part of packs. “Radeon Packs include a $US200 discount on the 34” Samsung CF791 curved ultrawide FreeSync monitor, and a $US100 discount on select Ryzen(tm) 7 1800X processor and 370X motherboard combos - $US300 in combined hardware savings” read the official AMD press release. In Australia we don’t get quite so many vouchers but the cards will come bundled with Prey and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. With luck we will have a card to bench test for next issue.