Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

AMD claims Vega gaming cards will be faster than Frontier Edition

By

amd vega gamer faster frontier radeon frontier4
Image used with permission by copyright holder
AMD has teased more information about its upcoming Vega line of graphics cards and has fans salivating with the news that the gaming editions of its cards will be even faster than the Frontier Edition it showed off earlier this week. The only downside is that they won’t be launching until later this year.

With AMD’s Ryzen CPUs performing so well when they were released earlier in 2017, the hype for AMD’s next generation of Vega graphics cards grew in earnest. While it’s been a long time since AMD could legitimately contest Nvidia with high-end performance, Vega looks set to do so and if AMD can even go beyond its Frontier Edition, it could quite handily steal the performance crown.

Recommended Videos

The Frontier Edition of the first Vega card — aimed at professionals and enterprises — is expected to launch in June, with as much as 13 teraflops of raw power. That’s a full TFlop more than Nvidia’s ungodly expensive Titan Xp, and the gaming editions of the Vega card are said to be even more impressive.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

That’s thanks to new features like the second generation of high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), a new memory cache controller, a new geometry pipeline, and more.

AMD’s Radeon VP, Raja Koduri said during his Reddit AMA (via Ars Technica), that production issues associated with HBM were solved with HBM2 and that what AMD had achieved, was to take high-end graphics card features and packed them into consumer hardware.

Koduri also suggested there may be a 16GB variant of an RX Vega card, which would back up the Compubench specifications for an unnamed AMD card with 16GB of memory we saw earlier this week.

Other Vega information includes the fact that gaming cards will feature 8+6pin power connectors, not the dual eight-pin connector of the Frontier Edition. He also confirmed that a water-cooled version will be available at some point, with a “slight difference in clock speed.” That may suggest that Vega overclocking isn’t particularly dependent on cooling, but that remains to be seen.

We also learned that the Frontier Edition card will be capable of playing games, though it won’t be designed with that in mind and would not be a cost-effective way of getting that kind of performance.

More news on the Vega range of AMD graphics cards will come out during Computex between May 30 and June 3, where AMD will unveil the consumer-focused Vega cards for the first time.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale
Computing Coordinator
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
AMD needs to fix this one problem with its next-gen GPUs
The RX 7800 XT graphics card with the ReSpec logo.

AMD's current-gen graphics cards have been a revelation. Last generation, AMD was able to hit performance parity with Nvidia while sacrificing ray tracing performance. This generation, AMD is maintaining parity while getting closer in ray tracing, as showcased by GPUs like the RX 7900 GRE. But the next frontier of gaming is rapidly approaching, and AMD's current options aren't up to the task right now.

I'm talking about path tracing. Nvidia calls it "full ray tracing," and it's a lighting technique that can take gaming visuals to the next level. Path tracing is only available in a small list of titles right now, but with frame generation and upscaling tools better than they've ever been, it won't be long before we see these destination gaming experiences everywhere.
Player two in path tracing

Read more
AMD’s GPUs had a bigger year in 2023 than you might realize
AMD's RX 7700 XT in a test bench.

It's safe to say that 2023 turned out to be a good year for the discrete graphics cards market. According to the latest data, both AMD and Nvidia saw an increase in add-in board (AIB) GPU shipments in the final quarter of 2023, and the year-to-year gains are also massive. While Nvidia still dominates the market, AMD's share is climbing steadily, and Intel remains in the shadows.

Today's round of market insights comes from Jon Peddie Research (JPR), and it's all about discrete GPUs. According to the analyst firm, discrete GPU shipments increased by 6.8% over the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to the previous quarter. This is above the less-than-impressive 10-year average of -0.6%. The year-to-year gains are even more impressive, though, as JPR notes a 32% increase compared to the final quarter of 2022, with a total of 9.5 million GPUs shipped (as opposed to 8.9 million units at the end of 2022).

Read more
Nvidia is the ‘GPU cartel,’ says former AMD Radeon manager
A hand holding the RTX 4090 GPU.

AMD's former senior vice president and general manager of Radeon has come out with some strong words against Nvidia. Scott Herkelman called Nvidia "the GPU cartel" in response to a story from the Wall Street Journal in which Nvidia's customers claim that it delays GPU shipments in retaliation for those customers shopping with other suppliers.

The accusation in question comes from Jonathan Ross, CEO of AI chip startup Groq, who said, "a lot of people that we meet with say that if Nvidia were to hear that we were meeting, they would disavow it. The problem is you have to pay Nvidia a year in advance, and you may get your hardware in a year, or it may take longer, and it's, 'Aw shucks, you're buying from someone else, and I guess it's going to take a little longer.'"

Read more