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’s RX 7600 XT might be dead on arrival — but there’s a catch
rx 7600 xt sales report review 4

AMD's new RX 7600 XT graphics card isn't off to a great start, at least according to sales data shared by 3DCenter. The new video card launched on Wednesday alongside Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti Super, and even with a relatively poor reception, Nvidia sold nearly 10 times as many graphics cards as AMD did in a sampling at a German retailer.

There are a few caveats to that, however. 3DCenter takes data for the number of sales from Mindfactory, a German hardware retailer, 12 to 14 hours after release. According to the data, weaker GPUs like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 sell considerably less than more powerful GPUs like the RTX 4070 Super and RX 7800 XT. It indicates some bias in this data, perhaps showing that this retailer caters to a crowd willing to spend more money on a graphics card.

Read more
Here’s how AMD counters Nvidia’s big RTX Super launch
RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT on a pink background.

Well done, AMD. Today is a big day for Nvidia -- after all, today is when the RTX 4070 Super hits the shelves. So what does AMD do? It serves up a huge price cut on one of its top graphics cards in this generation to strike back at Nvidia and counter its big release. Coincidence? No way. But will this price tag be low enough when Nvidia launches the RTX 4070 Ti Super?

AMD's RX 7900 XT is the GPU that's now a lot cheaper, with an official price of $750, but some models are as cheap as $710. It initially launched at $900 and was never the most popular option out of AMD's two flagships. The RX 7900 XTX, priced at just $100 more, often made more sense due to its greatly improved performance. As such, the RX 7900 XT was a bit of a forgotten entry in AMD's lineup. Its price quickly plummeted to $800 and even lower at certain retailers.

Read more
AMD just announced the graphics card everyone has been waiting for
AMD announces RX 7600 XT at CES 2024.

AMD just launched the RX 7600 XT at CES 2024. It's a graphics card that makes sense, and one that AMD fans have been waiting on ever since the launch of the original RX 7600. It might not do enough in the hotly contested market of graphics cards around $300, however.

Between the RX 7600 and the RX 7600 XT, not much has changed. These two graphics cards are based on the same GPU, and they come with the same number of cores. The XT model, however, boosts the clock speed by up to 10%, and it comes with a higher power draw at up to 190 watts.

Read more