AMD Vega

The AMD Vega GPU architecture is the next generation graphics silicon the Radeon-red team are working on for release next month. The gaming-focused Radeon RX Vega promises to deliver AMD a graphics card that can finally compete with the top-end of Nvidia’s rival GPU stack.

The Capsaicin event at SIGGRAPH has happened and we've finally got a little more official insight into the new AMD RX Vega graphics cards. The three new Vega cards will launch on August 14, with prices starting at a $399. AMD are promising that the base card will be the world's most powerful sub-$400 GPU.

That $399 card is the Radeon RX Vega 56, a 3,854 GCN 4.0 core card, sporting 8GB of HBM2 memory. It comes with a standard AMD reference blower cooler and base and boost clockspeeds of 1,156MHz and 1,471MHz respectively.

There is also a $499 Radeon RX Vega 64 card appearing at launch. This houses the full Vega 10 GPU, again with 8GB HBM2, but 64 next-gen compute units (nCU) and the same 4,096 cores as the professional-level Frontier Edition. There are two standard coolers for this card, the black one, which looks identical to the RX Vega 56 card, and a metallic shroud which probably costs a chunk more cash. Think Founders Edition...

There is also a liquid-chilled RX Vega 64 too. That retains the same basic GPU configuration as the air-cooled version, but has higher out-of-the-box clockspeeds. The standard RX Vega 64 clocks in at 1,247MHz and 1,546MHz, while the water-cooled variant has base and boost frequencies of 1,406MHz and 1,677MHz.

There have also been shots of an AMD RX Vega Nano released by Bits and Chips too, so it looks like there'll be a cute l'il Vega popping up later on too. But that's not going to be the full-fat RX Vega card rocking the same 16GB HBM2 the Frontier Edition is holding onto. Though it's entirely possible that much new memory tech will make a 16GB RX Vega card too expensive considering it will still probably struggle to top one of Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti cards.

AMD have announced the naming scheme for what will be the flagship Vega gaming card - the imaginatively-titled Radeon RX Vega. It's likely to be the direct replacement for the R9 Fury cards from the last generation of high-end AMD graphics cards.

In 2016, AMD promised their Polaris graphics cards would bring their Radeon graphics cards back into the game. But while the RX 580 and RX 570 have shown impressive DirectX 12 performance against the mid-range GeForce-shaped competition, AMD have yet to release a high-end card to give them genuine 4K gaming.

This is where the AMD Vega GPU architecture comes in, aiming to jump in at the high-end and providing the Radeon faithful with a serious GTX 1080 Ti contender.