The first Radeon Vega graphics card is here, and the Frontier Edition isn’t cheap.
After months of trickles and teases, the full hardware details about the first Radeon Vega graphics card are finally here as AMD formally launched Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on Tuesday.
While it’s capable of gaming, AMD’s new graphics card is very much workstation hardware, as PCWorld’s extensive Radeon Vega Frontier Edition hands-on revealed. Still, its specs give us a ballpark glimpse of what we might expect from consumer Radeon RX Vega graphics cards when they launch at the very end of July.
Here are the key Radeon Vega Frontier Edition technical details. The air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations have identical specifications aside from the thermal design power (TDP) rating.
The final core clock speed for the cards weren’ t announced, but knowing what we do about the Frontier Edition’s teraflops performance and hardware details, it will likely peak around 1,600MHz.
At $1,000, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has Nvidia’s similarly prosumer-focused Titan Xp squarely in its sights. Here’s how the two cards stack up in a handful of workstation scenarios, courtesy of Exxact.
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition vs. Nvidia Titan Xp (click to enlarge) .
Puzzling out what these specs portend for consumer graphics cards is tricky, especially because Radeon boss Raja Koduri already said that the Frontier Edition doesn’ t represent Vega’s pinnacle of gaming performance.
“Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!” Koduri said during a Reddit AMA in May.
That likely means a higher core clock, which could strain the 300W maximum TDP of the air-cooled version—even though it’s already 50W higher than the TDPs of Nvidia’s Titan Xp and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. AMD told us that the Frontier Edition could’ve been designed with more modest power connectors, however. The final version uses dual 8-pin connectors (hence the 300W TDP) for additional headroom.
Vega Frontier Edition’s stream processor and compute unit configuration matches the Radeon Fury X ’s one-to-one. It’s enticing to combine that information with the Fury X’s known performance and the Vega Frontier Edition’s estimated core clock speeds to guess at Vega’s potency, but things aren’ t quite that cut and dry. Radeon Vega’s packing all sorts of fresh tech —including “Next-gen compute units, ” primitive shaders, a new programmable geometry pipeline, and tile-based rendering—that complicate any attempt at straightforward comparison between Fury and Vega.
Adding to the mystery, in our hands-on Vega Frontier Edition testing the card performed similarly to a Titan Xp in a trio of heavily Radeon-optimized games on a 3440×1440 display. We were only able to compare the systems at an experiential level, however—actually playing the games. AMD didn’t allow frame rate-tracking software.
Speaking of hardware configurations, Apple’s iMac Pro rocks Radeon Vega graphics, including an option that packs 56 compute units. That’s eight fewer than the Vega Frontier Edition, but the CU count lines up exactly with the air-cooled Radeon Fury from the last generation, providing yet another hint at what we may see when the consumer Radeon RX Vega lineup launches later this summer.
