The first Radeon Vega graphics card is here, and the Frontier Edition isn’t cheap.<\/b>
\nAfter 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\u2019 t announced, but knowing what we do about the Frontier Edition\u2019s teraflops performance and hardware details, it will likely peak around 1,600MHz.
At $1,000, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has Nvidia\u2019s similarly prosumer-focused Titan Xp squarely in its sights. Here\u2019s 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\u2019 t represent Vega\u2019s pinnacle of gaming performance.
\u201cConsumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!\u201d 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\u2014even though it’s already 50W higher than the TDPs of Nvidia\u2019s 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\u2019s stream processor and compute unit configuration matches the Radeon Fury X \u2019s one-to-one. It\u2019s enticing to combine that information with the Fury X\u2019s known performance and the Vega Frontier Edition\u2019s estimated core clock speeds to guess at Vega\u2019s potency, but things aren\u2019 t quite that cut and dry. Radeon Vega\u2019s packing all sorts of fresh tech \u2014including \u201cNext-gen compute units, \u201d primitive shaders, a new programmable geometry pipeline, and tile-based rendering\u2014that 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\u2014actually playing the games. AMD didn’t allow frame rate-tracking software.
Speaking of hardware configurations, Apple\u2019s iMac Pro rocks Radeon Vega graphics, including an option that packs 56 compute units. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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