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
Evergreen writer
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
AMD’s new feature doubled my frame rate with a single click
RX 7900 XTX installed in a test bench.

AMD did exactly what I hoped it would do. Its Fluid Motion Frames feature, referred to as AFMF, originally promised a way to add frame generation to virtually any game. There was just one problem -- AFMF was bad. Really bad. Now, AMD is taking another swing at driver-level frame generation with AFMF 2, which works in any game for any of AMD's RX 6000 or RX 7000 graphics cards.

The new version takes a lot of cues from Lossless Scaling, a $7 Steam app that has catapulted in popularity over the past few months due to its ability to add frame generation to any game. AMD is now able to provide a similar level of quality, and with some clear upsides over Lossless Scaling if you own one of AMD's best graphics cards.
What's new here?

Read more
AMD just revealed a game-changing feature for your graphics card
AMD logo on the RX 7800 XT graphics card.

AMD is set to reveal a research paper about its technique for neural texture block compression at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) next week. It sounds like some technobabble, but the idea behind neural compression is pretty simple. AMD says it's using a neural network to compress the massive textures in games, which cuts down on both the download size of a game and its demands on your graphics card.

We've heard about similar tech before. Nvidia introduced a paper on Neural Texture Compression last year, and Intel followed up with a paper of its own that proposed an AI-driven level of detail (LoD) technique that could make models look more realistic from farther away. Nvidia's claims about Neural Texture Compression are particularly impressive, with the paper asserting that the technique can store 16 times the data in the same amount of space as traditional block-based compression.

Read more
AMD’s multi-chiplet GPU design might finally come true
RX 7900 XTX installed in a test bench.

An interesting AMD patent has just surfaced, and although it was filed a while back, finding it now is all the more exciting because this tech might be closer to appearing in future graphics cards. The patent describes a multi-chiplet GPU with three separate dies, which is something that could both improve performance and cut back on production costs.

In the patent, AMD refers to a GPU that's partitioned into multiple dies, which it refers to as GPU chiplets. These chiplets, or dies, can either function together as a single GPU or work as multiple GPUs in what AMD refers to as "second mode." The GPU has three modes in total, the first of which makes all the chiplets work together as a single, unified GPU. This enables it to share resources and, as Tom's Hardware says, allows the front-end die to deal with command scheduling for all the shader engine dies. This is similar to what a regular, non-chiplet GPU would do.

Read more