Recently, new video cards from AMD – Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition and Radeon Vega RX 64 – have been on sale, and since August 28, the Radeon RX Vega 56 will be available for sale. AMD positions Radeon RX Vega as the most advanced consumer video card based on Vega architecture , focused on the most hard-core gamers.
Representatives of the series
The series includes three video cards:
- Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition: 64 CU computational units, 4 096 stream processors, core frequency – 1 406 MHz (Boost up to 1 677 MHz), 8 GB of HBM2 memory, liquid cooling, TDP at 345 W.
- Radeon RX Vega 64: 64 computing units CU, 4 096 stream processors, core frequency – 1 247 MHz (Boost up to 1,546 MHz), 8 GB of HBM2 memory, air cooling, TDP at 295 watts.
- Radeon RX Vega 56: 56 CUs, 3,584 stream processors, core frequency – 1,156 MHz (Boost up to 1,471 MHz), 8 GB of HBM2 memory, air cooling, TDP at 210 watts.
Video cards Vega come in two color variations – black and silver (limited edition).
Price list
The recommended price for RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition is 699 dollars. Radeon Vega RX 64 with air cooling will cost $ 499. For Radeon RX Vega 56, the price is $ 399. However, as the portal Overclockers UK writes, such prices will operate only for a limited period of time, and then, on the recommendation of AMD, the cost of video cards will grow by some 20%. It is not very clear what is the reason for this decision.
Performance and power consumption
Judging by the tests conducted by VideoCardz and AnandTech resources, AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 slightly outperformed the analogue from NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 in the synthetic benchmarks, but expectedly fell behind the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
However, in the games Radeon RX Vega 64 showed performance at the level of GTX 1080, released in May last year. Performance was tested in the games Battlefield 1, Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Titanfall 2, Metro: Last Light Redux and Civilization VI. All of them use DirectX 11, perhaps in DX12 or Vulkan Vega card could bypass the competitor. In addition, AMD demonstrates the best results in 4K-resolution, but lags behind in 1 080p and 1 440p. RX Vega 56 shows similar results.
At the same time, all tested AMD Vega cards showed great appetites for power consumption than NVIDIA.
The testers did not reveal a special dependence of the performance of new cards on the processors. Radeon RX Vega 64 was tested in conjunction with Intel Core i7, AMD Ryzen 7 and Ryzen Threadripper.
AMD believes that the new series of video cards will be suitable not only for games at high settings, but also for mining. The manufacturer has even introduced a special driver that optimizes video cards for crypto currency production. Although, given the high power consumption, Radeon RX Vega is unlikely to be the best choice for miners.
AMD Vega Pack
In addition to individual Vega video cards, AMD also offers Radeon Pack for some regions, which, in addition to video cards, include Wolfenstein II games: The New Colossus and Prey.
Sets include discounts of up to $ 200 on selected monitors that support Radeon FreeSync technology, and discounts of $ 100 for Ryzen 7 1800X processors with motherboards based on the X370 chipset.
The price of the Radeon Aqua Pack with Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition is $ 699, the Radeon Black Pack with Radeon RX Vega 64 is available for $ 599, and the Radeon Red Pack with Radeon RX Vega 56 costs $ 499.
conclusions
A new series of video cards leaves a double impression. On the one hand, AMD announced a large number of new functions in the gland. Perhaps they will be revealed with the release of new drivers. And Radeon Pack kits look and at all tempting, if you decided to build a new gaming computer.
On the other hand, even now there is not a particularly high performance gain in games compared to similar NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards a year ago. But competitors from NVIDIA are more modest in power consumption, and if AMD increases prices in the coming days, then NVIDIA cards will indeed become more preferable for buyers.
