AMD releases their Radeon Vega Frontier Edition

Now AMD’s first Radeon Vega GPU has been released to the public, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, which sports compute performance levels of 13.1 TFLOPs and  16GB of HBM2 memory.  

This new GPU is designed for developers, though the GPU will sport a “Gaming Mode”, though it is expected that the Radeon RX Vega will offer increased gaming performance thanks to a specific, gaming-oriented drivers.  

To playtest and optimize the gaming experience, the exclusive ability of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition to switch from Radeonâ„¢ Pro Settings to Radeon Settings and back with a couple of clicks enables rapid switching between software features for faster iteration during development workflows.

When in “Gaming Mode” the full suite of gaming features of Radeon™ Software are made available, including Radeon Chill 5 and Radeon WattMan 6.

Game developers can also use the wealth of no-cost open development tools and software found on GPUOpen.com to optimize their next-generation gaming experiences for the pinnacle of AMD graphics technology.

 

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition also comes with a cheaper price than was originally anticipated, with early listings of these GPUS coming with $1,199 and $1,799 for the air cooled and water cooled versions of these GPUs.  

AMD has now confirmed that both of these GPUs will be much cheaper, with the air-cooled version coming with a price of $999 and the water-cooled version coming with a price of $1499. This represents a $200 and $300 price drop respectively for each part.   

 

  

These new GPUs are designed for professional workloads, with the air cooled version coming with similar pricing to Nvidia’s GTX Titan Xp while offering more performance in a range of applications. 

Sadly AMD has not sampled these new GPUs to reviewers, as it is feared that the media will claim that this GPU represents the performance of the RX Vega, which is expected to come with a different driver set and performance characteristics.  

 

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition comes with a 1382MHz base clock and a 1600MHz boost clock, with the GPU featuring a total of 4096 stream processors and 64 ROPs. In terms of clock speeds, the RX Vega Frontier Edition comes with a 10% boost in base clock speed and a 20% increase in boost clock speeds, though RX Vega GPUs are expected to offer even higher clock speeds, especially aftermarket variants.   

At this time the gaming performance of AMD’s RX Vega cannot even be guessed at, given the huge changes in AMD’s GPU architecture since Polaris and potential changes to AMD’s Radeon Software GPU drivers.  

 

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