The next generation graphics silicon is big news for gamers that might come this year. The AMD Vega is a viable high-end competitor for Nvidia.
The AMD Vega is touted to offer a huge leap forward in terms of the company's past architecture. Reports said that AMD has made serious changes to every aspect of the chip. Accordingly, the chip is the first high-end challenger to the supremacy of Nvidia.
AMD calls its build its Next-Generation-Compute Unit, or NCU, formed of individual stream processors doing work required by the graphic card. AMD Vega is capable of collecting tasks and distributing these tasks to correct areas of the card while managing workload.
According to PC Gamer, the AMD Vega is built on everything that makes the Polaris great. However, AMD says it is not simply a bigger chip with more cores. Accordingly, the baseline for the Vega is about 45 percent faster than the Fury X that should put it above the performance level of the GTX 1080, and possibly surpass the Titan X.
Graphics cards have always had a problem with memory, both Nvidia and AMD turned up every year with slightly better speeds and a wider access bus. Upon the implementation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in 2015, it delivered a far wider bus that could run at a far slower speed.
However, HBM can only be built on 1GB modules, peaking at 4GB on any card. The second generation HBM2 solved the problem by having each module have the capacity of up to 8GB. The modules can also offer double the bandwidth that delivers far better than its top HBM from the previous generation.
What sets it apart is that AMD's over-achieving goal of Vega's design is to improve memory efficiency, according to Digital Trends. Most game developers code games to load far more data than they need, this is why modern games require 4GB of memory at their highest detail settings.
With Vega's faster memory design, it should deliver assets more quickly when called for. In turn, games will not need to consume much of Vega's memory. There are no details yet about AMD Vega's availability and pricing. It is safe to assume at this point that its release is at least a few months away.
