AMD Vega, GTX 1080 Ti's Rival, Comes Late But With More Compute Powers, HBM2 Memory, Optimized Drivers

The AMD Radeon RX Vega is expected to arrive late this year or early 2018, months after its rival, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Late it may be, but AMD's Vega architecture will pack more compute powers with instinct accelerators, feature new HBM2 memory and obtain better performance as 80 percent of AMD's engineers are currently optimizing its GPU drivers

The Capsaicin and Cream event last week did not go into details about the AMD Vega other than revealing its official title. The earliest information that the red team disclosed about Vega was back at CES in January. Nonetheless, the upcoming flagship Vega 10 was demoed with the top-of-the-line Ryzen processor running "Star Wars Battlefront: Rogue One." The system delivered a consistent 60fps at 4K resolution from a system still with an unoptimized driver.

The AMD Radeon RX Vega is expected to make the GPU industry much more exciting as engineers continue to put more compute power into Vega that goes beyond gaming applications. The new GPU is believed to have outperformed the Titan X in machine learning applications as revealed by previously leaked benchmark results. This is because of AMD's MI8 and MI25 accelerators, which enable Vega to be twice as fast as Titan X, Motley FoolI has learned.

In fact, the AMD Vega 10 with MI25 accelerator obtained as much as 12.5 TERAFLOPS of single precision floating point compute. Meanwhile, the GPU posted doubled half precision FP 16 compute at 1.5 TERAFLOPS, which is reported to be higher than the Tesla P100 accelerators. The said score is also 2.5 TERAFLOPS higher than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080.

The AMD Vega architecture is also expected to come with a higher-bandwidth memory with as much as 8GB of HBM2 and 512 GB/s of memory bandwidth in its Vega 10-powered graphics cards. It will have the 64 next-generation compute units with each having 64 stream processors for a sum of 4096 GCN stream processors and the 2048 bit memory, Racing Junky reported. Moreover, the early estimate of 10 percent improved performance over the GTX 1080 may even be higher than the 35 percent claim of the GTX 1080 Ti. Currently, AMD has a dedicated team working on optimizing the GPU drivers to boost performance even further.

The AMD Radeon RX Vega will have the Vega 10 to be the top tier AMD product to wrestle dominance with the newly-unveiled GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The Vega 11 is the mid-range GPU to wrestle with the GTX 1070 though there is no information yet as to what new feature it brings to the mid-range table. As to pricing, observers say that AMD's success with Vega primarily rests on competitive pricing particularly paying mind to the $699 price tag of the GTX 1080 Ti. More details may be known during the Computex event happening from May 30 to June 3, according to wccftech.