AMD Radeon RX Vega Mid-Range Graphics Cards: Early 2018 Commercial Release Expected for Latest GPU

By Sheanne Aguila, Christian Post Contributor Saturday, June 10, 2017

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is expected to release the high-end variant of Vega to the market before launching the mid-range models.

During last week's Computex, AMD confirmed that their Radeon RX Vega graphics cards will be officially introduced at SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) 2017, an annual conference that will be held this year in Los Angeles from July 30 until Aug. 3. More information can be expected from the company before the event kicks off. It is believed that the new GPUs will be out by late 2017 or early 2018.

In a previous blog post, the AMD Radeon Technologies Group's chief architect Raja Koduri mentioned that the gaming Radeon RX Vega GPUs will be much faster and cheaper compared to the Frontier Edition, which is targeted towards pro content developers.

While users can still play games on the Frontier Edition card, AMD seems against it. Instead, the company suggests it would be better to just wait for the consumer variants, which will offer optimized features for playing PC games.

"The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card is going to empower the pioneers creating the next generation of gaming experiences, but it does beg one question: Can you game on a Radeon Vega Frontier Edition? The answer is yes, absolutely," Koduri wrote.

"But because this graphics card is optimized for professional use cases (and priced accordingly), if gaming is your primary reason for buying a GPU, I'd suggest waiting just a little while longer for the lower-priced, gaming-optimized Radeon RX Vega graphics card. You'll be glad you did," he added.

According to reports, the high-end RX Vega Nova is rumored to retail for $599 — making it $100 cheaper than its rival Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti. It's unclear whether the reduced price means slower performance as well. The rumors also suggest that the mid-range RX Vega Eclipse will have a $499 price tag while the RX Vega Core will cost $399.This leaves the RX 500-series GPUs targeting the mainstream market that usually falls below $250.