AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Reviews: New GPU Shows Vega Line Potential
Advanced Micro Devices have begun their release cycle for the Vega line of Graphics Processing Units, and their first product, the Vega Frontier Edition, gives promising results to the rest of the Vega GPUs that are expected to come later this year.
The AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has been released on Wednesday, June 28, and early reviews and benchmarks have started to circulate online. The GPU is currently priced at $1,000 for the air-cooled version and $1,400 for the liquid cooled model, according to WCCF Tech.
AMD has marketed the card as a workstation powerhouse, and it offers performance suitable for users working with professional software. As such, the company explains that the card is not fully aimed at the gamer market and is not highly optimized for gaming use.
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Even then, benchmarks do show that the GPU provides enough juice to run games at the highest settings, especially when switched to its "Gaming Mode."
The Vega Frontier Edition, on paper, is capable of pushing 25 TeraFLOPS of computing power for 16-bit tasks, and 13 TFLOPS for 32-bit vectors. The card has 16 GB of High Bandwidth Cache to load data in and out of its 64 Vega Next-Gen Compute Units. The card also has 4,096 Stream Processors built in.
Using gaming benchmarks, the new offering from AMD was able to beat the NVidia GeForce GTX 1070, but it comes just under the capabilities of the GeForce GTX 1080, according to PCPer.
Performance improvements are still expected from the card by way of driver updates, given that the GPU has just been released. Even as is, the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has already improved on the previous R9 Fury X series by 25 percent to 45 percent — an impressive leap powered by the new Vega architecture.
With these early benchmarks at hand, PC system builders can look forward to price-competitive offerings from AMD for the Vega cards to follow this year.
