The Radeon Vega GPU has been a rather mythical thing until the past couple of months, but we are finally approaching the new architecture’s release…Well, sort of.
The Vega graphics processor will be making its first public release on June 27 with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a powerful professional-grade workstation GPU featuring 16 GB of HBM2. However, as noted, this card is aimed at professionals, game designers, and scientists and is not aimed at PC gamers. Enthusiast gamers will need to wait a little longer for the gaming-grade RX Vega card.
However, it appears that the RX Vega cards will not all be releasing at the same time. Right now, we know that the first RX Vega cards will be released around the time of SIGGRAPH 2017 (July 3 to August 3). Yet, it appears that this will be the release for the most powerful of the gaming grade cards, but those operating on more of a budget will have to wait later…Much later.
According to some sources, the “high end” (non-enthusiast) and mainstream cuts of the Vega architecture most likely won’t be available until early-2018. Until then, Radeon fans that aren’t wanting to push to the bleeding edge will want to check out the RX 500 series of cards that launched back in April.
Time will tell what AMD’s official Vega plans will be, but thankfully SIGGRAPH isn’t that far away now and we should have more concrete answers by then!