NVIDIA finally has decent competition
NVIDIA has long been a dominant force in both market share and mind share when it comes to high-end graphics cards. AMD hasn’t had a proper answer to NVIDIA’s high-end offerings for years now, but that’s about to change: the company has officially taken the wraps off of their Radeon RX Vega graphics cards that’s aimed at the higher end of the market, promising to deliver at least equivalent speeds to NVIDIA’s offering for less.
There’s three offerings at launch: the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, Radeon RX Vega 64 and the Radeon RX Vega 56. Obviously the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid is the top of the line offering from the new architecture, boasting a base clock of 1406MHz and a boost clock of 1677MHz. The Radeon RX Vega 64 has lower clocks, consisting of 1247MHz and 1546MHz respectively. The Radeon RX Vega 56 is the tuned-down version of the new Vega GPU, with a few stream processors turned off, and boasting clocks of 1156MHz and 1471MHz respectively. All cards have 8GB of VRAM, though AMD’s curse of high power draws is still alive and well, with the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid having a power draw of 345W. The Radeon RX Vega 64 and the Radeon RX Vega 56 have power draws of 295W and 210W, respectively.
AMD hasn’t released extensive benchmarks as of yet, but from what they’ve offered in their promotional material, but in theory you should see at least minimum frame rates of 53 when playing games on an ultra-wide 1440p monitor with the highest-tier model. That’s higher than the 45 of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 which the cards are being measured against, but again until we get benchmarks of our own, those figures will serve more as an FYI than a hard number that you should be basing your purchase decisions on. At the very least, AMD finally has a solid answer to NVIDIA’s high-end GPU offerings.
More importantly, AMD is looking to give gamers more bang for their buck by introducing Radeon Bundles. Essentially, if buyers opt to hand over an additional $100 when they purchase a new Vega card, they’ll be getting a bunch of price cuts on hardware and software: they’ll be getting $200 off on a Radeon FreeSync enabled monitor (Samsung CF71 34-inch widescreen monitor), $100 off on a AMD Ryzen 7 CPU/motherboard combo as well as getting 2 free games. It’s unclear if this bundle is going to apply here in the Philippines.
AMD is pricing the Radeon RX Vega 64 at $499 or around 25K while the RX Vega 56 is priced at $399. AMD hasn’t announced stand-alone pricing for the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, though you can buy it at $699 with the Radeon Pack. Pricing for both Radeon-pack enabled RX Vega 64 and 56 are around $100 more expensive.
