Reports are doing the rounds regarding alleged AMD insiders having "blown the whistle", so to speak, on the company's upcoming Vega graphics cards. This leak also points towards retail availability of Vega cards on the 5th of June, which lines up nicely with AMD's May 31st Computex press conference. An announcement there, followed by market availability on the beginning of next week does sound like something that would happen in a new product launch.

On to the meat and bones of this story, three different SKUs have been leaked, of which no details are currently known, apart from their naming and pricing. AMD's Vega line-up starts off with the RX Vega Core graphics card, which is reportedly going to retail for $399. This graphics card is going to sell at a higher price than NVIDIA's GTX 1070, which should mean higher performance. Higher pricing with competitive performance really wouldn't stir any pot of excitement, so, higher performance is the most logical guess. The $399 pricing sits nicely in regards to AMD's RX 580, though it does mean there is space for another SKU to be thrown into the mix at a later date, perhaps at $329, though I'm just speculating on AMD's apparent pricing gap at this point.Next up is the RX Vega Eclipse, which will reportedly retail for $499, going head to head with NVIDIA's GTX 1080 (in fact, slightly cheaper than the majority of AIB versions of the card). The line between the Core and the Eclipse is a little blurry here, since we know that the GTX 1070's performance can easily be overclocked to reach a stock 1080 - their performance delta isn't that great. If the RX Vega Core does bring with it higher performance than the GTX 1070 (justified by its higher pricing), then that would place it close to GTX 1080 (stock) performance. Since AMD would be trying to avoid its RX Vega Core from eclipsing (eh) its RX Vega Eclipse graphics card in the price/performance department, one can expect - with reservations - that the performance delta between the Core and the Eclipse is higher than their respective pricing indicates. So I would expect the RX Vega Eclipse to offer performance that's greater than the GTX 1080's.

Finally, we have the crème de la crème of Vega, the RX Vega Nova. This graphics card is reported to retail for $599, a full $100 cheaper than NVIDIA's GTX 1080 Ti, while looking to directly compete with it. Considering this pricing, and admitting that the leak pans out correctly, this would mean we won't be seeing a Vega card that's capable of competing with NVIDIA's Titan Xp graphics card (at least, not a single-GPU solution...) AMD simply would not sell their top of the line Vega for $599 if it was competitive with that NVIDIA titan of a graphics card. Based on AMD's previous pricing strategy, I would expect the company to deliver roughly the same performance as the GTX 1080 Ti, looking to use its Nova not as a pure performance product, but as a price/performance contender. What do you make of this leak?