In an AMA (ask me anything) session with Tom's Hardware community, AMD desktop processor marketing exec Don Woligrosky answered a variety of AMD Ryzen platform related questions. He did not shy away from making a key comment about the company's upcoming high-end graphics card, Radeon Vega, either. "Vega performance compared to the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp looks really nice," Woligrosky stated. This implies that Radeon Vega is in the same league of performance as NVIDIA's two top consumer graphics SKUs, the $650 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and the $1,200 TITAN Xp.

It is conceivable that AMD's desktop processor marketing execs will have access to some privileged information from other product divisions, and so if true, this makes NVIDIA's recent memory speed bump for the GTX 1080 a failed gambit. NVIDIA similarly bumped memory speeds of the GTX 1060 6 GB to make it more competitive against the Radeon RX 580. Woligrosky also commented on a more plausible topic, of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync becoming the dominant adaptive v-sync technology, far outselling NVIDIA G-Sync.

id Software, the pioneering game studio behind "Doom" and "Quake," in a marketing video about how its developers and gamers are benefiting from AMD Ryzen processors, hinted that it is working on a new next-generation game engine that succeeds idTech 6, which is heavily optimized for AMD Ryzen processors. id CTO Robert Duffy spoke at length about how Ryzen is putting more CPU capabilities in the hands of gamers at attractive price-points, which is letting game developers add that much more content and production design that benefits from this level of parallelism and performance.

The most interesting part about Duffy's comment comes later in the video, where he talks about a new game engine that id is working on, which will be "far more parallel than idTech 6" (far more multi-core and multi-thread friendly), and that it will be able to consume "all of the CPU [compute power] that Ryzen can offer." Duffy also confirmed that "Quake Champions," the studio's upcoming online hero-based FPS, will be optimized for both Ryzen and Radeon Vega.The video follows.

Via Facebook, AMD has confirmed that Vega is nearly here - at least, as nearly here as a "this quarter" can be. This means Vega will launch in two-months time (Q2 extends through the months of April, May and June, after all.) Through a post on its Facebook page, AMD replied that Vega will be coming "when it's ready... And it will be this quarter."

According to previous leaks (and our own deep dive on Vega's architecture), Vega should go a long way towards bridging the power/performance gap between AMD and NVIDIA's GeForce series. It will be the first time since Fury that AMD will have a competitive, high-performance graphics design (expectedly, and hopefully, since no-one likes to buy over-priced graphics cards.) The fact that AMD has teased Vega in two different pieces of media that come out in May (Arkane Studios' Prey, which comes out on May 5th, and Alien: Covenant, which also comes out during the month of May.) I've previously posited that AMD wouldn't tease Vega's launch alongside one of the most promising games of the year without giving us the chance to power it through Vega come launch day, but as Prey's release date approaches and there is no more information on Vega (much less an announcement), it's looking increasingly likely that we'll have to wait until we can see that universe in all of its Vega-rendered glory.

PowerColor has pulled some images out of its teaser hat, bringing us some classy, though ultimately uninformative pics of an upcoming Red Devil card. The details that can be gleaned point to a dual-fan design and some semblance of LED illumination (which should always be expected in any recent product launch).

Though we can't know for sure what graphics card this Red Devil tease refers to, logic would dictate that it's the best-performing, upcoming card that we know off. Pulling a publicity stunt for the second-fastest card to arrive (RX 570) just wouldn't make sense, and the timing puts this teaser much closer to (what is expected to be) the rebranded RX 500 line than to the much-awaited RX Vega line of graphics cards. The latter will probably drop in around the same time as Arkane's Prey, which launches on the fifth of May.

It looks like AMD is confident enough on its HBC (High-Bandwidth Cache) and HBCC (High-Bandwidth Cache Controller) technology, and other assorted improvements to overall Vega memory management, to consider 4 GB as enough memory for high-performance gaming and applications. On a Beijing tech summit, AMD announced that its RX Vega cards (the highest performers in their next generation product stack, which features rebrands of their RX 400 line series of cards to th new RX 500) will come in at 4 GB and 8 GB HBM 2 (512 GB/s) memory amounts. The HBCC looks to ensure that we don't see a repeat of AMD's Fury X video card, which featured first generation HBM (High-Bandwidth memory), at the time limited to 4 GB stacks. But lacking extensive memory management improvements meant that the Fury X sometimes struggled on memory-heavy workloads.

If the company's Vega architecture deep dive is anything to go by, they may be right: remember that AMD put out a graph showing how the memory allocation is almost twice as big as the actual amount of memory used - and its here, with smarter, improved memory management and allocation, that AMD is looking to make do with only 4 GB of video memory (which is still more than enough for most games, mind you). This could be a turn of the screw moment for all that "more is always better" philosophy.

AMD has recently sent out around a hundred patches, which amount to over 40 thousand lines of code, so as to allow developers to integrate support for its upcoming Vega GPU architecture under Linux. The new code is essential towards baking support for Vega under Linux, considering the many changes this architecture entails over AMD's current-generation Polaris 10 (soon to be rebranded, if sources are correct, to the new RX 500 series.) Also of note is the existence of seven different device IDs for Vega-based products, though this really can't be extrapolated to the amount of SKUs under the Vega banner. For now, that really is just a number.

It would seem that AMD has been making internal, top-secret demonstrations of its upcoming RX Vega GPUs. The company was in Beijing, China yesterday, sowing some thoughts and knowledge on its upcoming Ryzen 5 line of processors. Yet AMD apparently also found the time to tease its upcoming high-performance GPU (which apparently, and unlike it's competitors GPUs, also carries a soul.)

From what can be gleaned from the pictures, this physical manifestation of Vega does away with AMD's Fury X small size (achieved through water cooling). Instead, the coolers seems to be a monolithic piece which totally encloses the card, in an attractive, white and red color scheme with AMD's Vega branding etched on for good measure. We can also glean from the pics that AMD's RX Vega doesn't drop the tachometer feature that allows you to look at the operating LED's to glean the amount of workload on the GPU, with switches that are likely to allow for "OFF/ON" positions for the LED's and for "RED/BLUE" coloring.

Memory clock speeds will go a long way in improving the performance of an AMD Ryzen processor, according to new information by the company, which reveals that Infinity Fabric, the high-bandwidth interconnect used to connect the two quad-core complexes (CCXs) on 6-core and 8-core Ryzen processors with other uncore components, such as the PCIe root-complex, and the integrated southbridge; is synced with the memory clock. AMD made this revelation in a response to a question posed by Reddit user CataclysmZA.

Infinity Fabric, a successor to HyperTransport, is AMD's latest interconnect technology that connects the various components on the Ryzen "Summit Ridge" processor, and on the upcoming "Vega" GPU family. According to AMD, it is a 256-bit wide bi-directional crossbar. Think of it as town-square for the chip, where tagged data and instructions change hands between the various components. Within the CCX, the L3 cache performs some inter-core connectivity. The speed of the Infinity Fabric crossbar on a "Summit Ridge" Ryzen processor is determined by the memory clock. When paired with DDR4-2133 memory, for example, the crossbar ticks at 1066 MHz (SDR, actual clock). Using faster memory, according to AMD, hence has a direct impact on the bandwidth of this interconnect.

We've previously covered how AMD's RX 500 series is to be a rebrand of the company's successful RX 400 series. Previous reports pegged the RX 500 series' launch on April 11th; now, it would seem that there has been a slight, one-week delay on the launch date, with it having been pushed back to April 18th. Apparently, this delay is looking to allow more time to "fine-tune the drivers".

The RX 500 series are purportedly straight rebrands from equivalent RX 400 series GPUs (RX 580 will be a rebrand of the RX 480, and so on down the ladder). The need for driver fine-tuning seems a little baffling considering these straight rebrands, but may have more to do with the reported Polaris 12 chips that are expected for launch than any other metric. Remember, RX 500 chips are expected to carry somewhat higher clock-speeds than their RX 400 originals, with some improved power/performance ratio being derived from improvements in foundry processes. But if the rebranding scheme holds up, don't expect these to bring in any meaningful changes towards these cards' performance. AMD is hoping Polaris tides them over through the mainstream market until it can introduce its Vega-based, high-performance GPUs, which are heralded to mark AMD's return to the high-performance consumer graphics segment in a while. Fingers crossed.Source: Thanks @TheMailMan78

The Vega based line of AMD GPUs are definitely a big unknown at this point, so any sightings or benchmarks of it are highly sought after by the rumormill. Well, here is another one to add to your pile of rumor-material folks: AMD has posted a card benchmark to Compubench that bests even the GTX 1080.

Why hold the hype?

There are two obvious issues. One, this is a compute only benchmark, and has little relevance to the average gamer. Two, in the same benchmark, a 980TI also beats the 1080. Stranger yet, the 1080 is also beaten by its little brother, the 1070. Take this one with a grain of salt, for the obvious reasons. It won't stop the the hypetrain from using this info to its own end, but maybe you can avoid being smashed by it by using some critical thinking.

AMD, at its post-Ryzen 7 launch Reddit AMA, disclosed some juicy details about its other upcoming socket AM4 chips, beginning with the rest of the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 "Summit Ridge" processor roll-out, and a little bit about its 8th generation socket AM4 APU, codenamed "Raven Ridge." To begin with, AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that "Raven Ridge" will also be sold under the Ryzen brand. This would mark a departure from the less-than-stellar A-series branding for its performance APUs. "Raven Ridge" likely combines a "Zen" quad-core CPU complex (CCX) with an integrated GPU based on one of AMD's newer GPU architectures (either "Polaris" or "Vega").

The range-topping Ryzen 7 series will lead the company's lineup throughout Q1, with six-core and quad-core Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 series launches being scheduled for later this year. Our older reports pinned Ryzen 5 series rollout for Q2, and Ryzen 3 series for the second half of 2017. This is likely also when the company rolls out "Raven Ridge" initially as mobile Ryzen products (BGA packages, which will likely also be used in AIOs), and later as desktop socket AM4 parts.

The folks at Heise online have put forward a report on how AMD's RX 500 series of graphics cards will be little less than direct rebrands of the Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs that AMD introduced with its RX 400 series of graphics cards. Apparently, a straight rebrand is in order, with the RX 580 entering the fray in the place of the RX 480, the RX 570 substituting the RX 470, and so on. Heise reports that the Polaris 10-based RX 500 should see the light of day as soon as April 4th, with Polaris 11-based solutions coming in a little later, on April 11th.

Videocardz, however, reports that these will be slightly more than a straight rebrand - if you can call a slight bump in clockspeeds as trumping a rebrand. The RX 580 is supposed to ship with base clocks ar 1340 MHz (74 MHz more than the reference RX 480), with the RX 570 carrying a much less significant 38 MHz increase over its RX 470 counterpart. Videocardz also reports on the possibility of AMD introducing a new Polaris 12 GPU with the RX 500 series, which will apparently be an even lower-end part than even Polaris 11.

Just before Holiday 2016 (December), we were intrigued by a curious line in a LinkedIn job-posting, which at the time confirmed that NVIDIA is working on the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and more importantly, that existing users of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti would have a priority in a pre-order queue, or a "Step Up Offer." A step-up offer is that in which GTX 980 Ti users would have the ability to trade-in their GTX 980 Ti cards for new GTX 1080 Ti cards, at a price significantly lower than buying a brand-new GTX 1080 Ti card. From the looks of it, there is no sign of such an offer.

The other, more scary detail about the GTX 1080 Ti, which was doing rounds at the time, was its fabled $999 price-tag, with fears of NVIDIA price-gouging with the new card so as to not cannibalize inventory of premium GTX 1080 cards in stock, some of which are still priced over the $700 mark. Alas, the GTX 1080 Ti launched at $699, a price we're sure NVIDIA partners with unsold super-premium GTX 1080 cards won't take kindly, and the GTX 1080 got its price cut to $499. NVIDIA is taking no chances with its market preparation for AMD's next-generation Radeon RX Vega.

Looking back on NVIDIA's GDC presentation, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects approached was the implementation of tile-based rendering on NVIDIA's post-Maxwell architectures. This has been an adaptation of typically mobile approaches to graphics rendering which keeps their specific needs for power efficiency in mind - and if you'll "member", "Maxwell" was NVIDIA's first graphics architecture publicly touted for its "mobile first" design.

This approach essentially divides the screen into tiles, and then rasterizes the entire frame in a per-tile basis. 16×16 and 32×32 pixels are the usual tile sizes, but both Maxwell and Pascal can dynamically assess the required tile size for each frame, changing it on-the-fly as needed and according to the complexity of the scene. This looks to ensure that the processed data has a much smaller footprint than that of the full image rendering - small enough that it makes it possible for NVIDIA to keep the data in a much smaller amount of memory (essentially, the L2 memory), dynamically filling and flushing the available cache as possible until the full frame has been rendered. This means that the GPU doesn't have to access larger, slower memory pools as much, which primarily reduces the load on the VRAM subsystem (increasing available VRAM for other tasks), whilst simultaneously accelerating rendering speed. At the same time, a tile-based approach also lends itself pretty well to the nature of GPUs - these are easily parallelized operations, with the GPU being able to tackle many independent tiles simultaneously, depending on the available resources.

AMD's hottest announcement from its Capsaicin & Cream event is the brand unveil for consumer graphics products based on the "Vega" architecture. The lineup will be called simply Radeon RX Vega (likely with brand extensions to denote tiers and model numbers). The company also unveiled the "V" (for Vega) logo we've seen from CEO Lisa Su's presser from last week. The product unveil video illustrates how "Vega" will span across the consumer-graphics, pro-graphics, and Radeon Instinct data-center GPU lines.

AMD introduced a remote rendering service rivaling NVIDIA GeForce Now, which it developed in partnership with LiquidSky, a company which will operate the service using AMD Radeon "Vega" based remote GPUs, that can stream to a variety of devices including low-power notebooks, tablets, and handhelds. The company will launch the service at prices competitive with GeForce Now. Watch this space for more.

What sets LiquidSky apart from GeForce Now is its pricing. The basic plan is ad-supported, and is hence practically free, with a pay-as-you-go plan starting at $4.99, and monthly plans starting at $9.99.

At its Capsaicin & Cream event today, AMD announced that its High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), a feature introduced by its "Vega" GPU architecture to improve memory management, will increase game performance tangibly. The company did a side-by-side comparison between two sessions of "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided," in which a HBCC-aware machine purportedly presented 2x better minimum FPS, and 1.5x better average FPS scores, than a non-HBCC-aware system (though the old, trusty frame-rate counter was conspicuously absent from both demos).

AMD also went on to show how HBCC seemingly halves memory requirements, by deliberately capping the amount of addressable memory on the HBCC-aware system to only 2 GB - half of the 4 GB addressable by the non-HBCC-aware system, while claiming that even so, the HBCC-enabled system still showed "the same or better performance" through its better memory management and bandwidth speeds. If these results do hold up to scrutiny, this should benefit implementations of "Vega" with lower amounts of video memory, while simultaneously reducing production costs and overall end-user pricing, since smaller memory pools would be needed for the same effect.

An AMD representative, responding to a Reddit question on AMD Ryzen branding, confirmed that the company will launch Mobile SoCs (APUs) based on the "Zen" micro-architecture later this year. The logical next-step for AMD with "Zen" beyond "Summit Ridge" has been to combine one or more quad-core "Zen" CCX (CPU complexes) with an integrated graphics core based on one of its newer GPU architectures ("Polaris" or "Vega").

The AMD representative confirmed that the company will launch mobile SoCs that combine "Zen" CPU cores with an integrated GPU, in the second half of 2017. This could hint at the availability of "Zen" powered notebooks, of all shapes and sizes by Holiday 2017. Over the year, AMD will begin launching "Zen" based products, starting off with 8-core high-end Ryzen 7 processors on March 2nd, six-core and some of the higher-end quad-core Ryzen 5 series processors in Q2-2017, and some of the lower-end quad-core Ryzen 3 parts in the second-half of 2017, now joined by mobile SoCs around the same time.

At its first reveal of the Radeon Vega graphics card on the sidelines of the 2017 International CES show, AMD was careful to conceal the power-connectors of its graphics card prototype (using tissue paper), even though teaser images of the card were splattered all over the web. From this week's reveal of a Radeon Vega graphics card running on an AMD Ryzen 7-1800X powered machine, the veil is off the power connector layout. Apparently, AMD's reference design Radeon Vega 10 graphics card is air-cooled, and it draws power from a combination of 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 (reference) makes do with a single 8-pin connector, although most custom-design GTX 1080 cards feature 6-pin + 8-pin layouts. The GP102-powered TITAN X Pascal reference, too, draws power from 6+8 pin connectors. It's interesting to note here, that the power connectors feature a string of LEDs near their contact points on the PCB. The Radeon R9 Fury X, too has something like this, although the LEDs are used to alert users of faulty power input, or power draw. In the image below, we see that LEDs over only one connector are lit up. Could this indicate that AMD is making sure users are aware that the card isn't drawing power from both connectors all the time?

NVIDIA's GeForce.com website today was updated to greet us with a curious-looking countdown to evening, February 28. The countdown goes with the caption "It's Almost Time," with "Ti" in bold lettering. This just about confirms launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA's next high-end graphics card based on the same "GP102" silicon as the TITAN X Pascal. It remains to be seen if the company endows the SKU with more CUDA cores than the TITAN X Pascal, or less. A lot will depend on what NVIDIA's product managers learned about AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega.

With its latest Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.2.1 drivers, AMD decided to stop releasing regular WHQL-signed drivers for the 32-bit version of the Windows 8.1 operating system. At first we thought AMD's web-admins accidentally missed publishing the driver (so we could post it on our Downloads section). When we got in touch with AMD, we were told that the company doesn't have new drivers for 32-bit Windows 8.1. We were even told that it's because nobody cares about 32-bit Windows 8.1 anymore, citing extremely low download numbers.

Apparently, AMD is cutting down costs and time for its driver development team by discarding operating systems and architectures that only a few people use. It was first to dump Windows XP support, and support for Windows 8 (in favor of Windows 8.1). While the company does provide 64-bit Windows 8.1 WHQL drivers as regularly as its popular Windows 7 and Windows 10 ones; it is skipping support for 32-bit Windows 8.1 going forward. The company will not release any new Windows 8.1 32-bit drivers anymore. One way out of this is to upgrade to Windows 10 while you still can. Updating to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 is pretty smooth, and maybe you can consider an upgrade to 64-bit, since most new AAA games are limited to 64-bit only.

At a press event by AMD, company CEO Lisa Su unveiled the first three AMD Ryzen desktop processor models, the top-dog Ryzen 7-1800X, the Ryzen 7-1700X, and the Ryzen 7-1700. The R7-1800X is priced at USD $499, followed by the R7-1700X at $399, and the R7-1700 at $329. The three chips will be available for purchase on the 2nd of March, 2017. The R7-1800X is clocked at 3.60 GHz, with a TurboCore frequency of 4.00 GHz, and the XFR (extended frequency range) feature, which further overclocks the chip, depending on the effectiveness of your CPU cooler.

The Ryzen 7-1700X ships with 3.40 GHz clocks, with 3.80 GHz TurboCore frequency, and the XFR feature. The Ryzen 7-1700 lacks XFR, and comes with slightly lower clocks, at 3.00 GHz core, and 3.70 GHz TurboCore. All three are true 8-core chips, with 512 KB of dedicated L2 cache per core, and 16 MB of shared L3 cache. Also featured are dual-channel DDR4 integrated memory controllers, and an integrated PCI-Express gen 3.0 root complex. The Ryzen 7-1700 has a TDP of just 65W (for a performance 8-core chip that's a kick in the butts of Intel's engineers), and will include an AMD Wraith Max cooling solution, while the 1700X and 1800X have TDP rated at 95W, and will come without coolers. At its media event, CEO Lisa Su stated that at $499, the Ryzen 7-1800X "smokes" the Intel Core i7-6900K eight-core processor. The company also unveiled the branding of its Radeon Vega enthusiast graphics family. Lastly, feast your eyes on the beautiful, 14 nm, Made-in-USA die-shot of Ryzen.

AMD in a press release today, stated that in its 2017 "Capsaicin Live" event held on the sidelines of the Game Developers Conference, it will reveal "exciting new details surrounding Vega," its next-generation GPU architecture, on which the company is expected to launch its next high-end graphics card. The company is hosting the much talked about "Capsaicin and Cream" launch event on the 28th February, 2017. It is expected to launch its next-generation Ryzen performance desktop processors, and talk some more about its "Vega" GPU architecture. Besides Ryzen and Vega, AMD will showcase some of Summer 2017's most anticipated AAA game launches that take advantage of VR.

It all seems to go back to AMD these days, doesn't it? If it isn't the company's upcoming Ryzen CPUs that stand in the limelight (a rare thing nowadays, with a seemingly neverending amount of leaks around them and the accompanying AM4 platform), it's the company's Vega graphics architecture that makes waves with new info or new leaks.

Now, reports are coming in (with solid imagery at that) regarding a collaboration between Arkane and AMD, marrying Arkane's promising new IP, Prey, and AMD's upcoming Vega architecture. This may sound like an interesting, if not at all important, piece of information. But digging deeper, this is probably indication of Vega's expected launch window. Considering that AMD's woman of the moment, Lisa Su, has previously placed Vega's launch in Q2 2017 (spanning April, May, and June), and adding 1+1, this places AMD's Vega launch before Prey's - after all, it wouldn't make much sense to market a game as being optimized for a given architecture.... If users can't actually use it.

As an avid reader and story addict, I admit that Arkane's take on the world of Dishonored in its second iteration left me a little underwhelmed (though the worldbuilding, gameplay and art direction were simply sublime). However, judging from Prey's trailers and some hands-on impressions running the world wide web, it looks as if Arkane has again hit the proverbial nail in the head. And from what AMD promises, Vega will be here to power it when it launches on May 5th.

Not to be outdone by AMD, and making sure to keep the landscape populated with enough green, NVIDIA has announced its presence in the upcoming GDC 2017. Could this be the choice battleground for an announcement regarding the (now) almost mythical GTX 1080Ti?

Let's see what the company has to say: "You're invited to attend the GeForce GTX gaming celebration! Come join us for an evening of awesome PC gaming, hardware, tournaments and of course free food, drinks and a few other amazing surprises. Doors will open at 6:30 PM and the event will start promptly at 7 PM. The celebration will take place in downtown San Francisco, CA."

Let's just say that the company has history of announcing its top-of-the-line Ti models on GDC (much like it did with 2015's GTX 980 Ti), and that NVIDIA closes their announcement with a very tentative (if generic) "You won't want to miss this". And with rumors of AMD being prepared to show off its Vega architecture on the same day, as well as the expected release of its highly anticipated Ryzen CPUs, February 28th is looking out to be one of the best days of the year for enthusiasts.