Monday we were treated to news we felt was too good to be true at the back of our minds, that AMD is adding a host of Radeon Pro features to its flagship client-segment Radeon VII graphics card, by enabling support in its upcoming Pro 19.Q1 drivers. The company today released a clarification on the matter, and explained that while it's true that some Radeon Pro features are being enabled, such as enterprise-grade security, standard feature-set, and Pro-grade driver stability; key features such as 3D application certifications and optimizations are being excluded. These would be the features you pay top-Dollar to buy Radeon Pro or competing NVIDIA Quadro products for. The drivers also lack enterprise remote workstation features.

AMD clarified the reasoning behind this partial Radeon Pro driver support that's along the lines of its Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition feature-set: to enable businesses to use both Radeon Pro and client-segment Radeon VII products across their infrastructure. They could, in theory, have a workstation set up with a Radeon Pro graphics card to satisfy application certification, and render some of their workloads on a Radeon VII installed on the same machine.The full AMD statement on the matter follows.

AMD today unveiled its big annual driver releases for its consumer-graphics Radeon line, and the professional-graphics Radeon Pro and FirePro lines. The BAR (big annual release) for the latter is titled AMD Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition 17.12.1 WHQL, and introduces a slew of new features that add value to the company's FirePro and Radeon Pro graphics cards. Since its 2016 BAR (Radeon Pro Crimson ReLive), the company's regular driver updates for enterprises achieved a predictable cadence of the 2nd Wednesday of the 2nd month of each quarter, capped off with a big annual release in December, besides prioritized 24x7 support. This, AMD claims, has been well received by its customers.

With the Radeon Pro Adrenalin Edition, AMD is expanding its software in four key directions - Pro Render, Pro Settings, New Driver Options, and Virtualization. It also chronicles driver releases over 2017 have gradually increased performance levels by up to 16 percent compared to last year's big annual release. AMD expanded the feature-set of ProRender, its in-house and highly modular 3D rendering engine for CAD designers and 3D artists, including its support for Maxon Cinema 4D; interactive viewport de-noising for Blender; a new Game Engine Importer extension that can import geometry and materials in real-time from SolidWorks to Unreal Engine; accelerating VR ports of popular games and professional 3D scenes; and a set of additional features such as PBR Shader for Blender. The drivers also add macOS support for Maya and Blender, which will be implemented "soon," along with support for 2018 releases of 3DSMax and Maya.

Aqua Computer today introduced its Kryographics Vega line of full-coverage water-blocks, which are compatible with reference-design Radeon RX Vega 64, Radeon RX Vega 56, and even Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition, since the three are based on a common PCB design. Available in two principal variants based on block material, exposed copper, and nickel-plated copper; the Kryographics Vega features a rather compact main block, since all the significantly hot components of the "Vega 10" PCB are nucleated toward the center. The block has bases for the "Vega 10" ASIC, and the VRM MOSFETs surrounding it. A POM-acetal extension gives the block a "full-coverage" look as it spans the rest of the PCB. The block features a clear-acrylic top, with an LED lighting strip on the nickel-plated variant. It features standard G 1/4 threading. The exposed copper variant is priced at 109.90€, and the nickel-plated variant at 129.90€.

In a bid to preempt sales of the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition, and the Pro WX 9100, NVIDIA expanded the feature-set of its consumer-segment TITAN Xp graphics card, with certain features reserved for its Quadro family of graphics cards, through a driver update. NVIDIA is rolling out its latest GeForce software update, which adds professional features for applications such as Maya, unlocking "3X more performance" for the software.

Priced at USD $1,199, the TITAN Xp packs a full-featured "GP102" graphics processor, with 3,840 CUDA cores, 240 TMUs, 96 ROPs, and 12 GB of GDDR5X memory across the chip's 384-bit wide memory interface. At its given memory clock of 11.4 GHz (GDDR5X-effective), the card has a memory bandwidth of 547.6 GB/s, which is higher than the 484 GB/s of the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 385.12 for TITAN Xp

It has been a huge weekend of product announcements and launches from AMD, which expanded not just its client computing CPU lineup on both ends, but also expanded its Radeon graphics cards family with both client- and professional-segment graphics cards. This article provides a brief summary of everything AMD launched or announced today, with their possible market-availability dates.

The liquid-cooled variant of AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition has some very lofty power requirements. Although it draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which along with the PCI-Express slot total a power output of 375W, the card was tested by PC Perspective, to be overdrawing power from the power connectors, with a peak power draw of a staggering 440W, with its power limit raised by 25% to stabilize a 7% overclock. At its stock clock speeds, however, the card remains well under the 375W limit, drawing around 350W of power.

The liquid-cooled Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition has its TDP rated at 375W, compared to 300W of the air-cooled variant. Given its performance being somewhere between the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti, these figures don't bode particularly well for the upcoming Radeon RX Vega family of consumer graphics cards, unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat with pricing. The RX Vega series is expected to be announced on July 27.