In a bid to increase interest and feed the Radeon rebels with hope for their latest high-performance GPU architecture, AMD is beginning a celebration of sorts, a road trip that will span two continents. Now this community tour won't be a non-stop travel and showcase - it's really only going to stop in two places. Still, AMD will be giving those lucky enough to be in attendance a chance to visit their Radeon RX Vega Experience area, where you'll be able to game on the upcoming graphics card and take in the experience, trade-show-style.

The first stop is in the old continent: the Radeon Experience will be setting up shop in the Akvárium Klub in Budapest, Hungary, from 2 to 7 CET. Then, the Radeon team will travel across the pond towards the USA, more specifically, towards PDXLAN in Portland, from July 21st to July 23rd. Finally, the last stop is one we knew about already: SIGGRAPH in the City of Angels. As we knew, they confirm that "Details on the Radeon RX Vega are coming during SIGGRAPH 2017, so you'll want to pay attention to what's happening during this technology summit taking place in the last week of July." So now you know. Are you going to go out of your way to attend?

An update to the Steam survey results is always worth noting, especially with the added, tremendous growth Valve's online store service has seen recently. And it seems that in the Steam gaming world at least, quad-core CPUs, NVIDIA graphics cards, and Windows 10 reign supreme.

Windows 10 64-bit is the most used operating system, with 50.33% of the survey. That the second most used Windows OS is the steady, hallmark Windows 7 shouldn't come as a surprise, though it does have just 32.05% of the market now. OS X has a measly 2.95% of the grand total, while Linux comes in at an even lower 0.72%. While AMD processor submits may have increased in other software, it seems that at least in Steam, those numbers aren't reflected, since AMD's processor market share in the survey has decreased from 21.89% in February to just 19.01% as of June, even though the company's Ryzen line of CPUs has been selling like hotcakes. Quad-core CPUs are the most used at time of the survey, at 52.06%, while the next highest percentage is still the dual-core CPU, with 42.23%.

After releasing the Vega Frontier Edition, AMD's take on a "prosumer" GPU which straddles the line between a professional and gaming graphics card, with somewhat mixed results, AMD is apparently now working on the fully professional version of the Vega silicon. Identified as the Radeon Pro WX 9100 (which is in line with AMD's current professional nomenclature), this professional graphics card will look to fully accelerate professional workloads, with a driver specifically crafted for such.

Recently rearing its head on CompuBench, the GPU features a low 1200 MHz clock speed, which is around 402 MHz lower than the Frontier Edition, and supposedly lower still than the Gaming RX Vega variant of the GPU. The Vega-based WX 9100 joins the Polaris-based WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100 professional graphics cards, thus apparently topping out AMD's professional line-up for the year.

AMD's Raja Koduri, leader of the company's Radeon Technologies Group, has somewhat informally confirmed on Twitter the overall die size of AMD's Vega chips. After PC Perspective updated their prognosis regarding Vega's die-size to a beefier 512 mm², Twitter users plied Raja Koduri with questions regarding this subject. Koduri declined to answer directly, actually opting for a somewhat cryptic response, in that " (...) the answer [to Vega's die-size] is the closest perfect square number actually:)".

For the math-savvy around here (or even just for those of you who have read the headline), that particular equation should solve towards a perfect 484 mm² die area. Good news for AMD: this isn't the company's biggest die-size in consumer GPUs ever. That dubious honor goes to the company's Fiji XT silicon which powered the company's R9 Fury X, coming in at a staggering 596 mm² in the 28 nm process. For comparison, AMD's current Polaris 20 XTX-based RX 580 chip comes in at slightly less than half the confirmed RX Vega's die-size, at a much more yield-friendly 232 mm². NVIDIA's current top-of-the-line Titan Xp comes in at a slightly smaller 471 mm² die-size.

In a series of tweets, the official Radeon RX Twitter (and AMD employees) have confirmed what we were already told: that the gaming version of the company's Vega architecture would make its debut at this year's SIGGRAPH. Also, when asked about the Frontier Edition's (lacking) gaming chops, AMD's Jason Evangelho has come out with the warning that we all expected, and that we ourselves conveyed here: "it's premature to worry about a product's gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming."

We've waited a long time already, why not just a few more days? SIGGRAPH will take place between July 30th and August 3rd.

It's here. The Radeon Vega that's not for gamers, that is. After what seems like a year of waiting forward to AMD's next generation GPU architecture, so it has finally appeared. As we all knew was going to be the case, Vega's first foray in the market is geared at the more profitable professional sector of the market. The good news for professionals: the pricing is lower than previously reported. Instead of the expected $1,199 and $1,799 for an air cooled or water-cooled version of the card respectively, AMD is commanding a much less demanding price tag of $999 for the air cooled version (available now) and $1,499 for the water-cooled one (to be available in Q3.)

One thing that deserves to be placed before the break is a software feature of the new Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards: AMD has changed their driver scheme into a single-package installer (available in the source), with both the professional-geared drivers, and the gaming ones as well. This means that after all that Raja Koduri told us to wait for AMD's consumer, gaming-oriented RX Vega graphics cards, these will probably work just as well for gaming as for professional workloads.

GPU-accelerated crypto-currency mining poses a threat to the consumer graphics industry, yet the revenues it brings to GPU manufacturers are hard to turn away. The more graphics cards are bought up by crypto-currency miners, the fewer there are left for gamers and the actual target-audience of graphics cards. This is particularly bad for AMD, as fewer gamers have Radeon graphics cards as opposed to miners; which means game developers no longer see AMD GPU market-share as an amorphous trigger to allocate developer resources in optimizing their games to AMD architectures.

To combat this, both AMD and NVIDIA are innovating graphics cards designed specifically for crypto-currency mining. These cards are built to a cost, lack display outputs, and have electrical and cooling mechanisms designed for 24/7 operation, even if not living up to the durability standards of real enterprise-segment graphics cards, such as Radeon Pro series or Quadro. NVIDIA's "Pascal" GPU architecture is inherently weaker than AMD's "Polaris" and older Graphics CoreNext architectures at Ethereum mining, owing in part to Pascal's lack of industry-standard asynchronous compute. This didn't deter NVIDIA from innovating a lineup of crypto-mining SKUs based on its existing "Pascal" GPUs. These include the NVIDIA P104 series based on the "GP104" silicon (on which the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 are based); and P106 series based on the "GP106" silicon (GTX 1060 series is based on this chip). NVIDIA didn't tap into its larger "GP102" or smaller "GP107" chips, yet.

AMD's EPYC Launch presentation focused mainly on its line of datacenter processors, but fans of AMD's new Vega GPU lineup may be interested in another high-end product that was announced during the presentation. The Radeon Instinct MI25 is a Deep Learning accelerator, and as such is hardly intended for consumers, but it is Vega based and potentially very potent in the company's portfolio all the same. Claiming a massive 24.6 TFLOPS of Half Precision Floating Point performance (12.3 Single Precision) from its 64 "next-gen" compute units, this machine is very suited to Deep Learning and Machine AI oriented applications. It comes with no less than 16 GBs of HBM2 memory, and has 484 GB/s of memory bandwidth to play with.

AMD late Wednesday released the latest version of Radeon Software Crimso ReLive Edition. Version 17.6.2 beta is the second release for this month, and comes with a quick-fix for the performance loss noticed in DiRT 4 after its latest game-patch, when the MSAA is cranked up to 8x. The rest of its feature-set appears unchanged from the previous 17.6.1 drivers. AMD has added to the list of known issues, listed after the break.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.6.2The change-log follows.

AMD has recently added two new offerings to their WX series of professional, workstation-oriented graphics cards. The WX 2100 and WX 3100 are entry-level offerings for the professional market, with 512 stream processors running at 1,219 MHz on a 14 nm graphics processor based on the Polaris architecture. The RX 2100 features 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 64-bit interface; the RX 3100 doubles those figures to 4GB of memory on a 128-bit interface.

On performance, AMD said that the soon to be released WX 2100 and WX 3100 deliver up to 2x the performance of previous entry-level professional AMD graphics, and up to 28% faster performance than competing NVIDIA offerings. The WX 2100 is expected to cost $149, while the WX 3100 is expected to go for $199. AMD said the Radeon Pro WX 2100 and WX 3100 are both expected to launch in June; an exact date wasn't provided. The company also said both cards are covered by 24/7 customer support and a three-year limited warranty that can be extended up to seven years.

AMD unveiled the high-performance, power-efficient Radeon Pro 500 series graphics, fueling beyond-UHD creativity in All-In-One computing. Available in the updated 21.5- and 27-inch iMac, Radeon Pro 500 series graphics enable extraordinary computing experiences, including stunning gaming, immersive VR on select models, and fluid content creation with exceptional performance and support for GPU acceleration across a range of creative applications on the Mac platform, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop and the Foundry Nuke, Mari and Modo. Moreover, Radeon Pro 500 series provides accelerated performance for the Radeon ProRender photorealistic ray-tracing rendering technology which is enabled for Autodesk Maya, and Maxon's Cinema 4D.

Radeon Pro 500 series graphics harness up to 5.5 TFLOPS of performance, unleashing the creativity of artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, visualizers and engineers, and aspiring creative types across high-resolution canvases in the most popular creative applications, powering through the most demanding games, and bringing fantastic worlds to life in VR. The Radeon Pro 500 series makes use of the critically-acclaimed "Polaris" GPU architecture, delivering the perfect balance of performance and operating efficiency that makes them ideal for All-In-Ones.

Amidst the cutting-edge innovations in NAS, networking, and IoT presented by QNAP Systems, Inc. at COMPUTEX 2017, the announcement of the world's first AMD Ryzen-based NAS took center stage and underlined QNAP's commitment to push the boundaries of NAS performance and functionality.

The new TS-x77 series leverages the incredible power of Ryzen, featuring processors with up to 8-cores/16-threads with Turbo Core up to 3.7 GHz to greatly boost virtualization performance. The TS-x77 is designed as a high-performance, highly-capable tiered storage geared for I/O intensive and virtualization applications, and also supports AMD Radeon and NVIDIA graphics cards to satisfy resource-demanding video editing and playback.

In a bid to increase options for budget-minded gamers, Acer has introduced the Nitro 5 gaming laptop, whose wealth of configurations start at a respectable $800. Choosing any kind of gaming-focused laptop over building your own desktop will always look like bad business, but how much one values mobility mays edge the decision towards one side or the other.

Specs-wise, it's a mix of respectable with the bare minimum: it features a 15.6-inch FHD IPS display, up to 32 GB of DDR4 2400 MHz memory, and is available in configurations featuring Intel's Core i5 or Core i7 processors paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, or your choice of an AMD 7th-gen A-series FX, A12 or A10 APUs, paired a Radeon RX550 GPU. Some models will include PCIe SSDs (up to 512GB) with up to 2TB of optional HDD storage. Ports include 1x Gigabit Ethernet, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C, 1x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 ports, and 1x HDMI output. The Nitro 5 also supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi with a 2x2 MIMO antenna. The Nitro 5 will be available in North America starting July 1. Acer did not release detailed pricing, so there's no idea of what the $800 configuration will net you spec-wise (though an AMD and RX 550 are pretty much guaranteed). The Nitro 5 will also be available in the EMEA in August, starting at a much less interesting €1,139.

AMD's senior marketing director Chris Hook has taken to Twitter to tease AMD's recently-revealed, non-gaming oriented Vega Frontier Edition graphics card. According to the man, he's testing the Frontier Edition's lighting system, which, as we've seen in renders, is supposed to bring in that yellow shade to the Frontier Edition's brushed aluminum, "Pro Blue" furnishings.

What we should be paying more attention to, though, is the partial graphics card that stands to the frontier Edition's right side. It's only a partial, granted, but the black and red color scheme is reminiscent of... well... AMD's gaming Radeon graphics cards. Could this actually be meant as a tease for one of the gaming-oriented RX Vega graphics cards?

In a blog post detailing AMD's Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, which we covered in-depth at the time of its announcement in AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, AMD's Radeon Technologies Group head Raja Koduri clarified that current machine learning poster child, the Vega Frontier Edition GPU, can also be used for gaming (who's to say some researchers, or pioneers, as AMD is so fond of calling them, won't be visiting Talos 1 themselves between coffee breaks?)

However, it is Raja Koduri's opinion that you should wait for Vega's gaming GPUs, since the Frontier Edition is "optimized for professional use cases (and priced accordingly)", and that if you want to game on AMD hardware, you should wait "just a little while longer for the lower-priced, gaming-optimized Radeon RX Vega graphics card." He then threw in a free "You'll be glad you did," as if Vega hasn't been a long, long time coming already.

Where is Vega? When is it launching? On AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, Raja Koduri spoke about the speculation in the past few weeks, and brought us an answer: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is the first iteration of Vega, aimed at data scientists, immersion engineers and product designers. It will be released in the second half of June for AMD's "pioneers". The wording, that Vega Frontier Edition will be released in the second half of June, makes it so that AMD still technically releases Vega in the 2H 2017... It's just not the consumer, gaming Vega version of the chip. This could unfortunately signify an after-June release time-frame for consumer GPUs based on the Vega micro-architecture.

This news comes as a disappointment to all gamers who have been hoping for Vega for gaming, because it reminds of what happened with dual Fiji. A promising design which ended up unsuitable for gaming and was thus marketed for content creators as Radeon Pro Duo, with little success. But there is still hope: it just looks like we really will have to wait for Computex 2017 to see some measure of details on Vega's gaming prowess.

AMD has tentatively announced the existence of an additional Ryzen line-up, Ryzen PRO, which AMD pits against Intel's i5-7500 with some interesting performance claims for professional-grade workloads.

Another day, another set of Vega results see the light of it. It would seem like this saga has been going on for ages, ever since we've seen AMD showcase its prototype Vega cards running Star Wars Battlefront (4K, Ultra settings at over 60 FPS) and Doom (4K, Vulcan render path at over 60 FPS on pre-production hardware). But with the lack of official information coming from AMD (let's hope this changes on May 16th), it would seem the company is content to see us hardware news sites jumping at every detail and offering free publicity.

This is known to be Vega because the device ID, 687F:C1, was spotted on AMD's own hands while running that Doom demo in 4K. The device clocks seem to be in line with previous leaks: a 1200 MHz core clock and 8GB of video memory running at 700 MHz memory clocks. With these clocks (which are expected to be extremely conservative when we take into account what we know of Vega), the Vega video card manages to deliver a 17,801 points graphics score, approximately 1,400 points more than your average Fury X, but some hundreds less than your average, current-generation GTX 1070. Remember: AMD's MI25 is expected to come in at 1,500 MHz core clocks, and this is a professional, passively-cooled graphics card. This means that unless AMD greatly overestimated the clock capability of its Vega cards, the consumer version of Vega will have necessarily higher clocks. But we'll stay here, waiting for some more details to pour our way, as always.

Reports are circling around the web regarding an AMD meeting featuring some of its higher ups - namely, CEO Lisa Su, head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri, and AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster happening on the 16th of May. The purpose of this meeting seems to be to discuss AMD's inflexion point, and lay out a vision for the company's future, supported on its upcoming products: the too-long-awaited Vega, its successor Navi, and the natural evolution of the company's current Zen processors, tentatively identified as Zen+.

Naturally, a company such as AMD has its roadmap planned well in advance, with work on next-generation products and technologies sometimes even running in parallel with current-generation product development. It's just a result of the kind of care, consideration, time and money that goes into making new architectures that makes this so. And while some would say Vega is now approaching a state akin to grapes that have been hanging for far too long, AMD's next graphics architecture, Navi, and its iterations on Zen cores, which the company expect to see refreshes in a 3-to-5-year period, are other matters entirely. Maybe we'll have some more details regarding the specific time of Vega's launch (for now expected on Computex), as well as on when AMD is looking to release a Zen+ refresh. I wouldn't expect much with regards to Navi - perhaps just an outline on how work is currently underway with some comments on the expectations surrounding Global Foundries' 7 nm process, on which Navi is expected to be built. And no, folks, this isn't a Vega launch. Not yet.

Not to let itself be outshined by arch-rival NVIDIA, AMD today released a new driver suite that introduces support for the impending release of Arkane Studios' Prey. A totally new IP in an era of sequels and re-releases, which has been paired - even if only so slightly - with AMD's own Vega teaser campaign, Prey promises to offer a mix of Bioshock and System Shock, with Arkane's own peculiar blend of game mechanics and art direction. Go on ahead fighting the invasion - I'll be joining you shortly.

These drivers promise an up to 4.7% performance improvement measured on Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics when compared to Radeon Software Crimson ReLive edition 17.4.4, as well as multi GPU profile support. As always, you can grab these right here on your favorite hardware site on the universe. Just follow the link below, and catch some more details like fixed and current issues after the break.Download: AMD Radeon Crimson Relive 17.5.1 Beta Drivers

Gigabyte has thrown its hat on the RX 550 line of graphics cards, offering two 2 GB versions of the cards. These sport slight overclocks on their core clock speed, at 1,219MHz (for the OC 2G version) and 1,195MHz (for the D5 2G version.) Like all other RX 550, these carry a 128-bit bus and lack any auxiliary power connectors.

Being entry-level, IGP-substitute cards does not mean AIBs can skimp on cooling - especially not considering these graphics cards now carry more performance (and higher TDP) than some aeons-old enthusiast-level GPUs. As such, these include Gigabyte's Windforce cooler with a patented Blade Fan design and 3D active fan functionality. The company claims an air flow improvement of 23% over traditional fans due to the 3D stripe curve on the fan surface. The semi-passive feature, which is something most AIBs now include in their designs (even if these do somewhat impact the longevity of the fans, due to higher pressure on their mechanisms whenever they start spinning again) allows the fans to remain off at lower temperatures and spin when the GPU is under heavy load. Both cards feature Gigabyte's Ultra Durable construction, which includes solid capacitors and metals chokes. As for software and user control, Gigabyte is bundling the Aorus Graphics Engine software utility with both cards, allowing for one-click overclocking as well as the ability to control clock speeds, voltage, power target, and fan profiles. The Radeon RX 550 D5 2G and the Radeon RX 550 Gaming OC 2G are available now for $80 and $90, respectively.

Today AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced the world's first dual-GPU graphics card designed for professionals: the Polaris-architecture-based Radeon Pro Duo. Built on the capabilities of the Radeon Pro WX 7100, the Radeon Pro Duo professional graphics card is designed to excel at media and entertainment, broadcast, and design and manufacturing workflows, delivering outstanding performance and superior flexibility that today's creative professionals demand.

The Radeon Pro Duo is equipped with 32GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory to handle larger data sets, more intricate 3D models, higher resolution videos, and complex assemblies with ease. Operating at a max power of 250W, the Radeon Pro Duo harnesses a total of 72 compute units (4608 stream processors) for a combined performance of up to 11.45 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance on one board, and twice the geometry throughput of the Radeon Pro WX 7100. The Radeon Pro Duo enables professionals to work up to four 4K monitors at 60Hz, drive the latest 8K single monitor display at 30Hz using a single cable, or drive an 8K display at 60Hz using a dual cable solution.

Yeston, the Chinese manufacturer of graphics cards from both NVIDIA and AMD alike, has announced what is one of the (as of yet) few triple-fan takes on the recently-released RX 580 graphics card. Yeston increased the graphics card's footprint by adding that third fan, which partially settles against a protrusion added by the card's backplate.

The center fan is 10 cm wide, while the outer fans are 9 cm - all temperature-level controlled, which means they remain idle until a certain temperature threshold is reached. There is a LED-backlit RX 580 logo on the side of the card, as well as Radeon RX branding on the backplate. The RX 580 GameAce is clocked at 1340 MHz, which probably means a Polaris 20 XTX chip. This model will not be sold outside China, which is a downer, since its cooling system seems interesting enough, and the card is pleasing in aesthetics. However, some of you might find a way to get them shipped to your doorstep if you so wish.

VisionTek, a company whose last graphics card announcement we've posted here was on June 2015 with its Fury X and R9 300 line of graphics cards, has announced its vision for the RX 500 series graphics cards. This one seems a throwback to the RX 400 series, though, with Visiontek's "Overclocked Edition" GPUs carrying clockspeeds more in line with the prevous AMD series: 1,366 MHz for the RX 580, and 1264 MHz for the RX 570, respectively.

The VisionTek Radeon RX 580 8 GB comes with a slightly unoriginal take on the AIB partner design, sporting custom dual-fan cooler with a black-nickel aluminum shroud with 2x 8 mm and 2x 6 mm heatpipes for increased cooling capacity. The Radeon 570 4GB makes use of what is basically AMD's RX 480 reference design cooler, with a blower-style fan that ensures the GPU's heated air output exits the back of your case instead of lingering inside your system. VisionTek's Radeon RX 500 Series cards are now available through the company's website, with retailer availability to follow.

It isn't unusual for AMD or NVIDIA to launch OEM-specific graphics chips, and it would seem that AMD is doing just so with its rebranded yet improved RX 500 series. Now, it's time for the RX 540 to surface, which, like the name implies, flies right below the RX 550 in terms of specs, though you wouldn't know it without a closer look.

The chip packs the same 8 CUs as the RX 550 (512 stream processors), but its memory bandwidth (in 2 GB or 4 GB flavors) peaks at 96 GB/s (lower than the RX 550's 112 GB/s.) However, its core clocks see an interesting boost from the RX 550's 1183 MHz boost clocks to a "up to 1219 MHz" value, which should alleviate the performance impact from the stunted memory bandwidth. This is a GPU that's likely to be used by OEMs and system integrators, whether on desktop computers or in laptops, though I do have to wonder regarding this configuration. I'd expect higher clocks on the core to increase power consumption more than the offset allowed by the reduced memory clocks, but then again, I'm not an AMD engineer.