Introduction

Today, AMD is pulling the curtains off one of its most eagerly awaited products it has ever brought to market. The Vega graphics architecture is without a doubt one of the releases AMD has taken more time in actually delivering, with whispers and semi-announcements of the new high-performance architecture doing the rounds for around two years already. The Vega name comes from α Lyr, a star which may very well be touted as the second most important star in the firmament next to our own sun; however, AMD certainly won't be settling for second best, not when it has been notably absent from the high-performance graphics market for a while now.


Vega breaks away from the iterative improvement on AMD's GCN architecture that we've been seeing for several years now. Incremental upgrades and feature-set augmentations are now paired with specifically designed, never before seen hardware solutions, which the company took two years to perfect and ready for prime time. AMD's investments in High Bandwidth Cache (HBC) and the accompanying High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC); the new programmable geometry pipeline; rapid packed math (rpm), and the new advanced pixel engine are all signs of an AMD that is future-proofing its architecture of today. Vega is arguably the most exotic graphics architecture to date with its slew of finesse-based improvements (like the HBC implementation) and pairing of components (with the ultra-fast HBM2 memory.)

AMD's Vega RX gaming card lineup consists of the following three models, which we will take a detailed look at on the following pages.