AMD has confirmed the RX Vega GPU series is "on track to launch," in the second quarter of 2017, likely ready to buy before the end of June. The chipmaker also indicated that the graphics cards will be "designed from scratch," as part of efforts to bring AMD back to the premium gaming market.
In presenting the company's earnings report for Q1 2017, AMD said the Vega 10 and 11 GPUs will "address the most data- and visually-intensive next-generation workloads with key architecture advancements including: a differentiated memory subsystem, next-generation geometry pipeline, new compute engine, and a new pixel engine."
According to WCCFTech, the RX Vega series is all geared up to accommodate diverse workloads and among the highlights is high-end gaming both in the PC and console platforms. The Vega GPU is built around the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture that AMD debuted in 2011 but will boast of the more powerful and energy efficient 14-nanometer GPU platform.
As mentioned, the Vega GPU will feature an entirely redesigned graphics engine coming from the RX 400 series and the recently introduced RX 500 cards. Nearly everything about the RX Vega have been overhauled - the pixel and geometry engines, memory, cache and render-back-end sub-systems," WCCFTech said on its report.
The GPU architecture will also make use of the High Bandwidth Memory instead of GDDR5 that is the current standard found on flagship graphics cards, the report added.
In terms of performance, leaked benchmark results have shown that the more premium Vega 10 cards, likely to retail under the Radeon Pro card series, would easily overwhelm NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and would be on par with the GTX 1080 Ti on the following monster specifications: 12.5TFLOLPS, 8BG HBM2 and TDP rating of 250W.
AMD said the RX Vega cards will come out within the current quarter, which is in line with the rumors that the GPU cards will be formally announced before the end of May, possibly though the Computex 2017 in Taiwan.
However, the actual release date for the AMD RX Vega series is likely to happen in the last week of June and the cards' biggest selling point is a more inviting sticker price compared to NVIDIA's flagship GPU offerings.