Published in Graphics

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition gets previewed

by on27 June 2017


Holds its ground against Titan Xp

While we are still waiting for AMD to release its consumer Radeon graphics card based on the new Vega GPU, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, one meant for professionals, has been previewed and compared to the Nvidia Titan Xp.

Based on AMD's new Vega GPU, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition packs 64 Compute Units (CUs) for 4096 Stream Processors and 16GB of HBM2 memory for 480GB/s of memory bandwidth. According to details provided by AMD, the Vega FE peaks at 25 TFLOPs of half precision FP16 compute performance, and 12.5 TFLOPs of single precision FP32 compute performance, which puts it slightly ahead of Nvidia Titan Xp, at least on paper.

The AMD Vega Frontier Edition has a suggested retail price of US $999, which is cheaper than the GP102-equipped Titan Xp, back when it was launched. Bear in mind that the air-cooled AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has a SEP of US $999, while the liquid-cooled version should launch with SEP US $1,499. 

In an exclusive preview done by PCWorld, which had a chance to test out two almost identical systems, based on AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X CPU with 32GB of DDR4-2400 memory, SSD storage, 4K panel and both running on Windows 10 Enterprise edition, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition held its ground, and even managed to outperform the Titan Xp in plenty of tests, including Catia, Creo, SolidWorks and Cinebench.

When it comes to gaming, which is not what that graphics card was meant to do, showed that Vega GPU, even when packed in a professional graphics card, was able to hold its ground and was "apparently" faster than the GTX 1080 and close to the GTX 1080 Ti. We already wrote on several occasions that we do not expect Vega to beat the GTX 1080 Ti but it should be close and offer decent performance per Watt.

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is scheduled to start shipping as of today, June 26th, while the consumer Radeon RX Vega is expected to come in late July.

AMD VegaFEpreview 2

AMD VegaFEpreview 1

 

Last modified on 27 June 2017
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