AMD Radeon RX Vega for gaming will not be launched in the second quarter

After almost six months of talking about Vega, AMD announced during its Financial Analyst Day 2017 that the architecture will be launched sharply at the end of June and thus keep its promise for the second quarter. However, the release only includes the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition aimed at professional users.

The announcement has disappointed many users who looked forward to a return to the top tier of gaming. On AMD’s blog, graphics manager Raja Koduri writes that Vega Frontier Edition can “absolutely” be used for gaming, but that it is optimized for professional applications and is priced accordingly.

If gaming is the main reason for buying a new graphics card, Raja Koduri recommends eager consumers to wait another “while” for lower priced variants optimized for gaming. It is interesting that Koduri writes about the Radeon RX Vega in the plural, which confirms the information that more than one graphics card will be released that gets that name.

As AMD previously only promised to launch the Vega architecture during the second quarter, which they agree with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, it is not right to talk about a real delay. However, the launch of game-oriented models is believed to be due to AMD’s use of HBM2 memory.

AMD’s partner for memory technology is SK Hynix, which has postponed HBM2 in every product catalog for the past nine months. At the same time, the promised speeds have dropped from 2.0 Gbps to 1.6 Gbps, something that can negatively affect the Radeon RX Vega’s performance as the latter means 20 percent lower bandwidth.

However, the graphics maker has largely been able to solve this with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, where HBM2 memory runs at almost 2.0 Gbps or 2,000 MHz efficiently. Whether AMD has chosen to turn to an alternative supplier such as Samsung or overclocked SK Hynix HBM2 is not known, however.

In addition to HBM2, the Vega 10 graphics circuit is equipped with 64 computing units according to the Next-Generation Compute Unit (NCU) architecture for 4,096 stream processors, which are expected to have a clock frequency of around 1,600 MHz for the top model in the Radeon RX Vega family.