AMD Vega gets 8 GB HBM2 and better performance than Geforce GTX 1080

For a couple of days in Sonoma, California, SweClockers got to see AMD’s future plans in processors and graphics cards. One of the main numbers for the event was the Radeon Instinct, where the architecture Vega will lay the foundation for the future top model MI25.

For enthusiasts, Vega will be AMD’s return to the performance segment, where Nvidia is still ravaging undisturbed with the Geforce GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and Titan X. .

During the event, AMD had a system containing a graphics card based on Vega, where the graphics circuit according to the company’s representatives was only a few weeks old and ran at lower clock frequencies than the end product. This also included immature drivers in the Alpha stage.

The game that was demonstrated with Vega was Doom in 4K resolution with settings in Ultra and the Vulcan interface. For a short period, German Golem.de and PC Games Hardware managed to produce one overlay in the game with more details Vega 10, such as the amount of memory and not least the performance.

The first detail that appears is the number of frames per second (FPS), which is set to 68 FPS. In Golem’s case, it is in the same sequence the site uses for its graphics tests and should mean an advantage of about 10 percent compared to Geforce GTX 1080. As it is about early hardware and software, this indicates that there is room for improvement before the sharp launch.

In addition, two other important details emerge. The first is the memory amount of 8 GB, where the memory technology used is most likely HBM2. The other one is Device ID-slingan 687F:C1, used by both third-party drivers and software to identify the graphics card.

Clock frequency above 1.5 GHz

When AMD unveiled the Radeon Instinct, it emerged that the top model MI25, which is based on Vega 10, will have a computing power of 25 TFLOPS. This is for calculations performed at half-precision (FP16), which means that the theoretical performance at single-precision (FP32) is 12.5 TFLOPS.

Assuming that previous information on 4,096 stream processors is correct, this means that Vega 10 has a clock frequency of over 1,500 MHz. This is still a bit below Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 which has boostfrequencies above 1,700 MHz, but clearly higher than the 1,266 MHz that the Radeon RX 480 has in the reference version.

The launch of AMD Vega is planned to take place during the first half of 2017, ie sometime in the spring or early summer.