AMD’s new top-end Radeon Vega graphics cards are taking aim at competing GPUs

It’s high-time for AMD to announce a new generation graphics card and it’s done just that with the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. This potentially deadly duo of souped-up GPUs take aim at NVIDIA’s Pascal series, namely the GTX 1080, 1080Ti and even directly, to the more recently announced Titan Xp.

Here are the nerdy details: the Vega features 64 compute units, an estimated 12.5 teraflops of single precision processing power, 16GB bandwidth cache and 8K display support.

However, AMD knows that one card isn’t enough (or maybe it is?), so a liquid cooled version will be made, in more limited quantities, to tackle the very highest of processing demands, while also keeping itself intact.Advanced Micro Devices is calling the Radeon Vega platform, “the fastest GPU in the world for data scientists and immersion engineers”. Historically, AMD hasn’t enjoyed the same street cred at NVIDIA among PC gamers, but their chips are active in computer systems all over the globe, including servers, desktops, laptops and game consoles.

Basically, Vega is AMD’s attempt at finally pulling a fast one over Nvidia. The kind of power touted here has the potential to shift discussion away from Nvidia’s widely-available Pascal offerings, something AMD loyalists have been hoping for what probably has seemed like forever.

AMD has already outlined a couple of ideal uses for Vega (things it’s best at) including machine learning development, photorealistic rendering, driving research behind AI and of course, gaming.

The Vega series launches in mid-June for an as-of-yet unknown cost, however I’d expect it to reach towards the thousand dollar mark.