People have been waiting for AMD to announce what their future of graphics cards looks like. And while people were hoping for more detail about AMD’s Vega line of GPUs to be unveiled at Computex, the manufacturer just announced that everyone will have to wait until the end of July instead.
At the tail end of their Computex conference, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su revealed that the company would be officially launching their Vega GPUs at the SIGGRAPH graphics conference. Which starts July 30, or July 31 Australian time.
It means Vega has missed the window for launching in the second quarter, which is a bit of annoyance for PC users who were hoping for an upgrade before the end of the financial year. It does mean there is a little more clear air for the RX 500 series of cards that just launched, although given that Vega was what gamers were looking forward to from AMD, that’s not much consolation.
AMD did show off a little treat, however, with a live demo of Prey running on an AMD Threadripper CPU and two Vega GPUs in CrossFire. The game was supposedly running at 4K on Ultra settings, but there were no metrics displayed during the demo and no settings shown off beforehand. You could notice some tearing as well, meaning that V-Sync was disabled.
It does at least confirm our suspicions from earlier in the month, when AMD unveiled the Radeon Vega Frontier GPU for workstations. That’s still launching before the turn of the financial year, which is handy for studios and users that require that sort of hardware.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/05/amds-vega-arrives-next-month-sort-of-and-theres-a-16-core-cpu-too/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/05/frontier-3-11-410×231.jpg” title=”AMD’s Vega Arrives Next Month (Sort Of) And There’s A 16 Core CPU Too” excerpt=”Earlier this morning the company confirmed it would start shipping the first Vega GPUs – although not the consumer cards people are expecting – from the end of next month – and as an added bonus, there’s a new 16 core CPU to boot.”]
So no word on price, no specifications, no benchmarks and no confirmation of an official retail release. Bit underwhelming, really, although if Vega shapes up when it’s officially unveiled then all will be forgiven.
Comments
5 responses to “AMD Won’t Launch Vega Until The End Of July”
I think that’s meant to be July?
A disappointing announcement – I thought it was a sure thing Vega’s Rx line was going to be announced as a soft launch this week. My 1070 is doing fine, but as the latest CPU announcements from Intel show, we need competition.
Or maybe they are planning to be cheeky and release the product one minute before midnight on June 30.
Still the end of June.
Yeah, it’s end of July. Thanks for pointing it out, @edc as well.
But yeah … bit of a let down.
I think people need to realise that AMD is no longer a consumer provider of hardware. Even when AMD had better cards, Nvidia outsold them. So with limited funds to do development, AMD is designing for the compute space where mindshare isn’t so much of a problem.
The easiest way to see this is the FP16 specs released by AMD on it. Absolutely huge amounts of FP16 shaders which are useless for 90% of games in the market (the reason why games use FP32 is a long one – but the easiest thing to remember is FP16 is possibly better for gaming in the long run, we just need to move to videocards + engines using it).
If anyone has been ‘holding out for Vega’, stop, and just buy yourself a 580, or 1080\Ti if you like spending more than a weeks minimum wage on a graphics card.
Keen to see what AMD come up with. Regardless of which camp you’re in, competition improves the breed. Was going to wait for Vega, but ended up going with the 1080Ti and have been happy with it, but still excited. Ryzen really shook things up, hoping Vega does the same.