Years in development, the new Radeon RX Vega line is finally arriving - AMD's return to the higher-end of GPU performance after concentrating its efforts more on the mainstream and budget sectors of the market. There's no shortage of cutting-edge tech here: the Vega processor utilises 12.5 billion transistors on a very large 486mm2 area of silicon, the chip paired with two 4GB stacks of cutting-edge HBM2 memory. It's a bigger chip than Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti and it has more memory bandwidth - however, the top-end RX Vega 64 offers performance more in line with GTX 1080, while the cut-down RX Vega 56 reviewed here is clearly aimed to compete with the GTX 1070. It does this job rather well.
Before we go on, it's worth stressing that the Vega architecture has a lot of features that may not be utilised much - if at all - today, but could make a big difference in future. For example, the double-speed FP16 support found in PlayStation 4 Pro was pulled ahead of time from the Vega spec sheet (referred to as 'rapid-packed math'), while AMD has incorporated the most fully featured implementation of DirectX 12 features found in any GPU to date. Meanwhile, the high bandwidth cache controller is an attempt to allow the GPU fast, low latency access to memory beyond the 8GB of onboard RAM.
Elsewhere, the basic layout of Vega looks remarkably similar to the Fiji processor at the heart of the last-gen Fury X, but AMD is keen to point out that every aspect of the GPU has been retooled. There are still 64 compute units and 4096 shaders in the processor - pared back to 56 and 3854 in this cut-down model - but these are 'new' compute units with an extended instruction set and a more efficient design. AMD has also sought out faster clocks from the Vega silicon. The last-gen Fiji topped out at 1050MHz, Polaris was coaxed to 1450MHz while Vega is set to hit an impressive 1700MHz - although, again, expect a hit to that in the pared back Vega 56.
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