There has been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and at the end of June 2017 AMD finally released this card onto the market. Now here we are a few days after its official release and we should be waiting with baited breath for the reviews, YouTube videos and user benchmark tests. However, AMD doesn’t want its usual clientele to buy this card and this means that the usual hype that we should expect with a new powerful GPU flies straight past this one.
Will It Game?
Well the answer is pretty simple, yes it will play any of your games, though for its $999 price tag you would expect to offer super performance. However, a thread on Reddit has claimed that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers around 40% less performance than the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti. The one exception that was mentioned was Hitman, which has been designed to run on Radeon cards and offers a slightly better 30% difference in performance.
Now expect these figures to differ when it comes to the even more powerful NVIDIA Titan XP. But, once again the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is not designed for gamers and AMD have said that we should rather wait for the RX Vega to be released at the end of July. AMD have mentioned that they will include dual-mode drivers that will allow you to switch between running professional applications to running your favorite games in a matter of seconds.
So Who Is This Card For?
The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is designed for industry professionals, to be more precise it is being targeted at content creators who run workstations. Despite its lower performance while gaming, this card does offers 13.1 teraFLOPS (single precision) and 26.2 teraFLOPS (half precision) of raw computing power. This makes it an attractive alternative to the pricy NVIDIA Quadro cards. This will allow you to easily render videos and animations with greater speed and precision than their cheaper RX 500 series cards. The version released in June is an air cooled version and there will be a liquid cooled version that is said to be releasing sometime in the third quarter of this year. This liquid cooled version will set you back a cool $1499, that’s $500 more than the standard version. The Radeon Vega will also feature in the newly announced Apple iMac Pro that will be released in December of this year.
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Vs Radeon Fury X
It might seem that AMD have just done a simple refresh of their Fury X card due to the fact that its stream processor and compute unit configuration match exactly. However, they have done quite a bit more to the Vega Frontier Edition. This includes a new programmable geometry pipeline, primitive shaders, next generation compute unit and tile-based rendering. This means that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is 55% faster than the Fury X.
Wrapping It Up
There is no doubt that this card is insanely powerful and if you are a content creator, then this card has your name written all over it. However, if you are a hardcore gamer looking for an alternative to the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, then I would recommend giving this card a miss and waiting for the RX Vega card coming later this month. However, if you are not a fan of AMD, then there is no shortage of high-end gaming rigs that feature the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti.
