When it comes to PC gaming, Video Cards are essential. And when talking about video cards, two brands stand out: AMD and Nvidia. These two companies' products get the lion's share of the video card market. Or at least, that was the case until 2015, when AMD last released its flagship card, Fury X. After that, Nvidia has remained on top, with the GTX 980 Ti taking over the competition that the Fury X presented.
Since then, AMD has remained more or less idle, as Nvidia — owing to its combination of the GTX 1080 with the powerful Intel Core i7 processor — dominated the gaming scene.
Introducing the Radeon RX Vega
AMD intends to change the status quo on August 14, with the release of the Radeon RX Vega line of video cards. Much has been teased about this line of video cards from AMD, and gamers loyal to the brand have been waiting eagerly. The good news is that just recently, the company has revealed release dates and actual pricing for the equipment.
According to The Verge, specifics of the video cards have been released as well, giving gamers at least a glimpse of what processing power they are getting, should they decide to own any of the cards in the Radeon RX Vega family.
New GPUs bundled with games and hardware discounts
There are three video cards scheduled to be released, with the top-of-the-line model being liquid cooled.
The most affordable of these is the RX Vega 56 (so named because it has 56 computing units) which will be priced at $399. Next is the RX Vega 64 which will cost $499. The liquid-cooled version of the RX Vega 64 will be available exclusively through "Radeon Packs," which bundle the said video card with games and other hardware that optimally work best with it.
Games available with the bundle include "Prey" and "Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus." The Radeon Packs will also include discounts on related hardware; for example, $200 discount on a 34-inch curved ultrawide FreeSync monitor by Samsung, and a $100 discount on a Ryzen 7 1800X processor and 370X motherboard combos.
Pack names are color coded, with Red Pack being the most affordable, priced at $499.
Those who can shell out the dough might want to go for the $699 Radeon Aqua Pack, though, which include the aforementioned liquid-cooled RX Vega 64.
With these announcements, AMD promised that the new cards will have double the throughput-per-clock when compared to previous AMD GPUs. They also said that the new cards will boast HBM2, a new version of high-bandwidth memory that was designed to stack vertically, promising double-bandwidth per pin.
