AMD Radeon RX Vega specs leaked, a shy monster?

There was a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) update for Linux pushed out yesterday, with AMD sliding in some major Vega feature support into the open source OS.

We now know that AMD have some interesting things planned for Vega, including GPU sensors, partial resident textures, network visualization, non-contiguous VRAM mapping, and more. But it's the internal specs of Vega 10 that we're all here for, so without getting your excitement meter up too much - please, take some of this salt and throw it over your shoulder.

Vega 10 will supposedly rock 64 next-gen compute units, each with 64 GCN stream processors - with a total of 4096 next-gen GCN stream processors in 4 divisions, each with a single shader engine. Every 1024 stream processor shader engine has two Asynchronous Compute Units, one render back end and 4 texture blocks.

Inside of each texture block are 16 texture mapping units, providing a total of 256 TMUs - while Vega 10 has the ability of supporting 8 independent work threads simultaneously. With Vega 10 clocked at 1.5GHz, we could expect a monstrous 12.5 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, and the high-speed 8GB of HBM2 with what I think will be the start of the show in High Bandwidth Cache (HBC), AMD could have one of the fastest graphics cards on the market with its Radeon RX Vega.

But, I know you're thinking: but Anthony, you've been writing so many stories on RX Vega and how its performance won't even match up to the GTX 1080. Remember that I've also said that AMD will have a line up of Radeon RX Vega graphics cards... a family of RX Vega from $399-$1000.

I think what we're seeing here with the card in this leak from Linux, is the faster GTX 1080 Ti competitor in Radeon RX Vega form. There should be RX Vega cards that will compete with each of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series, while the refreshed Radeon RX 500 series will cover everything up to the GTX 1060 from NVIDIA, everything beyond the GTX 1070 is what RX Vega will compete with.

Expect AMD to launch a lower-end RX Vega with 4GB of HBM2, something that I think will compete with the GTX 1070 - while a cut down RX Vega with 4GB or 8GB of HBM2 will duke it out with the GTX 1080. AMD could then pounce on the GTX 1080 Ti with a much faster Radeon RX Vega graphics card, with the most stream processors and fastest HBM2, but it needs to hit a damn good price point in order to pull people away.

With all of the high-end goodness inside of Vega, expect it to be the card of choice for AMD fans and FreeSync owners, even gamers who have recently purchased a Ryzen CPU will be more inclined to build a full Red system, if Radeon RX Vega is worthy enough - and can push 1440p at 120FPS+ and 4K 60FPS without a problem.

AMD Radeon RX Vega Line Up (My List)

AMD will have up to 7 different Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, as it needs to hit 5 different price points and products from NVIDIA from the GeForce GTX 1070 right up to the GTX 1080 Ti, and even the new TITAN Xp.

• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1070) - 4GB HBM2, cut down Vega 11 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080) - 4GB HBM2, cut down Vega 10 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080 11Gbps) - 8GB HBM2, cut down Vega 10 GPU (slightly higher clocks)
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080 Ti) - 8GB HBM2, full Vega 10 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (TITAN Xp) - 16GB HBM2, dual full Vega 10 GPUs