AMD Radeon Vega Frontier launches, with no reviews

AMD launched their next-gen Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card yesterday, but you know what? There are absolutely no performance information on Radeon Vega Frontier at all, nothing apart from what AMD has released themselves, or collaborated on with the likes of PCWorld.

VideoCardz wrote something on Radeon Vega Frontier, and said: Vega is quite possibly one of the most anticipated GPU launches in AMD's history. There are many reasons why this launch is so important. The early adopters of 4K monitors are left with no options other than GeForce GTX 1080 and above. AMD has been teasing demos of 4K gaming on Vega for a while, although no one was able to buy Vega card till today. AMD promised that Vega will launch in the first half of 2017, and that promise was fulfilled. What we didn't know is that only Radeon Pro card will be "available".

This triggered me to think about it, and respond. VC are right, it's not something I haven't been saying myself - but the last straw was AMD launching Radeon Vega Frontier Edition without any reviews. I personally reached out to AMD asking for one of these cards, even at my expense ($2000+) so that I could test it with whatever software I have here (and whatever software AMD would want me to test it with) and I would also do some exclusive cryptocurrency testing. Nothing. I've heard nothing in return about any sampling, or even AMD finding a card at retail and letting me take it.

There are no reviews at all. Nothing from the likes of TweakTown, PC Perspective, HotHardware, LinusTechTips, Paul's Hardware, BitWit, Hardware Canucks... no one. Not a single review. Sure, these cards are not for gamers and are instead for professionals, but there's no professional GPU review sites with reviews of Radeon Vega Frontier Edition either.

I'm siding on AMD wanting to squeeze more time out of the software side of things, especially with technologies like HBM2 and the High Bandwidth Cache Controller. VideoCardz seems to agree, saying: "AMD is clearly trying to boost it by optimizing software to the very last moment. This might also explain missing reviews of Frontier (even from the most trusted tech sites). The reality is that the very first person to provide gaming benchmarks of Vega Frontier is probably going to have the most popular content in months".