AMD Vega II release date, news and rumors

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It was a fairly quiet year for AMD’s graphics department in 2018, but now that AMD has released the Radeon VII graphics card for gaming, 2019 is the year of the 7nm GPU. 

We were left waiting for a new AMD graphics card for quite a long time, but the Radeon VII managed to put AMD back on the map. Thanks to the new 7nm GPU architecture, AMD was able to pack its latest graphics card with more transistors than ever before, without increasing the power draw.

Priced the same as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, while delivering comparable performance – albeit without Nvidia Turing’s ray tracing or DLSS features – 2019 is an exciting year for the best graphics cards.

While the Radeon VII seems to be at least tangentially related to Vega, but it hasn’t been confirmed whether or not it’ll officially be a part of the Vega II family – if the Vega II family will even exist. Based on what we were hearing before AMD pulled up the curtains, the Radeon VII lines up well with what we were expecting, so for now we’ll be treating AMD’s latest GPU as a Vega II part, even if it’s not official.

So, be sure to keep this page bookmarked, and we’ll dive into everything there is to know about AMD Vega II. 

Cut to the chase

• What is it? AMD’s first 7nm consumer graphics cards
• When is it out? February 7, 2019
• What will it cost? $699 (about £550, AU$980)

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Image Credit: AMD

AMD Vega II release date

At CES 2019, AMD announced the Radeon VII, the first 7nm consumer graphics card. Launching on February 7, 2019, what we believe to be the first of the Vega II graphics cards arrived with Devil May Cry V, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2. However, if you want to get your hands on this card, you might want to act fast – AMD’s Navi cards may not show up until October, and the Radeon VII is out of stock at many retailers.

Whether availability is going to be an issue remains to be seen, but we’ll be sure to update this article with whatever information comes out. 

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Image Credit: AMD

AMD Vega II price

Right now there’s only one AMD Vega II card, the Radeon VII, and that has launched at $699 (£649, AU$1,109), bundled with three games. We’re sure that AMD will fill out the product stack with lower priced GPUs in the future, but we don’t know what the pricing will look like quite yet. However, you can probably assume it’s going to compete with Nvidia’s Turing product stack directly. 

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Image Credit: TechRadar

AMD Vega II specs

The switch from a 14nm process to a 7nm process allows AMD to pack even more power into each GPU. For its graphics cards, this move means more transistors in each GPU without having to increase the die size or the power requirements.

And, the AMD Radeon VII is the fist 7nm graphics card for gamers, with 3,840 stream processors, 16GB HBM2 VRAM and 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. This goes directly against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, which has 2,944 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 448GB/s of memory bandwidth. 

The Radeon VII will definitely outperform its competitor in some workloads thanks to sheer horsepower. But, it’s especially going to shine in creative workloads, meaning that it’s going to be the best graphics card for hobbyist video editors and content creators who don’t have the cash to drop on a professional product.

But, the AMD Radeon VII won’t offer the double-precision capabilities that the enterprise Radeon MI60 does, according to ExtremeTech, so it’s still very much a consumer graphics card. 

Aside from standalone cards, it seems all but guaranteed that the Vega II series will find its way into mobile and lower-power devices as integrated graphics processors. With a new generation of Ryzen processors expected, a new generation of Vega graphics to integrate into APUs is only fitting.

In fact, laptops will soon see a flurry of 2nd Gen Ryzen Mobile processors equipped with brand new Vega graphics.  time. Even the anticipated Xbox Scarlet Cloud could see Vega II built into its APU.  

• AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation could introduce the very first 7nm processors

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