AMD's first Radeon Vega graphics card isn't for you, and gamers may be waiting a while

From PC World: Nvidia’s not the only graphics card maker with “FE” cards anymore—but the “F” in AMD’s debut Radeon Vega card stands for “frontier” rather than “founders,” and it definitely isn’t for PC gamers. In fact, the one tidbit that is relevant for gamers may disappoint, as it seems likely that consumer versions of Vega are further off than expected.

After months of teasing, AMD finally took the wraps off an actual graphics card based on its hotly anticipated Vega graphics architecture during the company’s Financial Analyst Day livestream late Tuesday. An on-stage demo revealed the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition tearing through Sniper Elite 4 at between 60 and 70 frames per second at 4K resolution. It’s hard to draw an exact comparison since AMD didn’t reveal the graphics settings, but assuming the fidelity was very high, this particular Vega’s likely punching somewhere around the GeForce GTX 1080 to GTX 1080 Ti range.

Another demo capped Rise of the Tomb Raider at 2GB of memory to show that the card’s radical high-bandwidth cache controller can significantly increase minimum and average frame rates in VRAM-constrained scenarios, as shown in the image above.

But don’t let those tidbits fool you. The Radeon Vega Founders Edition targets “data scientists, immersion engineers, and product designers” rather than PC gamers. Its whopping 16GB of ultra-fast HBM2 memory would be overkill otherwise.

The rest of AMD’s demos and tech specs focused solely on compute tasks rather than gaming scenarios, comparing the Vega Frontier Edition against Nvidia’s data-center graphics options as opposed to its GeForce lineup.

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