The Radeon RX Vega Makes A Nod To Linux

There are three DisplayPorts and one HDMI port.

The Radeon RX Vega 56 meanwhile is virtually identical to the Radeon RX Vega 64 from the exterior, only when looking at the manufacturer sticker can they be easily differentiated. The Radeon RX Vega 56 just arrived in an ESD bag.

The arrival of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 was unexpected this week. At first I wasn't going to be getting any review samples, but then it turns out their marketing department realized how much the Linux driver stack has advanced... Particularly the AMDGPU+RadeonSI Is Offering The Most Competitive Performance Yet Against NVIDIA On Linux and Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Radeon Gaming Performance With Linux 4.13 + Mesa 17.2. So thanks to the AMD marketing/PR folks for taking more interest in Linux now!

As a reminder to the already-public Radeon RX Vega 64 specifications, this $499 GPU has 4096 shader cores, 1247MHz clock speed with 1546MHz boost clock speed, 8GB of HBM2 memory, 483GB/s of memory bandwidth, and should yield 10.2~12.6k of single-precision GFLOPS compute power. The Radeon RX Vega 64 has a TDP of 295 Watts.

At $699 USD meanwhile will be the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid model that features a closed-loop water cooler. With the liquid cooling, the specifications are similar to the air-cooled model but the base clock frequency is boosted to 1406MHz (+13%) and the boost clock frequency is boosted to 1677MHz (+8%) while this pushes the graphics card's TDP up to 345 Watts.

Meanwhile, the Radeon RX Vega 56 has a $399 price-tag and is cut down to 3584 cores, 1156MHz base clock speed, 1471MHz boost clock speed, and still has 8GB of HBM2 memory but with 410GB/s of memory bandwidth. The Radeon RX Vega 56 should yield 8.2~10.5k of single-precision GFLOPS compute power. The TDP on this sub-$400 Vega GPU is 210 Watts.

I'd love to tell you how the Radeon RX Vega works on Linux, but that will have to wait until the embargo lift on Monday, 14 August. Get ready for a ton of interesting Linux GPU benchmarks on AMDGPU+RadeonSI and AMDGPU-PRO.