AMD held a tech summit over the weekend in Beijing. They talked about the upcoming Vega GPUs, and though there wasn’t much new information revealed, they did mention that the there will be variants of the new GPUs, a 4 GB and an 8 GB.
One key point that AMD made regarding Vega is the High Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC), which will allow better use of VRAM, meaning that even the 4 GB GPU can perform very well. Considering that most games don’t push beyond the 4-6 GB limit, this could be a major performance boost. Additionally, both the variants will use HBM2, and most likely with the same bandwidth of 512 GB/s.
Another important piece of information AMD revealed was that Vega GPUs will also may their way to gaming notebooks. Here the compact layout of HBM2 could prove advantageous over GDDR5, allowing it to fit into smaller laptops. However, one major issue that needs to be addressed here is the heat dissipation, which may mean that the most powerful of Vega GPU will not be available in a highly portable notebook, similar to how NVIDIA doesn’t not use a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 in the thinner laptops.
On the plus side, the availability of AMD gaming notebooks in the market is bound to give rise to competition, with performance and pricing that will hopefully make things interesting.
Register with us for the best in gaming, and join us for video game discussions on our forums.
