AMD Unleashes its Radeon Vega Frontier Edition

AMD today unleashed the first product based on its highly anticipated “Vega” graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

Through its disruptive High Bandwidth Cache Controller, the cornerstone of the world’s most advanced GPU memory architecture – HBM2 – Radeon Vega Frontier Edition expands the capacity of traditional GPU memory to 256TB, allowing users to tackle massive datasets with ease, and scored up to 33 percent faster than the competition in the DeepBench benchmark that measures the performance of basic operations involved in training deep neural networks.

“We’re dedicating Radeon Vega Frontier Edition to all the visionaries and trailblazers who embrace new technologies to propel their industries forward to help solve mankind’s greatest problems,” said Ogi Brkic, senior director and general manager, Radeon Pro business, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “With this powerful solution, we’ve brought the full weight of our new ‘Vega’ GPU architecture to bear, offering unmatched performance in the most demanding design, rendering, and machine intelligence workloads so that the world’s top creators, data scientists and game developers can reach new frontiers in their fields.”

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Board Design

“AMD did a stunning job on the industrial design of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. The blue-anodized brushed aluminum shroud and lit Radeon inlays are downright elegant,” said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. “The high-airflow I/O bracket and vented anodized backplate are a beautifully executed example of how form can follow function and still make for a beautiful product.”

Unmatched² Performance and TCO in Machine Learning Applications

Together with AMD’s open-source, fully scalable ROCm software platform, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition paves the way for pioneers to continue pushing boundaries in fields like artificial intelligence (AI). Developers can now use the power of the “Vega” architecture for machine learning algorithm development on the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition faster than with any other GPU on the market², before deploying it out to massive servers equipped with Radeon Instinct accelerators. This powerful new solution also delivers a disruptive performance per dollar equation, solidifying AMD’s leadership in compute total cost of ownership (TCO).

Advanced Photorealistic Rendering Performance

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition delivers the horsepower required for design and manufacturing firms to drive increasingly large and complex models and to deploy real-time visualization and physically-based rendering. The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition’s revolutionary memory engine also allows professionals to achieve photorealistic detail in computer-generated imagery. A visualization powerhouse, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU offers exceptional multi-GPU scaling, with 91 percent faster rendering using two Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPUs.

Accelerating Game Design and Immersive Workflows

The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card simplifies and accelerates game creation by providing a single GPU that is optimized for every stage of a game developer’s workflow. This includes everything from asset production to playtesting and performance optimization.  With the Radeon Pro Settings user interface, users can seamlessly switch between “Radeon Pro Mode” and “Gaming Mode” to alternate between development on animation applications like Autodesk® Maya and performance optimizations with free, open source tools available through AMD’s GPUOpen initiative.

The compute power in Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and its support for an open software ecosystem also give a new breed of developers and filmmakers the ability to break new ground in virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video content. AMD’s fastest Radeon VR Ready Creator graphics card ever, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition achieves the maximum possible score in the SteamVR benchmark, up to 21 percent higher than the multi-GPU Radeon™ Pro Duo solution. Combined with Radeon™ Loom, AMD’s revolutionary 360-degree video stitching technology, creators can stitch high-resolution video in real time.

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Availability

Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards are available from etailers in select regions today with an SEP of $999 USD for the air-cooled edition. The water-cooled edition is expected to launch in Q3 with an SEP of $1499. You can find more information here.

Following the beta release of the Radeon ProRender plug-in for Blender and the Radeon ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS earlier this year, the first production versions are freely available for download here. AMD is also releasing a beta version of its Radeon ProRender Game Engine Importer, a tool that allows you to easily import your geometry and materials using Radeon ProRender from applications like SOLIDWORKS right into Unreal Engine and view them in VR. Check out the following blog to learn more.  For the best experience in both compute (ROCm) and professional graphics workflows, you can also download the latest drivers here.