AMD reaffirms July launch window for its next generation Vega series of GPUs

The AMD Vega series is expected to bring massive performance gains over Polaris and be a true competitor to Nvidia's higher-end Pascal offerings. The chipmaker originally promised a Vega launch by the end of June, but AMD has clarified at Computex 2017 that this will apply only for the Frontier Edition GPU aimed at CAD users and professionals. Home users and gamers will have to wait until the end of July when the first SKUs will be detailed at Siggraph 2017 in Los Angeles.

AMD has been mostly an observer rather than a player at this year's Computex trade show in order to avoid clashing with Nvidia's Max-Q and the sea of Max-Q-enabled notebooks that followed. CEO Lisa Su, however, held a press demonstration to reveal the new 16-core Ryzen Threadripper processor with support for 64 PCIe lanes set to launch this Summer. She also showed off a PC equipped with Threadripper and two unnamed Vega GPUs in Crossfire running Prey in 4K resolution at a locked 60 FPS. According to our own benchmarks, a single GTX 1080 already averages around 71 FPS in Prey when on the same 4K resolution, so the fact that AMD chose to use two Vega GPUs to achieve roughly the same ballpark results isn't very telling of what a single Vega GPU can bring to the table.

Beyond the desktop demos, both AMD and Asus also unveiled Ryzen-powered ultra-thin notebooks and gaming notebooks, respectively, on the Taipei show floor.

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