AMD Moves Vega Up to October

With the Nvidia GTX 1080 out now, all that awaits is for AMD to launch their Polaris based GPUs. Unfortunately for enthusiasts, Polaris 10, the top end Polaris GPU to come out in May won’t be enough to challenge the Pascal flagship. Based on current rumours, the AMD GPU only manages to beat the older GTX 980Ti. To meet the challenge of Pascal, AMD is reportedly bringing forward their Vega GPU release to October.

Based on AMD’s official roadmaps, Vega was originally set to be launched in Q1 2017. By bringing it forward to October, AMD is moving their launch up by a whole quarter. Vega is expected to the flagship GCN 4.0 card, utilizing HBM2 and maybe sport 4096 stream processors. Given those specs, we can expect Vega to potentially surpass what GTX 1080 can offer. One reason for the accelerated launch is the fact that Polaris 10 won’t be performance competitive with the GTX 1080, requiring Vega to plug in the gap.

With Polaris 10, AMD is gambling that most users are still below the GTX 980 in terms of performance and are willing to upgrade to a GTX 980Ti/Fury X level card for cheap. From rumours, Polaris 10 will likely match the GTX 1070 but at a sub $300 price tag, cheaper by at least $80. It remains to be seen if this gamble will pay off for AMD as it has both flopped and seen spectacular success with this strategy.