The RX Vega graphics card is AMD’s answer to the high performance range where Nvidia had been ruling for a long time entirely unchallenged. The company released two new GPUs: Radeon RX Vega 56 to keep up with the Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1070 and Radeon RX Vega 64 to go toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080.
In this article we are going to take a look at the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 which is known to provide great bang for the buck if you find and pickup one at the release price. It is good choice for those who are looking for a budget friendly graphics card that provide judder free 1440p gaming performance. So without further ado let’s check our what this card has got to offer.
- Design:
The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 shares its design and aesthetics with its elder brother the Vega 64. It has gotten the same rubberized finish upfront with a 30mm blower style fan towards the end. Flip the card over and you will it is covered with back plate with a little space for fan hanging out for extra vacuum. It.is approximately 10.5 inch in length. The connections are also the same, which include one HDMI connection and three Display Ports. At the side you will find the 8-pin power supply connector port.
- Architecture:
The all new Vega architecture is designed to provide high-end gaming performance perks. It is the most advanced architecture that AMD engineers have come up with in the recent years. This architecture helps in achieving higher clock speeds and performance. The compute units have also been redesigned and tweaked from top to bottom to make the physical connections and the wiring inside the building block much smaller, it still manages to have 64 individual GCN cores inside them.
The architecture is also equipped with NCUs that will provide “Rapid Pocket Math” feature which basically allows the GPU to do two mathematical processes at the same time. This means that Vega architecture is capable of both FP16 and FP32 calculations. It also features high performance mini memory SRAMs inspired by the company’s own Zen CPUs and have optimized for GPU usage.
The engineers have also used the high-performance infinity fabric interconnect from the Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper processors which allpws the GPU core to connect to the rest of the graphics login in the package. All the other components are connected using high speed interface. It also features its own clock frequency which enables it to stay unaffected by the dynamic scaling and high frequency of the GPU clock.
- Specifications:
Taking a look at the specs, the RX Vega 56 is a slightly cut down version of the RX Vega 64 and as its name suggests it has 56 compute units , as opposed to 64 on the RX Vega 64. Also, it has less texture units and stream processors. The high performance capability comes thanks to the new 8GB of HBM2 video memory with a 2048-bit memory bus width which in this board delivers up to 410 GB/s Vs. 484 GBs on the Vega 64. However, the memory clock is is reduced from 945MHz down to 800MHz. Alongside that it features a 10.5 teraflops GPU with 12.5 billion transistors on a 14nm lithography process.
The clock speeds are also impressive, it runs at a base clock of 1156 MHz and a boost clock of 1471 MHz. These higher clock speeds are achieved with really high thermal power design TDP which is the main down point of this graphics card, it is 210-watt TDP cars that requires at least 700 watt power supply and an 8-pin connector to run smoothly.
It also supports AMD’s new High-Bandwidth Cache Controller (HBCC) which provides access to the computer’s system memory at high speed that helps in offering games huge amount of total RAM.
- Performance And Benchmarks:
This card is designed to dethrone the Nvidia GTX 1070 and it successfuly does that. It provides 5% increase in performance compared to the GTX 1070 in 1440p and 4K, however, in 1080p the GTX 1070 wins the lead.
You can easily enjoy all the recent AAA titles at maxed out graphics settings at 1440p resolution and 60 FPS. It also allows you to game at 4K in some games thanks to the HBM2 memory, the frame rates are playable.
The benchmark scores are also great, we tested it out on Ungine Valley and 3D Mark 11 at max to really stress out the graphics card. In the 3D Mark 11 extreme the score was 7481 which is slightly less than the the GTX 1070’s score of 7856.
- Final Verdict:
The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is one of the best budget GPU that you can buy for 1440p gaming. It represents best-in-class performance for its price. However, it is really hard to find cause the miners have already grabbed them all and even if you do find one it will cost a lot more. Also, this card is power hungry and gets loud under heavy load but if you manage to find one at a retail price than it is the best deal that you can get. You can get it from Amazon here.