I was looking forward to the launch of the Vega cards because I would really like to see team red in a better competitive spot when it comes to high end graphics cards. They hyped up their HBM memory a lot and rumors were going around that AMD had a 1080ti killer in their hands. When their Vega Frontier Edition launched there were already some red flags that this would not be the case however. But hey, that card was not a gaming GPU they said and so I had still some hopes For the RX's.

So with the RX56 and RX64 finally being out in the wild I couldn't wait to see the first benchmarks. And well, its a bit of a letdown. The RX64 is basically a 1080 that costs less but consumes way more power and the RX56 is competing with the 1070. So again AMD fails to deliver a new GPU king. Sure it's nice to see that AMD has at least an answer to the 1080 but with Volta coming soon enough I fear that we will see another year of Nvidea dominating the high end GPU market. My wallet is crying already...

If Nvidia's Volta really is coming out early next year then AMD kind of screwed themselves waiting this long and the performance is only roughly the same 1070 and 1080, dang. Unless you already own a Freesync monitor I don't see any reason to buy Vega.

Vega does blow the water out of team green when it comes to non-gaming stuff. It is also possible that the performance could get better with drivers since the 1080 and such have been out for a while. I am a bit sad about it, though it is nice to have a proper competitor at the high end even if you need a small fission reactor to power it.

AMD can at least go toe to toe with Intel and Nvidia on the performance side excluding the power consumption. I imagine AMD has been working their ass off just to keep up and ignored efficiency in the process. It has been waaay too long having Intel have damn near a monopoly on CPUs.

Power consumption is the biggest let down, it's basically AMD's Achilles heal. When you factor that in it's actually more money for cooling and psu.

Vega is the bigger version of their existing RX 480 / 580 cards and they have used HBM2 before, people always hope, but really nobody expected any different. For whatever reason AMD can't match the clockspeeds of Nvidia's offerings, liquid cooled cards with 350 W TDP are the unfortunate effect when they try to brute force clock-speeds.

So yeah people will have to continue to pay out of their nose for high end cards, but the good news is that nobody has to. The last 2 generations of tech improvement have been entirely spent/wasted to render higher resolutions, with no improvement to visual quality other than slightly less aliasing. Plus your money is better spend on a freesync/gsync monitor which in turn dictates which card to go with. Sticking to 1080p here or the ultrawide version of 1080p will be just fine for some time, VR being VR and all.

There is a case to be made for people who are looking to buy a new monitor and a GPU for sure. G-sync is still way more expensive than Freesync and if you want a fluid high end gaming experience the cheapest option definitely is Vega+Freesync. The thing is that without good competition at the top we will continue to see mid range cards going for over 400$ and I think that's too much for most people. I would like to see a return to the good ol' days of the 5000 series. Back then you could get a top of the line card for under 400$ and a midrange card for around 250$.

@bdead: My Rx 480 cost $250 new and I would consider that a mid-range card. Also despite it having an 8-pin connector I have never seen it hungry for more than 100 Watts. One of the current issues in the video card market is coin miners driving up demand which leads to sellers like Amazon raising the price.

I'll very likely be getting a One X this fall. It supports Freesync. I'm also in the market for a new monitor. If I get one that supports Freesync, then I may be inclined to upgrade to an AMD card soon after (currently have a GTX 980).

As long as AMD can continue to deliver on a good bang for buck, people will continue to buy their products. The toxic competitiveness that surrounds (well, everything really, but in this context) PC components will ensure that the underdog, AMD, will continue to see support.

From what I can see, the AMD Vega GPUs are pretty impressive. Yes they didn't topple the 1080ti from its throne up on GPU Mountain but they've positioned themselves to take advantage of the rest of the market quiet nicely. Also as many have already suggested, the VEGA cards have scored very well with other compute capabilities which suggests to me AMD was also keeping in mind the cryptocurrency miners and are looking to take advantage of that segment of the market. VEGA seems to be a great competitor to the 1070-1080 line cards for the more reasonable PC user as well as newcomers to the PC market, as well as a great alternative for miners. I mean it's great having a user buying one of their cards for their gaming rig, but it's even better if a single individual buys 4 or more of them for their mining rig. (I know right now a lot of sites have a limit on how many one can purchase but considering we're just a week or so out from launch these limits will disappear with time.)

Also I don't see VEGA 64 being their top flagship card, I have a feeling AMD's testing the waters similarly with what they did with the RYZEN launch. We get to see products equal the more mid-high tier consumer products right away, and now a few months later something larger like the RYZEN Threadripper will be more than likely announced to challenge the 1080ti's top spot.

Now with that in mind, how long with AMD wait to pull the trigger on this, or will this force Nvidia's hand to drop Volta early?

@emumford: I wonder how good they are for cryptocurrency miners when power efficiency is a big factor in that? Honestly i think that if they are good for that maybe Nvidia cards can grow back into supply and get back to normal prices.

@falconer: FreeSync in on the One X? That's pretty darn cool. Not sure how many people will take advantage of it, but that sounds really nice. I wonder if it will work below 60 fps, which would help with the v-sync hitching so many games have.

@oursin_360: I'm by no means an expert on hash rates of GPUs, but from what buzz I can find out there the VEGA RX 56 has most of the attention because some early overclocking/testing that's been reported has the card pushing out 38MH/s at times, and might be able to stabilize/coax a little more out of it with better driver support. From what I've gleamed with their reports it seems like with the right support from AMD and the custom tweaking most miners do to their cards to squeeze every last bit of digital blood from their turnip GPUs, one would think a single VEGA 56 when overclocked may have the ability to push out the work load of two 1070s.

The big disappointment for me is that AMD has been extremely slow to have custom/partner cards? Vega launched in August, which was already a bit late. But I fully expected to see the custom cards by late September. But then we would told late October, and that has pushed to late November.

I was looking forward to building a R7 1700 system with a Vega card, I was even okay with Vega not really reaching 1080 stats. But, without the custom fan/heat sink cards and the pricing being so high ist just not worth waiting. Even the first Vega custom cards shown-off for tear down shows some 'issues', so even when they cards come I was going to have to wait for reviews and tear-downs.

Just as bad is the lack of choice for high-end Ryzen motherboards that are not ATX or EATX. I just want a X370 mATX board!!! Why is that so hard to make by the partner manufactures?! Anything with a decent VRM on a mATX or IXT size, please!!! Hell, I woudl accept a B350 board...but it has to have a robust VRM - none of them really have that?

I have been ready to build for THREE MONTHS! The prices of video cards and RAM were distressing, but I was ready to build. However, there is really nothing that fits exactly what I want for motherboard and video-card. So I think I will just buy a GXT 1080 TI and a "less than adequate" motherboard, then when the mobo I want shows up I'll pull out the old one (disassemble everything) and sell it.