New AMD Vega cards will arrive by June

Despite having just last week unveiled its RX500 series of graphics cards, AMD has confirmed that its next-generation GPUs will arrive this quarter.

Wccftech reports that the Vega cards, which will be the first to offer AMD’s much hyped new graphics architecture, will be launched by June at the latest. The selling point is the supposed ability to effortlessly” handle 8K video.

AMD is also said to be focusing all its efforts on ensuring a smooth launch, with high performance, reliable” drivers available from day one. This, undoubtedly, is a reaction to the fudged recent release of AMD’s Ryzen processors, whose arrival was greeted with various incompatibilities and performance niggles.

Now the dust has settled, Ryzen has been largely welcomed for if nothing else finally presenting a viable alternative to Intel’s dominant Core i5 and i7 lines, even if ultimately they have fallen short of the pre-launch performance hype.

It’s also slightly odd that the Vega CPU lineup will arrive just weeks after the brand new RX500 series GPUs.

It was only last week that the RX580 and RX570 were unveiled, although each are largely identical to the RX480 and RX470 that preceded them. The differences are limited to increased speeds, with the components remaining the same. Whether such changes warrant a rebranding and price bump has been a matter of some hot debate online.

However, there will be one new GPU release before Vega comes along – the Radeon Pro Duo. The new card effectively bolts two RX cards together onto a single board, resulting in a whopping 32GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 72 compute units, resulting in 11.45 TFLOPS of output.

The Radeon Pro Duo can apparently run four 4K 60Hz monitors simultaneously. Oh, and it’ll cost around $1,000.