AMD RX Vega 64 & 56 Power Draw, Price, Specs, & DSBR

[_skyrem_]

Each CU has 4 TMUs with AMD’s architecture, so a 64 CU RX Vega card will run 256 TMUs, while the 56 CU option will run 224 TMUs. Vega 64 will also host 64 render back-ends, which are responsible for delta color compression in memory and color buffer compression to save power. The cards also have a 4MB L2 cache and use the same 2048-bit memory interface as the Vega FE card. That means that RX Vega is still running two HBM2 stacks, except now at 4GB per stack for 8GB total.

There’s a single graphics engine, 4x ACEs, and 4x of the revamped geometry engines.

We confirmed power targets independently at 165W for the RX Vega 56 model and 220W for the RX Vega 64 model, with total board power for the RX Vega 56 estimated at 210W on the reference model, and about 290W for the RX Vega 64 air reference model. The Aqua model has a total board power of 350W. One note here: AMD changed these numbers depending on who spoke to, so there’s a chance other outlets will report different numbers of 150W and 220W.

As for power tuning, we asked whether this was just tightening of the power target or if actual power performance features were enabled under the hood. Turns out, RX Vega isn’t just a matter of restricting power target, they’re actually doing something for power optimization. We couldn’t get explicit examples at this time. One thing we do know is that the voltage targets change, so voltage checks are at different frequencies than FE, and voltage should be lower. We’d expect that this will align with our findings in the undervolting testing on Vega: Frontier Edition, where power consumption can equalize while improving performance. It’s still AVFS, but just a better tuning profile than FE.

We also asked AMD’s architects, including Mike Mantor, about whether DSBR was actually disabled in Vega: Frontier Edition or whether it was just a rumor. The architects loosely confirmed that tile-based rasterization was in fact disabled for Frontier Edition’s launch, which we think mostly aligns with statements about pushing the card out in time, and noted that DSBR will be enabled on both Vega FE and RX Vega on launch of RX Vega. We asked about expected performance or power consumption improvements, but were not given any specifics at this time. Wait for launch on that, though – we’ll get that information.

This architecture looks very familiar, so there’s not a lot to learn for folks who read our RX 480 deep-dive on launch day. A few additional items of note include the power saving features: We spoke with AMD team members at the event and learned definitively that specific power saving features were disabled on Vega: Frontier Edition to just get the thing out the door. RX Vega will run lower power.