AMD RX Vega cards and packs: air and water, up against 1080

The folks at AMD have a bunch of new bits of hardware to show this week with new Radeon RX Vega cards. Inside the Vega 10, we see the next generation in simple terms: 1 graphics engine, 4 asynchronous compute engines, 4 next-gen geometry engines, 64 next-gen compute units. Also in the Vega 10 are 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 render back-ends, 4MB L2 cache, and 2048-bit HBM2.

Performance for this lot of cards is synced up with pricing that'll take on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. Or the RX Vega 56 will rally against the GTX 1070, while the Vega 64 takes on the GTX 1080 – somehow or another! It's almost as if the 1080Ti is not the card AMD is warring against because NVIDIA sells more cards at that slightly lower tier – the 1080 and the 1070 – but we can't be sure!

• RX Vega 56: 1156MHz base clock with 1471MHz boost, 64 ROPs, 224 texture units, 3584 shader cores, 2048-bit memory bus. Also 410GB/s memory bandwidth, 8GB of HBM2, and a 210W TDP.• RX Vega 64 (Air Cooled): 1247MHz base clock with 1546MHz Boost, 64 ROPS, 256 texture units, 4096 shader cores, 2048-bit memory bus. Also484GB/s of memory bandwidth, and a TDP of 295W.• RX Vega 64 (Water Cooled): 1406MHz base clock with 1677MHz boost clock, 64 ROPs, 256 texture units, 4096 shader cores, 2048-bit memory bus. Also 484GB/s of memory bandwidth, and a 345W TDP.

The Radeon Aqua Pack with Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled will cost $699 and arrive in September. The Radeon Black Pack with Radeon RX Vega 64 Air Cooled will cost $599 and come in September. The Radeon Red Pack will include the Radeon RX Vega 56 and will cost $499, and will come in September as well.

Each of these bundles include a coupon for $200 off a Samsung CF791 34-inch WQHD Curved FreeSync monitor. You'll also get a $100 discount on a Ryzen 7 CPU plus motherboard bundle. And a couple of games come with the bundle – Wolfentein II and Prey, for example.

Just the Radeon RX Vega 64 Air Cooled will cost $499, while the Radeon RX Vega 56 will cost $399. That's on their own, in no packs of any kind. Those will also come in September of this year. The liquid-cooled Vega 64 ONLY comes in bundle form.