Vega: Next-gen GPU Architecture Delivers the Best Gaming Experience Ever

Vega's Journey From Idea to Execution

Conceived and executed over 5 years, Vega architecture enables new possibilities in PC gaming, professional design, and machine intelligence that traditional GPU architectures surely lag behind and have not been able to address effectively. If we consider other issues occurring in the gaming space, data-intensive workloads are becoming the new standard and processing these huge new data sets requires fast access to massive amounts of memory. However, the Vega architecture's revolutionary memory subsystem enables GPUs to address very large data sets spread across a mix of memory types with up to 512TB of virtual address space.

Yes, Vega's architecture has been designed with the ability to address the breadth of problems GPUs will be solving not only today but also five years from now.

Now that we know how AMD's Vega emerged, let's check out all the key highlights of this Vega GPU Architecture.

 

Most Advanced GPU Memory Architecture Makes it the Fastest One Ever

It is a new memory hierarchy for GPUs. The Vega architecture comes in the form of a new high-bandwidth cache and controller. Wherein, the cache features leading-edge HBM2 technology, which is very much capable of transferring terabytes of data every second, doubling the bandwidth-per-pin over the previous generation HBM technology. Further, it also enables much greater capacity at less than half the footprint of GDDR5 memory.

Image Source

Next-generation Geometry Pipeline

Today's games and professional applications make use of incredibly complex geometry enabled by the extraordinary increase in the resolutions of data acquisition devices. In this regard, Vega's next-generation geometry pipeline enables the programmer to extract incredible efficiency in processing this complex geometry, while delivering more than 200 percent of the throughput-per-clock over previous Radeon architectures. Not only this, Vega also features improved load-balancing with an intelligent workload distributor to deliver consistent performance.

Image Source

Next-generation Compute Engine

Vega architecture is built with a new, next-generation compute engine, which is designed on flexible compute units that can natively process 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit or 64-bit operations in each clock cycle. These compute units are optimized to attain significantly higher frequencies than previous generations and their support of variable datatypes makes the architecture highly versatile across workloads.

Image Source

Advanced Pixel Engine

The new Vega pixel engine employs is a Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer, designed to improve performance and power efficiency, which allows for "fetch once, shade once" of pixels through the use of a smart on-chip bin cache and early culling of pixels invisible in a final scene. Vega's pixel engine is now a client of the onboard L2 cache, enabling considerable overhead reduction for graphics workloads and perform frequent read-after-write operations.

Image Source

"Wait For Vega"

Mentioned are the key highlights of Vega that differentiate it from the other traditional GPU architectures and make it a perfect fit for an enhanced gaming experience. Well, about the shipment of Vega architecture, it is expected to resume only by the first half of 2017. Hence, like AMD showcased "Wait for Vega" in its released trailer, the wait seems to be a never-ending one as of yet.

Image Source