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AMD Radeon RX Vega 56

Yesterday, AMD's Vega 56 GPU went on sale — and immediately vanished from the market. Availability was exceptionally brief, possibly just a matter of minutes, and the cards are now sold out at every retailer we've checked (Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg). Obviously new stock may trickle out to manufacturers, merely snagging a card is going to require lightning-fast reflexes and a good memory for one's ain credit card number. In one case over again, the likely culprit is cryptocurrency mining; AMD GPUs have been exceedingly hard to find in-market place and NV cards, while easier to locate, aren't exactly selling for their MSRPs. The cheapest GTX 1070 available at Newegg is $429, with many models pushing into $489+ territory.

A year agone, I slagged both AMD and Nvidia for low GPU availability and higher-than-expected MSRPs, noting that cards similar the GTX 1070 were running ~$440, compared with a $379 target. Today, the situation is damn near identical, only with marginally ameliorate availability for NV and even worse availability for Team Red. AMD has confirmed it isn't raising its ain GPU prices, which means information technology isn't benefiting from the increased need — or, at least, it isn't benefiting any more it would be if gamers were ownership those cards at their target prices.

RXVega

AMD's RX Vega production stack

That makes the current state of affairs different from terminal twelvemonth in at to the lowest degree one respect: None of the companies in question can be accused of launching GPUs with no realistic ability to encounter demand absent a cryptocurrency-driven shortage. Just it does heighten the question of what consumers in the market place for a GPU should do, given these price increases.

The Vega 56 is a stronger competitor to the GeForce GTX 1070 than Vega 64 is to the GTX 1080, and if all these cards were selling for MSRP / SEP we'd recommend consumers investigate both. If you happen to come beyond a card selling for its actual expected price, we'd recommend pulling the trigger on either, depending on your preference. But the bottom line is this: The Vega 56 is a moderate comeback on the 1070 at a significantly higher price, while the 1070 itself is in one case again selling for at least $50 over retail. When the GPU was make-new, you could at to the lowest degree argue jumping on Pascal would yield long-term dividends in performance. With Volta at present expected to launch in less than a year, that calculus is less certain. If your current GPU is an Hard disk 5000 or GTX 4xx series, you'll nevertheless see a major functioning uplift from one of these two GPU families, but it's hard to recommend anyone pay a substantial premium over suggested MSRP/SEP under these conditions.

At the same fourth dimension, nevertheless, it's impossible to know how long these bug volition persist or how long the cryptocurrency market will remain overheated. If new GPUs from Nvidia or AMD offer dramatically better mining performance and the market hasn't cooled by and so, information technology could but exacerbate the problem. That makes it even harder to give a long-term forecast — nobody wants to buy at the high signal, but waiting an indefinite flow of time for a cost drop that could take four-6 months to materialize isn't a not bad option, either.

If you are in the marketplace for a new GPU, the Vega 56 is a pretty skilful option. But regardless of which company you adopt, continue Nvidia's $379 and AMD'south $399 targets in mind.

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