AMD Radeon RX Vega release date, specs rumors: Launch to see limited supply of the video card

AMD Radeon Vega promotional image.Facebook/AMD.Philippines

Radeon RX Vega is being promoted by AMD to be a direct competitor of NVIDIA's high-end video cards, such as the GTX 1080, 1080 Ti, and Titan XP. Given this, it is alarming to note that rumors are now going on that the AMD offering will have a limited supply on its launch date, which is said to be within the first half of 2017.

According to Tweak Town, fewer than 16,000 cards will be shipped for the launch. The reason for the limited supply, the publication notes, is the fact that High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2), which is used on the card, is in limited supply and is expensive to boot, which why it also affected the number of video cards produced by AMD.

Given the amount of hype raised by AMD in promoting the brand, it is a likely possibility that many consumers will find themselves unable to purchase a unit come launch date, should this rumor be true.

Digiworthy notes that since the last high-end video card released by AMD was Radeon R9 Fury X in 2015, AMD will need to step up its game to stay in competition with NVIDIA, which is currently reigning the market. Radeon RX Vega is touted to be in direct competition with the high-end cards of NVIDIA, which is why many AMD fans are eagerly looking forward to its release.

Wccftech reports that the specifications of the video card have been leaked via a Linux graphics driver update. The card will feature 64 next-generation compute units, each of which has 64 GCN stream processors. The chip has 4,096 next-generation GCN stream processors, subsectioned into four, each of which forms a shader engine. Each shader engine has two asynchronous compute units, one render back-end, and four texture blocks each.

AMD has yet to confirm if the specifications, as well as the short stocks rumor, are true.