This year has been hard on system builders and PCMR members looking to purchase that upgrade in the GPU department. Due to the increase in demand thanks to cryptocurrencies (specifically Ethereum), it has been near impossible to find any GTX 1070 or 1060 from the green team and any AMD RX 580, 570, 470 or 480 GPUs from the red team. The influx of EBay offers for these cards and their inflated prices have driven normal users to sell high and earn some extra cash while waiting for Vega.

As we all waited for the details on Vega, RTG (Radeon Technology Group) was busy creating a huge update for Radeon GPU users.  The driver update sports a new techonlogy called "Enhanced Sync", which provides a similar function as triple buffering but is built-in to the driver and not game specific.  This is a direct competitor to NVIDIA's "Fast Sync" and has similar if not identitical end user experience.

It's recently been announced that Nvidia will be the official graphcs (GPU) of The International 2017.  This is the largest DOTA 2 tournament held yearly and directly backed by Valve Software (creators of DOTA 2).  With DOTA 2 being a huge eSports title, this seems like a major win for Nvidia.  Several players are known to have sponsers but a direct sponsership by Nvidia with Valve should speak volumes for Nvidia sales and branding.

At Siggraph, Nvidia announced a new eGPU (External GPU) case that enables creative artists and designers use of a full sized GPU (Quadro® or TITAN Xp).  They cleam that 25 million artists and content creators exist and can now leverage their powerful full sized GPUs to enhace their creation efforts.

Right on the heals of Vega launch, Nvidia released a new driver (July 31st) that seems to increase performance by 300%.  This is specific to applications like Maya and are meant to benefit the creators (sorry gamers).

At Capsaicin SIGGRAPH, AMD showcased what could be achieved with the new Epyc and Vega series of products.  You read that right, it has the powered of 1 PetaFLOPS for virtualization and machine learning.  This proof of concept is based on Inventec's P-Series massively parallel computing platform, and is rack designed to excel in a range of tasks.

During the Siggraph 2017 event, AMD's Chris Hook was interviewed by HardOCP and he provided some insight into why Vega availability is further delayed for release post he launch.  In the interview, Chris Hook mentions that it was necessary to increase available stock for gamers and that we can actually get our hands on them.  With the increased volume on launch, let's hope it's enough that mining enthusiasts don't snatch them all up!

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has finally released the specs for the highly anticipated RX Vega series graphics cards.  The reveal happened at SIGGRAPH industry conference in Loca Angeles this past Monday (July 31st) with all information directly shared with the press attending.  This event was not streamed for whatever reason but videos and slide content was made available to the public.  Below you can see the introduction video that shares some information about RX Vega and what to expect.