AMD’s stock price is on the rise as reviews of the company’s new Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 graphics cards are released.
Shares are up 4.05% on Monday, the same day the cards were released. The cards are currently sold out on Newegg, and only a few units are still available on Amazon, though they are selling much higher than the manufacturer’s recommended price.
The cards are the company’s long-awaited answer to Nvidia’s dominant GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, released last year. AMD has lacked a serious offering to compete with the Nvidia graphics units until the new Vega cards. The number in the name of the new AMD cards refers to the number of computing cores the card has, either 56 or 64.
Reviews of the cards boil down to a solid, if unenthusiastic, “they’re fine.” PC Gamer says “AMD now shows up in the discussion” around high-end graphics cards when it previously hadn’t, and Gizmodo says the company’s cards are now “neck and neck” with Nvidia’s offerings.
While testing from both outlets showed that performance from AMD is comparable to the Nvidia cards, power consumption for the Vega cards is higher than the year-old GeForce options. The high-end graphics card market is worth millions a year, and AMD now has a chance at grabbing some portion of that market, according to PC Mag writer Jarred Walton.
The shortage of cards seen on launch day is not a new phenomenon. Cryptocurrency miners have been buying up tons of graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD to speed up their mining. Nvidia is set to release a mining-specific graphics card soon, and the company’s CEO has said Nvidia will continue to serve the needs of miners. Meanwhile, AMD’s CEO has said that cryptocurrencies are not a “long-term growth driver” for the company.
AMD is up 12.64% this year, including Monday’s bump.
