AMD Vega Preview Could Be Planned For February 28th "Capsaicin & Cream" Live Event

AMD has just announced via its eventbrite portal that it will be holding a special live-streamed event for graphics technology at GDC on the 28th of February. The company has not made any specific mention of Vega in its press release, although we know the company has developer sessions scheduled at GDC to talk specifically about Vega technologies and architecture-sepcific optimizations. AMD engineers also have at least one scheduled session that we know of to talk about the company’s hotly anticipated Ryzen CPUs.

The brand new graphics architecture is set to power the company’s next generation family of high-end Radeon graphics cards. Vega is AMD’s latest 14nm graphics architecture and represents the most significant leap forward for the company in half a decade. The performance demos that AMD has showcased of Vega so far have painted a picture of an enthusiast class chip, the fastest that the company has ever built, going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA’s GTX 1080.

"Our feature-packed show will be highlighted by the hottest new graphics and VR technologies propelling the game industry forward—with previews of the summer’s hottest PC games and VR experiences from the biggest names in the business," AMD says.

The event will take place on February 28 at the 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC). There will be a Capsaicin livestream that kicks off at 10:30 AM Pacific (1:30 PM Eastern) from Ruby Skye, a theater-turned-club that is a popular destination in San Francisco, California.

With Ryzen set to release on the same day or not long after, it's a safe bet that AMD will showcase its new CPU architecture extensively during the event. However, there's speculation that AMD will also use Capsaicin as a launchpad for Vega. It would probably still be another couple of months before Vega cards released to retail, but detailing the GPU architecture and showing off demos would certainly drum up excitement.

Ryzen CPUs are slated for an official launch on March 2nd while Vega GPUs are officially slated for release in the second quarter of 2017.