on Feb 7, 2019AMD’s next high-end graphics card for gaming and content creation has arrived: the Radeon™ VII, the world’s first 7nm gaming graphics card, hits shelves today.
With gaming performance, bandwidth and creation needing more and more memory each year, Radeon™ VII brings 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth and 16 GB of HBM2 massive memory in as a supercharged “Vega” architecture* to gamers, creators and enthusiasts everywhere. Read the blog on why Radeon® VII with 16 GB of VRAM capacity is a huge benefit for today’s gamers and creators.
Take advantage of Radeon™ VII’s massive memory for super smooth gameplay and content creation:
- Gamers: Experience max resolutions, max framerates and max settings in the latest AAA/esports games and unrestrained streaming**. Pair your experience with a FreeSync 2 HDR technology-capable monitor for a premium buttery-smooth experience.
- Creators: Push your limits with 8K editing and enhanced real-time performance.
For gamers who demand excellence and content creators who need perfection, discover the Radeon™ VII graphics card now:
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“Vega” is a codename for AMD architectures, and is not a product name. GD-122
Testing done by AMD performance labs 1/3/19 on Ryzen 7 2700X,16GB DDR4 3000MHz, Radeon VII, AMD Driver 18.50, and Windows 10. Using Fortnite 1080p Max settings Radeon VII scored 127 fps. Fortnite 1080p Max settings and HD streaming to Twitch 1080p (1080p @ 60fps, 6 Mbps, AMF encoder) Radeon VII scored 123 fps. PC manufacturers may vary configurations yielding different results. All scores are an average of 3 runs with the same settings. Performance may vary based on use of latest drivers. RX-272
I planned on purchasing the Radeon 7 today, but I decided to look at some objective reviews. Hardware Canucks and Hardware Unboxed had 2 fairly objective reviews posted on You Tube. It is apparent that in many games that this card is not competitive at 1440P or even 4K with the RTX 2080. Yes, it does well in some but not nearly enough games for a $700 card. AMD had they wanted this card to win mindshare and succeed made three critical errors. They should have done some architectural tweaks, like increasing ROPS to 128, NOT whittling down FP64, and installing Bequiet fans on these cards. The Radeon 7 card with weakened compute has little computational advantage over RTX 2080. This was proven in some content creation tests done on Hardware Canucks. So we have a noisy, underperforming high end gaming card that has lots of memory but not the tools to really make optimal use of it in gaming and workloads. I will hold onto my 1080 Ti another 10 to 12 months hoping AMD repairs it's very damaged GPU image when Navi 20 rolls out. I really do not want to give another dime to Nvidia, but AMD has to do better than this. This was a disingenuous PR stunt that was poorly conceived and flopped on its face. These issues can not really be attributed to drivers as this is merely a die shrink from 14nm Vega without architectural changes.So the current drivers should be very close to optimal. But of course they are NOT optimal. This was proven by Der Bauer when he tried extreme overclocking the readouts were just all over the place. He was able to do an overclock using the autooverclock feature, But the driver made it impossible to manually overclock in a scientific way. Having a badly defective driver on launch day is something that gives a black eye to AMD. Initial impressions HAVE to be good.. AMD should have learned that lesson from the Vega 56 and 64 fiasco. But they have not learned it. Instead they release a defective driver for Radeon 7 and also fail to supply vendors and even their own website with an adequate supply of cards. This was NOT due to overwhelming demand but to inadequate supply only. This launch should have been delayed a month so the driver and supply issues could have been smoothed out. Radeon 7 could have been a golden opportunity, but instead it was done in a haphazard and self-defeating way.
I want to make it clear I had exclusively purchased AMD graphics cards until after my disappointment with Vega 56. I have done my own builds for about 20 years. Now as a I approach my 70th year I plan on my next build incorporating a Ryzen Zen 2 12 or 16 core cpu. I have been a very loyal and enthusiastic user of your Bulldzoer and Piledriver cpus and Ryzen 1800X and now 2700X cpus. I look forward to high end Navi gpus. I understand they have a substantialm delay until next October. I hope those reports are not true and that the 7nm process yields are close to optimal. You can not make these errors with Navi and any further delay with Navi will be disastrous.