Thursday, January 10th 2019
AMD Radeon VII Hands On at CES 2019
While many have watched or at the very least seen our coverage of AMD's live stream at CES 2019, it just can't compare to seeing the latest graphics card from the company up close and personal. Therefore as soon as we had the opportunity, we took a closer look at the AMD Radeon VII and let us just say the reference card is indeed a bit fancy. The shroud itself is made of metal and has a very similar look and feel to the one used on the Radeon RX Vega 64 liquid cooled reference cards. However, instead of using an AIO for this release AMD instead opted for three uniform fans and a massive heatsink. Not only does this make the card more compatible with small form factor systems, it is also less of a hassle to install. Display outputs consist of 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI. Sadly AMD did not include a VirtualLink port (USB Type-C) like NVIDIA for VR headsets, which is rather odd considering AMD is also part of the VirtualLink consortium.
Power delivery is handled by two 8-pin PCIe power connectors giving the card access to a theoretical limit of 375-watts which is 75-watts more than its 300-watt TDP. Considering the Radeon VII has the same power level as the Vega 64 it offers 25% more performance at the same power level. Compute unit count falls between the Vega 56 and Vega 64 at precisely 60 CUs. That said, a few missing CUs are of no consequence when you consider how close the Vega 56 performed to the Vega 64 once tweaked. As for clock speeds AMD has stated the Radeon VII will have a 1.8 GHz core clock, while the 16 GB of HBM2 will deliver 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth over the 4096-bit memory interface.
Overall gaming performance is 29% higher according to AMD with the Radeon VII having been tested in 25 titles in order to reach that conclusion. Eight of them were DX12 and two of them Vulkan meaning they used a decent spread of games across multiple APIs. In regards to the games tested they used; Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Battlefield 1, Battlefield V, Destiny 2, Doom, F1 2018, Fallout 76, Far Cry 5, Forza Horizon 4, Grand Theft Auto V, Strange Brigade, The Witcher 3, and Monster Hunter World just to name a few. Add that to the information shown in AMD's graphs and it appears it really can beat or at least trade blows with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080. However, before jumping to any conclusions we will verify that soon enough once we have a sample in for review. In regards to pricing and availability it was already revealed earlier that AMD's Radeon VII will release at $699 on February 7th and will come bundled with a few games including, Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and The Division 2 for a limited time.
Power delivery is handled by two 8-pin PCIe power connectors giving the card access to a theoretical limit of 375-watts which is 75-watts more than its 300-watt TDP. Considering the Radeon VII has the same power level as the Vega 64 it offers 25% more performance at the same power level. Compute unit count falls between the Vega 56 and Vega 64 at precisely 60 CUs. That said, a few missing CUs are of no consequence when you consider how close the Vega 56 performed to the Vega 64 once tweaked. As for clock speeds AMD has stated the Radeon VII will have a 1.8 GHz core clock, while the 16 GB of HBM2 will deliver 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth over the 4096-bit memory interface.
109 Comments on AMD Radeon VII Hands On at CES 2019
Nice to see AMD ditch the squirrel cage blower on their reference cards!
Wonder if Gamers Nexus will do a tear down and comparison on Glue, Screws and tape used vs RTX design
Sure, the 2080 performance is good, but that nice fat 16GB of VRAM buffer and AMD's traditionally strong compute units makes it much tastier for other workloads than gaming.
Vega being so Geometry limited doesn't really ultilize all those steam processors, Vega 56 is pretty much on-par with 64 clock for clock.
Its basically the same issue with Fury vs Fury X.
Navi and mid-range 7nm are supposed to be the real deals, so this stop-gap SHOULD be bought if you want rtx2080 levels of performance or so and if you want an AMD card, otherwise it's probably worth waitimg for prices to drop and/or real next-gen gpu's (and non-rtx nvidia parts).
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2060_Founders_Edition/33.html
RTX 2080 performance compared to Vega 64: 38% at 1080p, 42% at 1440p and 46% at 2160p
29% is AMDs own number? I really hope it is not that bad.
Not sure what their tactic is at this point.
Reason why they showd strange brigade for vulkan is turing would massacre it in wolfenstein and probably beat in DOOM too.
this is updated every month,last update 27th Dec. Across all tests 1080Ti is 33% faster than V64.
Ferrari sells 2 cars a year for a million a piece while Volkswagen sells a 10 million a year for 10.000 a piece.
Volkswagen makes a much higher profit, thats what AMD should do with this, bring out a card that is simply good enough and then price it so damn sharply that everyone who isnt a fanboy would go for that.
- mid end 450€/600€
- high end 800€
- enthusiast 1200€
Amd followed this pricing. I am personally out. Bring that PlayStation 5.
Never bought an apple product so I will defo not be paying premium price on pc hardware. I'm done.
I guess the bubble had to burst at some point, amd is a profit-oriented company. they're releasing a comptitive card,and charging the same as nvidia does,only without the FE premium.
I'll still keep on insisting that this is a good card.It's not a game changer,and it's slightly disappointing when it comes to performance (if can only match 1080ti,we'll see) and price (700 for 1080Ti performance,not very new or exciting) but at least it is there.I thought there was gonna be no 7nm Vega for gamers in Q1 and I was absolutely wrong (though they might've though of it this morning like Huang said :laugh:)
GTX 1080 Ti performance at GTX 1080 Ti launch prices 2 years down the line. You can get an RTX 2080 at 699 with less power draw and the option to turn on DXR, regardless how much of a checkbox feature it is at the moment.
Maybe with 8GB framebuffer and 549USD pricetag this would be a great sell, in its current state tho... no bueno.