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.