Monday, February 18th 2019
AMD Radeon VII Retested With Latest Drivers
Just two weeks ago, AMD released their Radeon VII flagship graphics card. It is based on the new Vega 20 GPU, which is the world's first graphics processor built using a 7 nanometer production process. Priced at $699, the new card offers performance levels 20% higher than Radeon RX Vega 64, which should bring it much closer to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080. In our testing we still saw a 14% performance deficit compared to RTX 2080. For the launch-day reviews AMD provided media outlets with a press driver dated January 22, 2019, which we used for our review.
Since the first reviews went up, people in online communities have been speculating that these were early drivers and that new drivers will significantly boost the performance of Radeon VII, to make up lost ground over RTX 2080. There's also the mythical "fine wine" phenomenon where performance of Radeon GPUs significantly improve over time, incrementally. We've put these theories to the test by retesting Radeon VII using AMD's latest Adrenalin 2019 19.2.2 drivers, using our full suite of graphics card benchmarks.
In the chart below, we show the performance deltas compared to our original review, for each title three resolutions are tested: 1920x1080, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 (in that order).
Please do note that these results include performance gained by the washer mod and thermal paste change that we had to do when reassembling of the card. These changes reduced hotspot temperatures by around 10°C, allowing the card to boost a little bit higher. To verify what performance improvements were due to the new driver, and what was due to the thermal changes, we first retested the card using the original press driver (with washer mod and TIM). The result was +0.2% improved performance.
Using the latest 19.2.2 drivers added +0.45% on top of that, for a total improvement of +0.653%. Taking a closer look at the results we can see that two specific titles have seen significant gains due to the new driver version. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and Battlefield V both achieve several-percent improvements, looks like AMD has worked some magic in those games, to unlock extra performance. The remaining titles see small, but statistically significant gains, suggesting that there are some "global" tweaks that AMD can implement to improve performance across the board, but unsurprisingly, these gains are smaller than title-specific optimizations.
Looking further ahead, it seems plausible that AMD can increase performance of Radeon VII down the road, even though we have doubts that enough optimizations can be discovered to match RTX 2080, maybe if suddenly a lot of developers jump on the DirectX 12 bandwagon (which seems unlikely). It's also a question of resources, AMD can't waste time and money to micro-optimize every single title out there. Rather the company seems to be doing the right thing: invest into optimizations for big, popular titles, like Battlefield V and Assassin's Creed. Given how many new titles are coming out using Unreal Engine 4, and how much AMD is lagging behind in those titles, I'd focus on optimizations for UE4 next.
Since the first reviews went up, people in online communities have been speculating that these were early drivers and that new drivers will significantly boost the performance of Radeon VII, to make up lost ground over RTX 2080. There's also the mythical "fine wine" phenomenon where performance of Radeon GPUs significantly improve over time, incrementally. We've put these theories to the test by retesting Radeon VII using AMD's latest Adrenalin 2019 19.2.2 drivers, using our full suite of graphics card benchmarks.
Please do note that these results include performance gained by the washer mod and thermal paste change that we had to do when reassembling of the card. These changes reduced hotspot temperatures by around 10°C, allowing the card to boost a little bit higher. To verify what performance improvements were due to the new driver, and what was due to the thermal changes, we first retested the card using the original press driver (with washer mod and TIM). The result was +0.2% improved performance.
Using the latest 19.2.2 drivers added +0.45% on top of that, for a total improvement of +0.653%. Taking a closer look at the results we can see that two specific titles have seen significant gains due to the new driver version. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and Battlefield V both achieve several-percent improvements, looks like AMD has worked some magic in those games, to unlock extra performance. The remaining titles see small, but statistically significant gains, suggesting that there are some "global" tweaks that AMD can implement to improve performance across the board, but unsurprisingly, these gains are smaller than title-specific optimizations.
Looking further ahead, it seems plausible that AMD can increase performance of Radeon VII down the road, even though we have doubts that enough optimizations can be discovered to match RTX 2080, maybe if suddenly a lot of developers jump on the DirectX 12 bandwagon (which seems unlikely). It's also a question of resources, AMD can't waste time and money to micro-optimize every single title out there. Rather the company seems to be doing the right thing: invest into optimizations for big, popular titles, like Battlefield V and Assassin's Creed. Given how many new titles are coming out using Unreal Engine 4, and how much AMD is lagging behind in those titles, I'd focus on optimizations for UE4 next.
182 Comments on AMD Radeon VII Retested With Latest Drivers
Today, with 2xxx / Radeon VII we are seeing a watershed moment in that all of current cards are seeing manual OCs about 8% over reference which makes side by side comparisons easier when using those charts.
Getting back to the "new drivers" issue have to wonder how much of these improvements are real. Is the game actually performing better across the board ? Or has it just been tweaked a bit more to "look good" in that benchmark. That's what makes sites like TPU a "go to" source for me as Wiz doesn't use the IG demo. As was presented in the chart in Post #59, I have not seen any evidence that either side is doing better than the other in this respect .... that chart says otherwise.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/amd-radeon-vii-retested-with-latest-drivers.252691/post-3997015
But the attention is not the bad part; the bad part is those who claim it's a decent buy, both in forums and among Youtube opinionators.
As you can see above, the highest cores aren't delivering the most fps.
You'll note that "outta the box' the Fury X beat the "slower" 980 Ti (102.6) by 0.3 fps before overclocking .
However, when TPU OC'd the Fury, it brought just 5.1% to the table .... Now let's look at what happened when TPU OCd the 980 Tis
On the MSI Gaming X 980 Ti, they OC's it 27.2% to hit 130.5 fps, 20.7% faster than the Fury X
On the Giga G1 980 Ti, they OC's it 31.4% to hit 130.5 fps, 24.7% faster than the Fury X
On the Zotac AMP X 980 Ti, they OC's it 27.1% to hit 130.4 fps, 20.6% faster than the Fury X
On the Asus Strix X 980 Ti, they OC's it 28,4% to hit 131.7 fps, 21.8% faster than the Fury X
I'm not going to speak to the "narrative", but the math here is clear. I don't care about who wins, but I do care about facts. The overclocking room for the 980 Ti is 5 - 6 times that of the Fury X. If this is "competiing", it's the 1973 Belmont Stakes
www.3dmark.com/hall-of-fame-2/timespy+3dmark+score+extreme+preset/version+1.0/1+gpu
It likes water > and many people archieved a clockspeed of over 2250Mhz. From a maximum boost of 1800Mhz that is not bad at all! It's a great OC'er actually.
It may not match 2080 in every title but for people like me who come from Vega 64 and enjoy Freesync gaming it is a viable upgrade.
I know that Nvidia supports Freesync now but until now only officially on a handful of monitors.
I had a long thought if I should go for 2080 or Radeon VII, but finally decided to go with VII because of concerns with Freesync.
Nvidia does not support as far as I checked my Benq XL2730 freesync monitor and paying between 500€ to 700€ more to get a new good Gsync monitor would have been too much. :oops:
Only cooling performance of the refernce cooler on Radeon VII is not good but a good waterblock will fix that.
no,that's 8%
1140 is 1.08x of 1050that's synthetics,amd always did great in 3dmarks
look at actual games
Welp
hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/126752-amd-radeon-vii/?page=4
trog