AMD just launched their flagship Radeon video card, the Radeon VII, and by doing so they are securing their place in the high-end gaming graphic cards after a long absence in this segment dominated by NVIDIA. They tried to penetrate the market with the Vega 56 and 64 in the past but these cards did not live up to hype and they got crushed by the competition in both performance and efficiency. But now, AMD seems to have done it, and the Radeon VII is for sure a graphic card that no one expected to be as good as AMD claimed.
Of course we have to back up the claims, so we tested the new Radeon VII and let me tell you that it is just as we expect it to be. The new GPU that powers the Radeon VII is based on the Vega 20 architecture, being almost identical to the previous generation that powers the Vega 56 and Vega 64, but with allot of improvements and 7nm fabrication process instead of a 14nm like in the previous Vega 10 architecture.
So with the new 7nm fabrication process we have a smaller GPU die size, measuring just 331 mm2, and 13.2 billion transistors. Although we have allot more transistors, the Stream Processors have decreased to 3840 in comparison with the Vega 64 which had 4096, but this time the Stream Processors operate at higher frequencies.
The Radeon VII GPU has a base frequency of 1400MHz with a turbo up to 1750MHz and a maximum of 1800MHz. These frequencies make the GPU process up to 14.2 TFLOPS/s, which is truly amazing. vRAM was also increased and the Radeon VII has no more no less than 16GB of HBM2 operating at 4096 bits and a bandwith of 1TB/s. This is allot of power!
But this power comes with a drawback, even though it uses a 7nm fabrication process, it seems that AMD still struggles with power efficiency. This beast comes with a TDP of 300W, which makes this card more power hungry than NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 its main competitor, which made us wonder, was this effort from AMD truly worth it, and if so can AMD be a serious competitor for NVIDIA in the high-end gaming cards?
Our tests used a reference Radeon VII and out of the box the card looks truly awesome. Cooling includes a massive coper radiator with 3 fans and under normal load it is very quiet. The drivers used are not in the final version, being media drivers, and due to this some results may not be as conclusive as we hoped so. But this will change as new drivers will be released soon and I am sure that stability will be addressed as well as performance.
The testing rigs are based on AMD and Intel CPUs (a Ryzen 7 2700X and an Intel I9 9900K respectively to take out any eventual bottlenecks), 16 GB of DDR 4 running in dual channel at 3200MHz, a 960 Samsung Pro NVME SSD and a 1200W power supply from Corsair. For comparison a NVIDIA Founders Edition RTX 2080 was chosen to see how it fairs against its targeted competitor.
The selected games for this test are Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, running at 1080p with High or Ultra presets. We chose 1080p as this is the most popular gaming resolution running at 144Hz. Also we won’t include results for both systems as we did not see any significant difference between the AMD and Intel system (6-7 FPS difference is not something that truly impacts gaming experience), and instead we will do an average between them.
So let’s see some results:
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Radeon VII: 52 FPS
NVIDIA RTX 2080: 68 FPS
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Radeon VII: 106 FPS
NVIDIA RTX 2080: 105 FPS
Battlefield 5
Radeon VII: 123 FPS
NVIDIA RTX 2080: 122 FPS
Up until now we can see that these two cards are evenly matched so we decided to include synthetic benchmark as well, 3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy (yes I know it is not a real test and does not reflect true gaming performance) as we need something repetitive that forces the graphic cards to use all their power. Here are our results:
Radeon VII
Fire Strike Ultra: 6484 points
Time Spy: 8650 points
NVIDIA RTX 2080:
Fire Strike Ultra: 6543 points
Time Spy: 10559 points
The synthetic benchmarks are in favor of the RTX 2080 but I strongly believe that these differences, especially in Time Spy are due to the fact that AMD drivers are not there yet, like NVIDIA’s, and once a stable driver will be released these numbers should improve.
But even if the drivers are not ready yet and games developers will add support for the massive 16GB of HBM2 a bit later, the Radeon VII shows allot of promise, as the numbers are very very good so in conclusion we can say that yes NVIDIA has a competitor in the high-end gaming graphic cards, which makes us even more excited as prices will be affected and we can finally see some real competition in this field. The Radeon VII is available for purchase at $699.
