The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Testbed Setup
To preface, because of the SMU changes mentioned earlier, no third party utilities can read Radeon VII data, though patches are expected shortly. AIB partner tools such as MSI Afterburner should presumably launch with support. Otherwise, Radeon Wattman was the only monitoring tool possible, except we observed that the performance metric log recording and overlay sometimes caused issues with games.
On that note, a large factor in this review was the instability of press drivers. Known issues include being unable to downclock HBM2 on the Radeon VII, which AMD clarified was a bug introduced in Adrenalin 2019 19.2.1, or system crashes when the Wattman voltage curve is set to a single min/max point. There are also issues with DX11 game crashes, which we also ran into early on, that AMD is also looking at.
For these reasons, we won't have Radeon VII clockspeed or overclocking data for this review. To put simply, these types of issues are mildly concerning; while Vega 20 is new to gamers, it is not new to drivers, and if Radeon VII was indeed always in the plan, then game stability should have been a priority. Despite being a bit of a prosumer card, the Radeon VII is still the new flagship gaming card. There's no indication that these are more than simply teething issues, but it does seem to lend a little credence to the idea that Radeon VII was launched as soon as feasibly possible.
| Test Setup | |||||
| CPU | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz | ||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g) | ||||
| PSU | Corsair AX860i | ||||
| Storage | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) | ||||
| Memory | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
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| Case | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition | ||||
| Monitor | LG 27UD68P-B | ||||
| Video Cards | AMD Radeon VII AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (Air) AMD Radeon R9 Fury X NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti |
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| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Release 417.71 AMD Radeon Software 18.50 Press |
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| OS | Windows 10 x64 Pro (1803) Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
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Thanks to Corsair, we were able to get a replacement for our AX860i. While the plan was to utilize Corsair Link as an additional datapoint for power consumption, for the reasons mentioned above it was not feasible for this time. On that note, power consumption figures will differ for earlier GPU 2018 Bench data.
In the same vein, for Ashes, GTA V, F1 2018, and Shadow of War, we've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous GPU 2018 data.
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schizoide - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Sure it does, at the bottom-end. It basically IS an instinct mi50 on the cheap.GreenReaper - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Maybe they weren't selling so well so they decided to repurpose before Navi comes out and makes it largely redundant.schizoide - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
IMO, what happened is pretty simple. Nvidia's extremely high prices allowed AMD to compete with a workstation-class card. So they took a swing.eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
My take to. This card was never intended to be released. It just happened because the RTX 2080 is at 700+$.In Canada, the RVII is 40$ less than the cheapest 2080 RTX, making it the better deal.
Manch - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It is but its slightly gimped perf wise to justify the price diff.sing_electric - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Anyone else think that the Mac Pro is lurking behind the Radeon VII release? Apple traditionally does a March 2019 event where they launch new products, so the timing fits (especially since there's little reason to think the Pro would need to be launched in time for the Q4 holiday season).-If Navi is "gamer-focused" as Su has hinted, that may well mean GDDR6 (and rays?), so wouldn't be of much/any benefit to a "pro" workload
-This way Apple can release the Pro with the GPU as a known quantity (though it may well come in a "Pro" variant w/say, ECC and other features enabled)
-Maybe the timing was moved up, and separated from the Apple launch, in part to "strike back" at the 2080 and insert AMD into the GPU conversation more for 2019.
The timeline and available facts seem to fit pretty well here...
tipoo - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I was thinking a better binned die like VII for the iMac Pro.Tbh the Mac Pro really needs to support CUDA/Nvidia if it's going to be a serious contendor for scientific compute.
sing_electric - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I mean, sure? but I'm not sure WHAT market Apple is going after with the Mac Pro anyways... I mean, would YOU switch platforms (since anyone who seriously needs the performance necessary to justify the price tag in a compute-heavy workload has almost certainly moved on from their 2013 Mac Pro) with the risk that Apple might leave the Pro to languish again?There's certainly A market for it, I'm just not sure what the market is.
repoman27 - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
The Radeon VII does seem to be one piece of the puzzle, as far as the new Mac Pro goes. On the CPU side Apple still needs to wait for Cascade Lake Xeon W if they want to do anything more than release a modular iMac Pro though. I can't imagine Apple will ever release another dual-socket Mac, and I'd be very surprised if they switched to AMD Threadripper at this point. But even still, they would need XCC based Xeon W chips to beat the iMac Pro in terms of core count. Intel did release just such a thing with the Xeon W 3175X, but I'm seriously hoping for Cascade Lake over Skylake Refresh for the new Mac Pro. That would push the release timeline out to Q3 or Q4 though.The Radeon VII also appears to lack DisplayPort DSC, which means single cable 8K external displays would be a no-go. A new Mac Pro that could only support Thunderbolt 3 displays up to 5120 x 2880, 10 bits per color, at 60 Hz would almost seem like a bit of a letdown at this point. Apple is in a bit of an awkward position here anyway, as ICL-U will have integrated Thunderbolt 3 and an iGPU that supports DP 1.4a with HBR 3 and DSC when it arrives, also around the Q3 2019 timeframe. I'm not sure Intel even has any plans for discrete Thunderbolt controllers after Titan Ridge, but with no PCIe 4.0 on Cascade Lake, there's not much they can even do to improve on it anyway.
So maybe the new Mac Pro is a Q4 2019 product and will have Cascade Lake Xeon W and a more pro-oriented yet Navi-based GPU?
sing_electric - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Possibly, but I'm not 100% sure that they need to be at the iMac Pro on core count to have a product. More RAM (with a lot of slots that a user can get to) and a socketed CPU with better thermals than you can get on the back of a display might do it. I'd tend to think that moving to Threadripper (or EPYC) is a pipe dream, partly because of Thunderbolt support (which I guess, now that it's open, Apple could THEORETICALLY add, but it just seems unlikely at this point, particularly since there'd be things where a Intel-based iMac Pro might beat a TR-based Mac Pro, and Apple doesn't generally like complexities like that).Also, I'd assumed that stuff like DSC support would be one of the changes between the consumer and Pro versions (and AMD's Radeon Pro WX 7100 already does DSC, so its not like they don't have the ability to add it to pro GPUs).