The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTWolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
We've known that Wolfenstein II enjoys its framebuffer, and to explain the obvious outlier first the Fury X's 4GB HBM1 simply isn't enough for smooth gameplay. The resulting performance is better conveyed by 99th percentile framerates, and even at 1080p the amount of stuttering renders the game unplayable.
Returning to the rest of the cards, Wolfenstein II's penchant for current-generation architectures (i.e. Turing, Vega) is again on display. Here, the Pascal-based GTX 1080 Ti FE isn't in the running for best-in-class, with the RTX 2080 taking pole and Radeon VII in a close second. Once again, the raw lead in average frametimes grows at lower resolutions, indicating that the Radeon VII is indeed a few shades slower than the reference RTX 2080, but judging from 99th percentile data the real-world difference is close to nil.
Compared to the RX Vega 64, the performance uplift is exactly 24% at 4K and 25% at 1440p, an amusing coincidence given the guidance of 25% given earlier.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
289 Comments
View All Comments
drgigolo - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
Yeah, of course I am looking at it that way :-) But I also like tech, and find the progress lacking these last years. Longer development cycles and diminishing returns for a lot more dollars.remedo - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Why isn't there any benchmarks for machine learning or deep learning?imaheadcase - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Because the card is not for that...loleva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It kind of is... it is a Radeon Instinct M150 with less memory.DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
The buy a Radeon Instinct M150GreenReaper - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Sure, if you want to pay two and a half times as much! Maybe get two and blow the rest on juice.eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Well, you are buying a Vega 20 gimped... >:/So you do in reality... >:/
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
In short, ML results take longer to put together than these relatively short embargoes allow for. It's also not a primary market for this card, so other things such as gaming performance testing get priority.That said, we're curious about it as well. Now that we're past the embargo, check back in later this month. We have an RTX Titan review coming up, which will give us a great opportunity to poke at the ML performance of the Radeon VII as well.
eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
I will be curious to see that. Compute/ML/Rendering/Content Creation comparison. I was more looking for this in all honesty since we knew what to expect from the card from the beginning.HStewart - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I would think this is expected, AMD trying there best to go against NVidia video and probably release because some of struggles that RTX is having with unit issues.But in stage in my life, personally I don't need a high end graphics card but I would go nVidia because of past good experience. But in any case how many owners actually need high end card. For majority 90+ % of people Integrated graphics are good enough for spreadsheets, internet and word processing