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.
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just4U - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Really? I see the pre-order pricing here in Canada as 50-100 less then the 2080.Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I think you missed the noise-to-performance metric.This GPU isn't even close to competitive with the 2080 because of that.
just4U - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Sure it is.. a mild undervolt (which the cards support in wattman) is all that's needed. Lower temps lower fan noise. (..shrug)Also since many own blower style cards these 3 fan designs are usually less noise (unless maybe coil whine comes into play..)
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
1) Undervolting is a crap shoot due to binning and other factors, not a solution that you can simply apply as a fix for every one of these cards.2) Saying that some other cards are even louder is a complete avoidance of the issue. The issue is that Nvidia is crushing the noise-to-performance metric with the 2080, according to the presented data in this article. AMD is not, at all, competitive.
eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Results are there and Vega is greatly improved with undervolting. It is like this since it launch. It is related to the uarch.D. Lister - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Which is why I can never recommend AMD GPUs. I mean how competent can they really be if they don't even know how to set proper voltages on their GPUs?Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
It's also possible that a GPU will run at a lower voltage that what is optimal without artifacting and yet perform more slowly. Chips are typically able to do some compensation with error correction to handle inadequate voltage but the result is reduced speed.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
You're avoiding the point.eddman - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It's performing better than I expected. It doesn't fully match a 2080 but still performs good enough as a stopgap solution.A bit lower price would've been nice but I suppose it can be justified by the 16GB memory to some extent.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
"It doesn't fully match a 2080 but still performs good enough as a stopgap solution."No. It sucks unless you can use the areas of compute it excels at.
There is zero reason to buy a product for gaming that is so much louder for equivalent gaming performance. None.