The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
Wrapping things up for games is Total War: Warhammer II, and this title is one that is less than ideal for the matchup between the Radeon VII and its competitors. Much like GTA V, the card is able to make substantial improvements over its predecessor; at 4K, this is an astounding 47% increase over the RX Vega 64. Nevertheless, given the starting point of the RX Vega 64, the Radeon VII is still somewhere around 15% behind the reference RTX 2080, meaning that it performs a shade faster than the reference RTX 2070 at 4K/1440p. That's not where the Radeon VII ideally wants to be, despite being respectable way to iterate on the RX Vega 64.
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Dr. Swag - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
If I had to guess, those tests probably are more dependent on memory capacity and/or memory bandwidth.Klimax - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Could be still difference between AMD's and Nvidia's OpenCL drivers. Nvidia only fairly recently started to focus on them. (Quite few 2.0 features are still listed as experimental)tipoo - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
That they changed the FP64 rate cap entirely in BIOS makes me wonder, should the iMac Pro be updated with something like this (as Navi is supposed to be launching with the mid range first), if it would have the double precision rate cap at all as Apple would be co-writing the drivers and all.tvdang7 - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I feel AT needs to update the game list. I understand that these are probably easier to bench and are demanding but most of us are curious on how it performs on games we actually play. Lets be real how many of you or your friends play these game on the daily? BF1 and MAYBE GTA are popular but not on the grand scheme of things .Manch - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
7 DX 111 DX 12
1 Vulcan
Need a better spread of the API's and denote which games are engineered specifically for AMD or Nvidia or neither. I think that would be helpful when deciding which card should be in your rig.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Perhaps tell game developers to get with the times then? You cant test what isnt there, and the vast majority of games with repeatable benchmarks are DX11 titles. That is not Anandtech's fault.Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Didn't say it was. Merely a suggestion/request. There are around 30 games that are released with DX 12 support and about a dozen with Vulkan. Some of the DX 11 titles tested for this review offer DX 12 & Vulkan supt. They exist and can be tested. If there is a reason to NOT test a DX version or Vulkan version, for example RE2's broken DX12 implementation, OK fair enough. I think it would offer a better picture of how each card performs overall.Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
DX11 DX12 Vulkan
BF1 Tested Yes No
FC5 Tested No No
AotS Yes Tested Yes
Wolf Yes Yes Tested
FF Tested Maybe? No
GTA Tested No No
SoW Tested No No
F1 Tested No No
TW Tested Yes No
4 of the games tested with DX11 have DX 12 implementations and AotS has a Vulkan implementation. If the implementation is problematic, fair enough. Put a foot note or a ** but there are games with DX 12 and Vulkan out there on current engines so it can be done.
Ryan, perhaps and article on the games, the engines, their API implementations and how/why you choose to use/not use them in testing? Think it would be a good read.
Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Sorry bout the format didn't realize it would do that to it.eddman - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
"about a dozen with Vulkan"What are these dozen games? Last time I checked there were only three or four modern games suitable for vulkan benchmarking: Wolfenstein 2, Doom, Strange Brigade and perhaps AotS.
IMO Wolfenstein 2 is enough to represent vulkan.
"Wolf Yes Yes Tested"
Wolfenstein 2 is vulkan only; no DX12.
As for DX12, yes, I too think they could add more.