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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29a - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
As usual in these garbage articles the prices given are nowhere near reality. The Vega 64 is $100 cheaper than what is listed.RSAUser - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Anandtech doesn't ever seem to update reviews or prices.They'll compare a device from their history even if there have been months of driver updates that fixed performance issues, so they'll be using non-current info and everyone will assume it's current.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
"Anandtech doesn't ever seem to update reviews or prices."On the contrary, quite a bit was updated for this review. Though as driver performance has been rather stable as of late, performance hasn't exactly gone anywhere for most cards on most games.
If you see anything that seems wrong, please let us know. But we go out of our way to try to avoid using any card/driver combinations that result in performance issues.
Korguz - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
29aif you think AT does nothing but garbage articles.. then, lets see YOU do better...
as for prices.. meh.. thats something hard to account for as there are things called exchange rates, and other variables that no one can predict.....
Phil85 - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
So when will prices of GPU's decrease? Is this the new normal?eva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Navi should bring value back to mid-range.It is still a nice card for professional/compute/rendering. But for gaming, the price is maybe 50$ too expensive, and AMD really needs to get some better quality fans.
TEAMSWITCHER - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
If Navi is missing next generation features like ray tracing and tensor cores, there will be ZERO value to it.eva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
AHAHAHAHA... Ray Tracing... you know the real problem of Ray Tracing? It was never on the table until Jensen brainwashed shill that it was important. by defending it, you obviously prove that you have no critical judgement.By the way, the problem with RT/DLSS is that it will never be implemented because AMD owns consoles, and that devs develop on consoles. There is no monetary benefit to implement gimmick proprietary gameworks features for 1% of the PC user base, unless if Nvidia is paying you to do so.
It will never be a thing for the upcoming console generation. See you in 7 years, where it might be remotely relevant to the industry. As of now, unless you are rendering a CGI movie, it is worthless.
Dribble - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Both the next gen consoles are going to have ray tracing. Microsoft - who wrote and own the spec for the DX12 ray tracing extension currently used by PC's and hence a strong backer of ray tracing - will make one of them.eva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Not going to happen because RTX is proprietary, it is a closed environment, and require hardware acceleration that AMD is not going to pursue in the short time. Nvidia shoot themselves in the foot by pushing it. Open source is the only way a new standard can be adopted. The whole G-synch fiasco should have been enough to prove it.Hardware could run it still, but the impact on performances is just to important. At that point, developers like Sony have incredible talent in creating new effect that look way more realistic.
Just looking at The Last of Us Part 2 is a good example.