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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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.