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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
289 Comments
View All Comments
HollyDOL - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
Please, read what others write before you start accusing others.eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Yeah, when your speaker sound is at 70-80 dB next to you when playing CoD... /sarcasmAMD is going to solve the fan problems. Temps are lower than the RTX 2080, they can play with the fan profile a little bit better.
SeaTurtleNinja - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Lisa Su is liar and AMD hates gamers. This is just a publicity stunt and a way to give a gift to their friends in the Tech Media. This was created for YouTube content creators and not for people who play games. Another Vega dumpster fire.GreenReaper - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
But many YouTubers play games as their content. And people vicariously watch them, so effectively it's letting many people play at once, just for the cost of the video decode - which is far more efficient!Korguz - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
yea.. amd hates gamers.. you DO know AMD makes the cpu and vid cards that are in the current playstation and xbox... right ???Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Yes, it's difficult to forgot the fiasco that is the Jaguar-based "console"(actually a poor-quality x86 PC with a superfluous anti-consumer walled software garden).
Korguz - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
how is it a fiasco ??the original xbox used a Pentium 3 and Geforce for its cpu and gpu... the 360, and IBM CPU and ATI GPU...
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
1) Because it has worse performance than even Piledriver.2) Because the two Jaguar-based pseudo-consoles splinter the PC gaming market unnecessarily.
Overpriced and damaging to the PC gaming platform. But consumers have a long history of being fooled by price tags into paying too much for too little.
eddman - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Consoles have nothing to do with PC. They've existed for decades and PC gaming is still alive and even thriving.Why do you even care what processor is in consoles?
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
False. The only difference between the MS and Sony "consoles" and the "PC gaming" platform is the existence of artificial software barriers.