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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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.