The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 1 (DX11)
Battlefield 1 returns from the 2017 benchmark suite, the 2017 benchmark suite with a bang as DICE brought gamers the long-awaited AAA World War 1 shooter a little over a year ago. With detailed maps, environmental effects, and pacy combat, Battlefield 1 provides a generally well-optimized yet demanding graphics workload. The next Battlefield game from DICE, Battlefield V, completes the nostalgia circuit with a return to World War 2, but more importantly for us, is one of the flagship titles for GeForce RTX real time ray tracing.
We use the Ultra preset is used with no alterations. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, our rule of thumb with multiplayer performance still applies: multiplayer framerates generally dip to half our single player framerates. Battlefield 1 also supports HDR (HDR10, Dolby Vision).
Our previous experience with Battlefield 1 shows that AMD hardware tend to do relatively well here, and the Radeon VII is no exception. Of the games in our suite, Battlefield 1 is actually only one of two games where the Radeon VII takes the lead over the RTX 2080, but nevertheless this is still a feather in its cap. The uplift over the Vega 64 is an impressive 34% at 4K, more than enough to solidly mark its position at the tier above. In turn, Battlefield 1 sees the Radeon VII meaningfully faster than the GTX 1080 Ti FE, something that the RTX 2080 needed the Founders Edition tweaks for.
99th percentiles reflect the same story, and at 1080p the CPU bottleneck plays more of a role than slight differences of the top three cards.
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just4U - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
It's not a turkey at all.. it beats a Vega64 for around 30% ads 2x the ram (which is not really utilized yet) has a 3 fan design with Amd's top end shroud/block takes less power, runs cooler, and has the same characteristics which means Amd was generous on power so undervolting it without appreciable performance losses will be easy enough to do as will overclocking.For me that's a winner. I have blower 1080s and their very loud if I let them or run things at stock (i undervolt there to..) and I've seen how loud the Vega56/64 blowers can be.. this with the 3 fans? pfft.. way quieter.
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
I think you should look at the data in this review because your analysis is way off.ballsystemlord - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
They are sold out! All the online retailers I checked have no Radeon VIIs! Unless you go to ebay and pay way too much.Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Overpriced underbaked vaporware? Never-coulda-happen.It's an ugly time to be a "serious" PC gamer.
ballsystemlord - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Well, it's been a week. They came into stock for about 5min.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
amdumb defense force in full denial mode, sorry, we can't hear you over the 55db noise level of the radeon VII ;)))))))))rukufe - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
If you want to play with AI, you need tensorflow, and for a "server" card, at this price, it doesn't not makes sense to not support tensorflow. AI is everywhere today. this card is obsolete.gsalkin - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
So is this too little too late? I'm bewildered that even at 7nm this card is pulling 300W of power and generating insane noise.It's also unfortunate that the rumor of 128 ROPs was bunk. These cards definitely have an imbalance in the CU to ROP ratio. Nvidia Titan Xp had 96 ROPs strapped to 3840 SPs but AMD is shipping a max of 64?
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
"It's also unfortunate that the rumor of 128 ROPs was bunk."That rumor typifies the irrational thinking that plagues the gaming community. AMD isn't going to make the effort of changing the Instinct GPU to better suit gamers. It isn't and it hasn't.
dr.denton - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
I wonder, do people actually read and comprehend these articles? By now it should be obvious to everyone, that VII is not and was never supposed to be AMD's next generation of GPU. In fact, they always denied that Vega 7nm would make it into the consumer market - and for very good reason: they had Navi for that. Now that Navi is delayed, they need something for people to talk about - and talk about it we do.