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
Samus - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
BenSkywalker, the short answer is this is based on a dated architecture (2 generations behind Turing) so there is no real way it's going to beat it in efficiency: It doesn't even try to compete with the 2080Ti.But the fact that a GCN\Vega-based card can nearly tie a 2080 is commendable. I think the problem this card has is it's $100 too expensive.
BenSkywalker - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
If we were comparing ray traced performance that would be a valid point, but we are talking about traditional rendering. They have a half node process advantage and are using more power than a 2080 by a comfortable amount.Try finding another chip, CPU or gpu that was built with a half node advantage, used more power *and* was slower.
Either TSMC is having major problems with 7nm or AMD set a new standard for poor engineering in this segment.
Ganjir - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
It is a shame the infinity fabric is disabled, because crossfire would actually give these cards a reason to use ALL of that bandwidth and capacity - at least on one card. Is there a way to enable this or is it a hardware limitation?Alistair - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
I calculate OxfordGuy has made 11 percent of all comments in this thread ;)Zingam - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
AMD should invest in power stations. And maybe even sell their future Radeon XIV in a bundle with a little power station!Crion66 - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
Nate or Ian, can AMD choose to enable pci-express 4.0 on this card when Ryzen/TR4 3000 is released?Also can crossfire be implemented by popular gamer demand?
ccfly - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
did anyone test this card in c4d ,radeon pro vs octane for speed ?peevee - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
"Though AMD hasn’t made a big deal of it up to now, Vega 20 is actually their first PCI-Express 4.0-capable GPU, and this functionality is enabled on the Radeon Instinct cards. However for Radeon VII, this isn’t being enabled, and the card is being limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds"Oh God, how much I hate marketoids! Morons who cannot get an A even in the primitive school math are hired into marketing depts, and ruin EVERYTHING.