The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Testbed Setup
To preface, because of the SMU changes mentioned earlier, no third party utilities can read Radeon VII data, though patches are expected shortly. AIB partner tools such as MSI Afterburner should presumably launch with support. Otherwise, Radeon Wattman was the only monitoring tool possible, except we observed that the performance metric log recording and overlay sometimes caused issues with games.
On that note, a large factor in this review was the instability of press drivers. Known issues include being unable to downclock HBM2 on the Radeon VII, which AMD clarified was a bug introduced in Adrenalin 2019 19.2.1, or system crashes when the Wattman voltage curve is set to a single min/max point. There are also issues with DX11 game crashes, which we also ran into early on, that AMD is also looking at.
For these reasons, we won't have Radeon VII clockspeed or overclocking data for this review. To put simply, these types of issues are mildly concerning; while Vega 20 is new to gamers, it is not new to drivers, and if Radeon VII was indeed always in the plan, then game stability should have been a priority. Despite being a bit of a prosumer card, the Radeon VII is still the new flagship gaming card. There's no indication that these are more than simply teething issues, but it does seem to lend a little credence to the idea that Radeon VII was launched as soon as feasibly possible.
| Test Setup | |||||
| CPU | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz | ||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g) | ||||
| PSU | Corsair AX860i | ||||
| Storage | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) | ||||
| Memory | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
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| Case | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition | ||||
| Monitor | LG 27UD68P-B | ||||
| Video Cards | AMD Radeon VII AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (Air) AMD Radeon R9 Fury X NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti |
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| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Release 417.71 AMD Radeon Software 18.50 Press |
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| OS | Windows 10 x64 Pro (1803) Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
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Thanks to Corsair, we were able to get a replacement for our AX860i. While the plan was to utilize Corsair Link as an additional datapoint for power consumption, for the reasons mentioned above it was not feasible for this time. On that note, power consumption figures will differ for earlier GPU 2018 Bench data.
In the same vein, for Ashes, GTA V, F1 2018, and Shadow of War, we've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous GPU 2018 data.
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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.