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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tipoo - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
It's MI50vanilla_gorilla - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
As a linux prosumer user who does light gaming, this card is a slam dunk for me.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
and a noisy one at thatBaneSilvermoon - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Meh, I went looking for a 16GB card about a week before they announced Radeon VII because gaming was using up all 8gb of VRAM and 14gb of system RAM. This card is a no brainer upgrade from my Vega 64.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
lemme guess, you're playing sandstorm?Gastec - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
I was beginning to think that the "money" was in crytocurrency mining with video cards but I guess after the €1500+ RTX 2080Ti I should reconsider :)eddman - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Perhaps but Turing is also a new architecture, so it's probable it'd get better with newer drivers too.Maxwell is from 2014 and still performs as it should.
As for GPU-accelerated gameworks, obviously nvidia is optimizing it for their own cards only, but that doesn't mean they actively modify the code to make it perform worse on AMD cards; not to mention it would be illegal. (GPU-only gameworks effects can be disabled in game options if need be)
Many (most?) games just utilize the CPU-only gameworks modules; no performance difference between cards.
ccfly - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
you joking right ?1st game they did just that is crysis (they hide modely under water so ati card will render these too
and be slower
and after that they cheat full time ...
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
No, I'm not.There was no proof of misconduct in crysis 2's case, just baseless rumors.
For all we know, it was an oversight on crytek's part. Also, DX11 was an optional feature, meaning it wasn't part of game's main code, as I've stated.
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
... I mean an optional toggle for crysis 2. The game could be run in DX9 mode.