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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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.