The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTMiddle-earth: Shadow of War (DX11)
Next up is Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. Developed by Monolith, whose last hit was arguably F.E.A.R., Shadow of Mordor returned them to the spotlight with an innovative NPC rival generation and interaction system called the Nemesis System, along with a storyline based on J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, and making it work on a highly modified engine that originally powered F.E.A.R. in 2005.
Using the new LithTech Firebird engine, Shadow of War improves on the detail and complexity, and with free add-on high resolution texture packs, offers itself as a good example of getting the most graphics out of an engine that may not be bleeding edge. Shadow of War also supports HDR (HDR10).
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.
For Shadow of War, the Radeon VII positioning is much closer to ideal, splitting the GTX 1080 Ti FE and reference RTX 2080 while offering more than 25% improvement over the RX Vega 64. In that sense, at 4K the matchup with the reference RTX 2080 is a bit of a wash, and the Radeon VII can cement its claim at the RTX 2080/GTX 1080 Ti FE performance tier.
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mapesdhs - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
It's going to be hillariously funny if Ryzen 3000 series reverses this accepted norm. :)mkaibear - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
I'd not be surprised - given anandtech's love for AMD (take a look at the "best gaming CPUs" article released today...)Not really "hilariously funny", though. More "logical and methodical"
thesavvymage - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It's not like itll perform any better though... Intel still has generally better gaming performance. There's no reason to artificially hamstring the card, as it introduces a CPU bottleneckbrokerdavelhr - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Once again - in gaming for the most part....try again with other apps and their is a marked difference. Many of which are in AMD's favor. try again.....jordanclock - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
In every scenario that is worth testing a VIDEO CARD, Intel CPUs offer the best performance.ballsystemlord - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
There choice of processor is kind of strange. An 8-core Intel on *plain* 14nm, now 2! years old, with rather low clocks at 4.3Ghz, is not ideal for a gaming setup. I would have used a 9900K or 2700X personally[1].For a content creator I'd be using a Threadripper or similar.
Re-testing would be an undertaking for AT though. Probably too much to ask. Maybe next time they'll choose some saner processor.
[1] 9900K is 4.7Ghz all cores. The 2700X runs at 4.0Ghz turbo, so you'd loose frequency, but then you could use faster RAM.
For citations see:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/p...
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12625/2nd%20Gen%...
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13400/9thGenTurb...
ToTTenTranz - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Page 3 table:- The MI50 uses a Vega 20, not a Vega 10.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Thanks!FreckledTrout - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I wonder why this card absolutely dominates in the "LuxMark 3.1 - LuxBall and Hotel" HDR test? Its pulling in numbers 1.7x higher than the RTX 2080 on that test. That's a funky outlier.Targon - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
How much video memory is used? That is the key. Since many games and benchmarks are set up to test with a fairly low amount of video memory being needed(so those 3GB 1050 cards can run the test), what happens when you try to load 10-15GB into video memory for rendering? Cards with 8GB and under(the majority) will suddenly look a lot slower in comparison.