The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 1 (DX11)
Battlefield 1 returns from the 2017 benchmark suite, the 2017 benchmark suite with a bang as DICE brought gamers the long-awaited AAA World War 1 shooter a little over a year ago. With detailed maps, environmental effects, and pacy combat, Battlefield 1 provides a generally well-optimized yet demanding graphics workload. The next Battlefield game from DICE, Battlefield V, completes the nostalgia circuit with a return to World War 2, but more importantly for us, is one of the flagship titles for GeForce RTX real time ray tracing.
We use the Ultra preset is used with no alterations. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, our rule of thumb with multiplayer performance still applies: multiplayer framerates generally dip to half our single player framerates. Battlefield 1 also supports HDR (HDR10, Dolby Vision).
Our previous experience with Battlefield 1 shows that AMD hardware tend to do relatively well here, and the Radeon VII is no exception. Of the games in our suite, Battlefield 1 is actually only one of two games where the Radeon VII takes the lead over the RTX 2080, but nevertheless this is still a feather in its cap. The uplift over the Vega 64 is an impressive 34% at 4K, more than enough to solidly mark its position at the tier above. In turn, Battlefield 1 sees the Radeon VII meaningfully faster than the GTX 1080 Ti FE, something that the RTX 2080 needed the Founders Edition tweaks for.
99th percentiles reflect the same story, and at 1080p the CPU bottleneck plays more of a role than slight differences of the top three cards.
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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.