The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTCompute Performance
Shifting gears, we'll look at the compute aspects of the Radeon VII. Though it is fundamentally similar to first generation Vega, there has been an emphasis on improved compute for Vega 20, and we may see it here.
Beginning with CompuBench 2.0, the latest iteration of Kishonti's GPU compute benchmark suite offers a wide array of different practical compute workloads, and we’ve decided to focus on level set segmentation, optical flow modeling, and N-Body physics simulations.
Moving on, we'll also look at single precision floating point performance with FAHBench, the official Folding @ Home benchmark. Folding @ Home is the popular Stanford-backed research and distributed computing initiative that has work distributed to millions of volunteer computers over the internet, each of which is responsible for a tiny slice of a protein folding simulation. FAHBench can test both single precision and double precision floating point performance, with single precision being the most useful metric for most consumer cards due to their low double precision performance.
Next is Geekbench 4's GPU compute suite. A multi-faceted test suite, Geekbench 4 runs seven different GPU sub-tests, ranging from face detection to FFTs, and then averages out their scores via their geometric mean. As a result Geekbench 4 isn't testing any one workload, but rather is an average of many different basic workloads.
Lastly, we have SiSoftware Sandra, with general compute benchmarks at different precisions.
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Dr. Swag - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
If I had to guess, those tests probably are more dependent on memory capacity and/or memory bandwidth.Klimax - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Could be still difference between AMD's and Nvidia's OpenCL drivers. Nvidia only fairly recently started to focus on them. (Quite few 2.0 features are still listed as experimental)tipoo - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
That they changed the FP64 rate cap entirely in BIOS makes me wonder, should the iMac Pro be updated with something like this (as Navi is supposed to be launching with the mid range first), if it would have the double precision rate cap at all as Apple would be co-writing the drivers and all.tvdang7 - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I feel AT needs to update the game list. I understand that these are probably easier to bench and are demanding but most of us are curious on how it performs on games we actually play. Lets be real how many of you or your friends play these game on the daily? BF1 and MAYBE GTA are popular but not on the grand scheme of things .Manch - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
7 DX 111 DX 12
1 Vulcan
Need a better spread of the API's and denote which games are engineered specifically for AMD or Nvidia or neither. I think that would be helpful when deciding which card should be in your rig.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Perhaps tell game developers to get with the times then? You cant test what isnt there, and the vast majority of games with repeatable benchmarks are DX11 titles. That is not Anandtech's fault.Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Didn't say it was. Merely a suggestion/request. There are around 30 games that are released with DX 12 support and about a dozen with Vulkan. Some of the DX 11 titles tested for this review offer DX 12 & Vulkan supt. They exist and can be tested. If there is a reason to NOT test a DX version or Vulkan version, for example RE2's broken DX12 implementation, OK fair enough. I think it would offer a better picture of how each card performs overall.Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
DX11 DX12 Vulkan
BF1 Tested Yes No
FC5 Tested No No
AotS Yes Tested Yes
Wolf Yes Yes Tested
FF Tested Maybe? No
GTA Tested No No
SoW Tested No No
F1 Tested No No
TW Tested Yes No
4 of the games tested with DX11 have DX 12 implementations and AotS has a Vulkan implementation. If the implementation is problematic, fair enough. Put a foot note or a ** but there are games with DX 12 and Vulkan out there on current engines so it can be done.
Ryan, perhaps and article on the games, the engines, their API implementations and how/why you choose to use/not use them in testing? Think it would be a good read.
Manch - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Sorry bout the format didn't realize it would do that to it.eddman - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
"about a dozen with Vulkan"What are these dozen games? Last time I checked there were only three or four modern games suitable for vulkan benchmarking: Wolfenstein 2, Doom, Strange Brigade and perhaps AotS.
IMO Wolfenstein 2 is enough to represent vulkan.
"Wolf Yes Yes Tested"
Wolfenstein 2 is vulkan only; no DX12.
As for DX12, yes, I too think they could add more.