AMD Radeon VII Review - More Compelling Than Ray Tracing? - MMORPG.com

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AMD Radeon VII Review - More Compelling Than Ray Tracing? - MMORPG.com

It’s no secret that over the last two years AMD hasn’t been able to truly compete in the enthusiast graphics space. While they are taking market share away from Intel in the CPU world thanks to their incredible Ryzen CPUs (love my Ryzen 7 1700, by the way), the company’s flagship consumer card, the Vega 64, failed to capture the high end market as many consumers were hoping for.

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Slapshot1188

I know you are giving it the old college try here but you really have to be careful about making charts showing performance comparisons when they are from different machines, using different drivers and different test parameters.

I know you mention this yourself, but its really not a fair way to compare cards.

Hashbrick

Slapshot1188 said:

I know you are giving it the old college try here but you really have to be careful about making charts showing performance comparisons when they are from different machines, using different drivers and different test parameters.



I know you mention this yourself, but its really not a fair way to compare cards.

Agreed, give your pros and cons, talk about it, but let the benchmarkers do the benchmarks. When you don't have a solid amount of test builds you are doing nothing but throwing numbers in the air on graphics.

azurrei

Vvalue for the money the cheaper RTX 2070 wins...you could buy the more powerful RTX 2080 for the same price as the VII which of course would make the VII not look so impressive. Nevertheless, I'm glad to see AMD stepping it up with VEGA as the nVidia 10x0 series was my first non-ATI/AMD card...kind of like the Ryzen chip I'll likely buy later this year will be my first non-Intel CPU since my IBM PCjr I had as a kid.

gervaise1

What a stupid title. Possibly a dangerous one.

"AMD Radeon VI - More Compelling than NVidia RTX". That would have worked but not what is written.

Ray tracing is just a type of maths. AMD cards can - and do - do ray tracing e.g. film industry. CPUs can do ray tracing. You might as well have written "AMD VII - More compelling than multiplication."

Don't - don't - fall into the trap of thinking that if a "game" includes ray tracing then you have to have an NVidia card. Don't fall into the trap of assigning a basic function to any single company.

As I said ray tracing is just maths. And whilst it hasn't been applied to games previously both AMD and NVidia "pro" cards (and the likes of Matrox, who are still going!, before them) have been doing ray tracing for decade. The film industry, physics labs, engineering, architecture, cosmology, etc. etc. its just a form of maths that's requires "huge" computational power. 

Sephrus

Honestly this is like the third crock review from this guy on this site. The card launched with crap driver support. Running stock it's just about at TJ max and the cooler runs loud as hell. PLEASE WAIT til they clean up the drivers before even thinking about purchasing this card.

Hashbrick

It actually makes the whole thing kind of sad. Higher wattage, higher fan spin, hotter core. It just shows AMD still has a long ways to go when you can get a card for $200 less that is getting fps near the VII.

https://www.gpucheck.com/compare/amd-radeon-vii-vs-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2070/intel-core-i7-9700k-3-60ghz-vs-intel-core-i7-9700k-3-60ghz/ultra?lang=en&currency=usd

and then compared to the 2080 series, no competition

https://www.gpucheck.com/compare-multi/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-vs-amd-radeon-vii-vs-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti

Vrika

System said:

in every test the Radeon VII came out on top the card didn’t even hit 65 C in some tests. That is insanely impressive...

Guru3D measured Radeon VII's load noise level as 51 dB, whereas RTX 2070 Armor got only 34 dB.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_vii_16_gb_review,9.html
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_rtx_2070_armor_8g_review,10.html

druez

I would of loved for AMD to come out with a card that can compete with the 2080ti, but they didn't. If you want to game in 4k, the 2080ti is the best out there period and it isn't even close.

Quizzical

The thing that you have to remember is that this is really a compute card that just happens to have a graphics driver.  If you're doing compute and have a global memory bandwidth bottleneck (as is common), then this is likely to be the fastest GPU ever made, and also likely to remain so a year from now.  The Tesla V100 (which costs $9000) is the only other card in the same ballpark.  We're fortunate that the ethereum mining craze is dead, as otherwise, they'd be bid up so far that they'd be insane to buy for any purpose other than compute.

But as the GPU is built for compute, that's what it will live and die on.  If this card lets AMD take a significant chunk of the GPU compute market (likely in the guise of its Radeon Instinct siblings), then the GPU is a success.  And if not, then it's a failure.  Sales of this card in its Radeon form used for gaming are just noise.

Because it's so focused on compute, it's not that interesting for graphics.  If you have a strong preference for AMD for whatever reason and need to buy something right now, then maybe you can justify one.  Navi is likely to be a lot more interesting to gamers, but that will have to wait at least until the middle of this year if not longer.  Navi is also likely to bring the price tag for a given level of performance down considerably.

The other purpose of this chip is as a test part for TSMC's new 7 nm process node.  AMD's Zen 2 CPU cores are coming later this year, and AMD needs for those to be great.  If they are, then establishing AMD as the market leader in the x86 server market could easily be worth billions in profit annually.  Or quarterly.  Navi is AMD's next GPU architecture that will refresh their whole lineup; if that's a major new architecture (which would be AMD's first since GCN at the start of 2012), then AMD needs that to be great.  AMD can't afford for either of those to flop because they botched the process node.

But Vega 20?  AMD doesn't need Vega 20 to be great.  If Vega 20 flops because AMD mishandled the process node, but what they learn from it can make Zen 2 cores and Navi GPUs considerably better, then it's a worthwhile sacrifice.

Quizzical

druez said:

I would of loved for AMD to come out with a card that can compete with the 2080ti, but they didn't. If you want to game in 4k, the 2080ti is the best out there period and it isn't even close.

So you're telling me that a 754 mm^2 die is faster than a 331 mm^2 die?  And also that a $1200 GPU is faster than a $700 one.  Huh.  Who knew?