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AMD Announces Radeon VII, Its Next-Generation $699 Graphics Card (theverge.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the competition-rises dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it's primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that's competitive with Nvidia's RTX 2080. It's called the Radeon VII ("Seven"), and it uses the company's first 7nm graphics chip that we'd seen teased previously. It'll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the company. That's the same price as a standard Nvidia RTX 2080. [...] AMD says the second-gen Vega architecture offers 25 percent more performance at the same power as previous Vega graphics, and the company showed it running Devil May Cry 5 here at 4K resolution, ultra settings, and frame rates "way above 60 fps." AMD says it has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth.

4 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Good news! by DaMattster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, AMD is lagging behind but I will still go with AMD graphics over NVIDIA because NVIDIA has an anti-open source stance. It's good news that AMD's graphics chipsets are getting better.

    1. Re:Good news! by vyvepe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      NVidia is not an option if you need a longer term linux support.

    2. Re:Good news! by WaffleMonster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Come on, don't give them a pass. It's not a very good value proposition is it. It's for the fanboys only. You can buy a 2080 for $699 and you get RT and Tensor cores (ray tracing, DLSS, etc.).

      I watched the Nvidia CES and the whole presentation + RT/Tensor thing felt like one giant scam.

      DLSS as near as I can tell is basically just an upscaler using substantially similar "AI" database approach as Sony's x-reality asic. This technology has been around for years. While it's nice it sure as heck doesn't produce magical outcomes that are anywhere near rendering native resolution.

      Then there was gratuitous use of TAA throughout the demos as a reference which would be hilarious if they were not serious. TAA is only state of the art in blurry mess technology... using that as basis for comparisons especially given the effective resolution of the window as it was viewable in the CES demo... was basically a scam.

      Personally if 2080 can't deliver high frame rate ray tracing at 4k what does it matter? Modern shader hacks for dynamic lighting are quite realistic.. so is it really worth cranking resolution down so much .. just for slightly more realistic lighting? Would that really produce a better overall quality image? Personally I'm more impressed by 1TB/s memory bandwidth than I am with ray tracing at this point.

      No doubt in the future RT will win out but right now to make buying decision based on it ... I personally don't see the value.

    3. Re:Good news! by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you can only use a product by agreeing to shitty terms and conditions that prevent you from using it the way you wanted to, it's a second tier technology. No ifs, buts, or anything else.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.