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

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.

Comments

Good news!

[DaMattster]

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.

Re:Good news!

[vyvepe]

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

Re:Good news!

[WaffleMonster]

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.

Re:Good news!

[squiggleslash]

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.

Re:Good news!

[Luckyo]

I play warframe at 120fps lock. TAA is fucking awful. It's like vaseline smeared all over your screen. I suspect the only people who like it are the people who really like motion blur. It produces a sorta kinda similar look.

Re:Good news!

[epine]

Lets compromise on second tear technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.

Let's compromise on second-tier literacy while we're at it.

Here's a better metaphor: both Nvidia and AMD are fancy hotels, but for the last five or ten years, Nvidia has a posh penthouse bridal suite, and AMD doesn't. For a good while, concerning posh penthouse bridal suites, there was only one game in town.

Frasier: Why would I stay across the street in a shitty hotel that doesn't even have a posh penthouse bridal suite?

Niles: Do you actually need a penthouse bridal suite?

Frasier: No, but it just feels cheap when the elevator ends at 69, instead of P.

Re:Good news!

[WorBlux]

AMD had traditionally excelled on compute. I don't expect RT acceleration on Vega 7nm, but INT8 performance is 58.9 FlOPs on the M160 could be competitive with tensor. Especially with a PCI-e 4.0 option available combined with the HBM2. (At least on the data-center side of things). Gaming performance (Radeon cards) probably isn't going to be outstanding, but it should still be pretty good. I don't thing-k the lack of accelerated RT is going to hurt them as NVidia can't make it perform adequately even with the acceleration to support from game developers/engines is going to be hit and miss at best, just like PhysX. Some people will swear by it, but many won't care until it's actually good and widely supported.

Re: Okay, I may be pessimistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Dmc5 isn't even out yet. So the fact that it runs it on ultra at above 60 FPS in 4K at that. Is a good thing.

Re:Meh

[RickyShade]

It's almost like you haven't seen what a new 1080ti or rtx2800 costs right now

Re: Ray tracing?

[supremebob]

Yeah, real time ray tracing isn't really a thing yet. They haven't really built video cards powerful enough to enable it without a huge performance hit.

Maybe the next gen cards will support it in 2020... but it's not gonna happen now.

apple mac pro price $999

[Joe_Dragon]

apple mac pro price $999

Re:Meh

[G00F]

I see the 1080 ti going from almost $800 to almost $1680 (newegg) I can find some Nvidia RTX 2080 for as cheap as 699.99 to $1,699.00.

I fail to see what your issue is?

Re:What is the point of Freesync?

[Immerman]

There's a bit of a terminology snafu here:

v(ertical)sync's original meaning is the once-per-frame signal between monitor and video card that lets them stay coordinated and display a stable image (in combination with h(orizontal)sync, which happens once per line)

Then there's the more modern usage where you "turn on vsync" in a game. But what that's actually turning on is "vsynced rendering", or perhaps better expressed "sync the framebuffer update to the monitor vsync signal"

And yes,"turning on vsync" does stop the tear line, because waiting for vsync to flip the framebuffer means the buffer doesn't change while the monitor is refreshing. But it does so at the expense of drastically reducing the frame rate, at least intermittently. Framerate can only be adjusted in integer multiples of frames, so if you're only able to render at 57Hz, then syncing the rendering engine to vsync will drop the frame rate to 60/2 = 30Hz, either permanently or as "stuttering", depending on exactly how the synchronization is implemented.

(Hmm, I'm a bit rusty, but I think you need triple-buffering to only see stuttering - pretty sure that double-buffering requires you to wait until vsync to free up the "old" framebuffer before you can start rendering the next frame, which means *every* new frame will take slightly too long to render, and thus *every* old frame will be displayed for an extra refresh while your computer sits idle, dropping you to 1/2 your montors refresh rate. Triple buffering lets you render one frame while a second waits for the monitor to finish displaying the third. Can anyone confidently confirm or correct me?)

That's actually one of the big draws for high frame rate monitors - smoother vsynced rendering. If your monitor refreshes at 120Hz instead of 60Hz, then a 57Hz rendering engine will cause the framerate to stutter between 120/2=60Hz and 120/3=40Hz. Or alternately, your game might be able to lock to a slower refresh rate - e.g. a nice stable 40 Hz in this case (which is kind of slow, and probably probably why rates like 144Hz are more popular - you can run that at 72 or 48Hz, either of which is pretty solidly above the motion perceptual threshold)