AMD Radeon VII Graphics Card Launched, Benchmarks Versus NVIDIA GeForce RTX (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched its new Radeon VII flagship graphics card today, based on the company's 7nm second-generation Vega architecture. In addition to core GPU optimizations, Radeon VII provides 2X the graphics memory at 16GB and 2.1X the memory bandwidth at a full 1TB/s, compared to AMD's previous generation Radeon RX Vega 64. The move to 7nm allowed AMD to shrink the Vega 20 GPU die down to 331 square millimeters. This shrink and the subsequent silicon die area saving is what allowed them to add an additional two stacks of HBM2 memory and increase the high-bandwidth cache (frame buffer) capacity to 16GB. The GPU on board the Radeon VII has 60CUs and a total of 3,840 active stream processors with a board power TDP of 300 Watts. As you might expect, it's a beast in the benchmarks that's able to pull ahead of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 in spots but ultimately lands somewhere in between the performance of an RTX 2070 and 2080 overall. AMD Radeon VII cards will be available in a matter of days at an MSRP of $699 with custom boards from third-party partners showing up shortly as well.

Comments

Games vs 3D art

[AHuxley]

The games crave the graphics power of a NVIDIA product.
3D art creation likes the extra memory of the AMD card.

Buy a AMD card to create a 3D game and pay it on NVIDIA card?

Re:Games vs 3D art

[Tough Love]

What are you talking about. Radeon VII is now widely understood to be roughly similar to GTX 1080 for games, if not faster especially at 4K. While being cheaper and twice the memory, which future-proofs it. Plus 50% higher internal memory bandwidth. Games crave these things.

Re:Games vs 3D art

[Tough Love]

My problem with this card is there's no DXR acceleration or DLSS. I want both, mostly because I do actual ray tracing.

Then you've been had by NVidia's hype. RTX is completely useless for actual ray tracing as opposed to the bag of cheap tricks they actually do for real time gaming, which involves shooting roughly three rays per pixel and trying to fake it from there. Usually only one bounce as well. So many unacceptable artifacts are apparent with anything more than a cursory look. Notice that anything reflected off a curved surface looks like it's been worked over with a ball peen hammer. I'm pretty sure the window reflections are being faked too, just so you don't immediately notice how broken up the actual raytraced reflections are. This isn't actual raytracing, it's a normal polygon render pass then they post process the scene by tracing a few rays off each reflective pixel and run it through some really weird and AI filtering to try to smooth with neighbour reflective pixels.

If you are doing actual ray tracing then you will do it with the usual GPU path, not with the RTX hardware, and it will be offline. If you tried to use RTX rendered frames in a video you would get laughed at.

Driver not quite optimized yet?

[Lonewolf666]

AMD has a history of needing some time to arrive at best driver performance.
Vega 64 and Vega 56 were originally significantly weaker than GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Now they have caught up, just in time to become obsolete...

I'm curious how Navi will work out. It is supposed to be a major step forward, architecture wise.

Re:Basically just trying to scoop extra $

[alvinrod]

This only exists because they needed something to show off at CES because their next generation Navi cards aren’t ready. This is a Vega 20 part which is specifically designed for machine learning and heavy compute workloads. It’s basically just one of their MI50 cards with the double precision performance crippled intentionally. If NVidia weren’t jacking up the prices on their 2000 series cards, AMD probably wouldn’t be able to sell this since it’s expensive for them to make and comes at the cost of selling a several thousand dollar professional card instead.

Re:Slower than a 2 year old 1080ti

[Tough Love]

over 500 watts

The Radeon VII draws approximately the same power as the RTX 2080, what are you blathering about?

Idiot.

Re:Power consumption

[Tough Love]

Then you will be overjoyed to know that the Radeon VII draws roughly the same power as the RTX 2080. Further, it is likely to underclock very well, dropping into a sweeter spot of the 7nm power curve. At which point it will be not only a very powerful card, but a cool and quiet one too. Whereas in stock configuration, this reference card is known to be about twice as noisy as a typical 2080. That would be my only serious issue, and for that reason I will wait for the OEM cards to land, which they surely will because AMD has, by accident or design, left room for OEMs to differentiate with superior cooling solutions.

I guess this GPU is going to be a solid seller after the dust settles. It's already a hit in the Linux world. AMD will probably be selling as many as they can make for quite some time.

That is considering it purely as a gaming card. But with twice the memory, and 50% faster memory than the RTX 2080 it's not just a gaming card. And 16MB gives it a lot of longevity, maybe an uncomfortable fact for Nvidia, who prefers its products to go obsolete as quickly as possible.