AMD Radeon VII Video Card Review @ [H]

Seems like a solid offering. So it may be priced a little high for what it is, but comes very close to going toe to toe with the 2080. AMD can probably do enough driver tweaking to narrow that gap - probably and $1 getting you a cup of water, of course, but I hope it's got some legs.
 
Thank you for a great conclusion, objective and not judging that nvidia has better performance and screaming RTX.
For mainly gamers I'd still reccomend a RTX2080 just on the basis of it's traditional rasterized performance. :)

Linux users and opencl guys definitely would buy this :)
 
I don’t expect a full blown reversal, but AMDs drivers have experienced teething issues. I’m curious to see if there will be an uplift in performance where they have deficits. And if so, how much if any.

Beta testing expensive hardware is not acceptable of course. I’m not ignoring that, but in the name of competition, I hope there will be more better competition as a result of drivers.
 
Just cant help but think this should be 100 dollars cheaper, even 50 could be compelling. Drivers could improve performance but that could also happen with the 2080. Nvidia is still the performance king overall and per dollar spent, I hate it, but that is the conclusion here. As much as I may want to i cant give amd my money for what amounts to an attaboy for trying hard.
 
The review was worth the wait! Thank you, [H] crew!


As impressive as the Radeon VII is, I feel that it's either tapped out on performance, or further driver and/or game engine patches may come down the pipe and help utilize all that VRAM and bandwidth. We'll see as time goes on.
 
DejaWiz said:
The review was worth the wait! Thank you, [H] crew!


As impressive as the Radeon VII is, I feel that it's either tapped out on performance, or further driver and/or game engine patches may come down the pipe and help utilize all that VRAM and bandwidth. We'll see as time goes on.
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If that is possible, to leverage that vram in games with drivers, then I could see myself tempted. Is this likely?
 
Ok, so it must come from the game developer end. Sorry, I am not knowledgable about driver development.
 
Cool review as always.

Regarding the Black Ops VRAM, I've read on Gamers Nexus he thinks the game automatically allocates the entire capacity of VRAM that the GPU has even if it's not using it.
 
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They really need a revision 2 of this card, quickly, with 8-10 GB of HBM2 and slash the price to $550. That's where this card needs to be.

[H] always delivers. Thanks for the review!
 
So I just loaded up the new driver on the RVII and sent it to some stress testing. And I think holy hell that is loud and whiny, I did not hear that with the last driver. Go check and the fans are running at over 3800RPM. This is with the AutoOverclock setting turned on. Card is surely running faster, and louder.
 
Great detailed review. Actually surprised at the silver award at price to performance considering the conclusion of the rtx being generally the better option and not getting the same treatment... but no matter the performance gives me hope and hard has always put out more accurate reviews!
 
haste. said:
Great detailed review. Actually surprised at the silver award at price to performance considering the conclusion of the rtx being generally the better option and not getting the same treatment... but no matter the performance gives me hope and hard has always put out more accurate reviews!
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As we suggested, this is far and away from a bad product, in fact it is a very good product. I doubt many would be disappointed with purchasing one. The RTX overshadows it a little but not a lot. So if the RTX 2080 is worth a gold, wouldn't this be worth a silver? That is my two cents, you may need change.
 
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Good review. I agree with the conclusion, if AMD came in a bit lower in price ($649) I would have no problem recommending this over the RTX 2080. At the same price though, I'd rather go with the RTX since it offers more consistent performance across different games and you have the option of using the RTX features (not that I think they are a big selling point at the moment, I've found DLSS pretty disappointing, but if I'm paying the same price I might as well get them).
 
Kyle

Why the delay in the review? Did you run into any problems of then the issue you experienced on your system?
 
chithanh said:
Kyle, did you receive a reply to the questions which you sent to AMD about the Radeon VII?

I kinda expected them to be part of the review, but I could not find them mentioned anywhere.
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AMD Radeon VII Interview with Scott Herkelman
By Kyle Bennett January 14, 2019

We had the opportunity to talk to Scott Herkelman at AMD about the new Radeon VII GPU at CES 2019, and he was kind enough to answer questions that we had. We get his thoughts on the new Radeon VII, its full specifications and die size, FreeSync, multi-GPU, 16GB of HBM2, AMD getting back into direct retail sales of video cards, and more.

Discussion thread on that here.
 
trick0502 said:
Kyle

Why the delay in the review? Did you run into any problems of then the issue you experienced on your system?
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AMD got the card to us later than others, then we screwed some things up and had to rerun all the data.
 
Jim Kim said:
Faster enough to justify the increased fan noise?
I don't know what's wrong w/me; When I was young I didn't mind the whine of 7k rpm cpu fans or the click of IBM Model M kb's, now i want quiet.
Awesome review, muchos thanks!
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I don't know. Hard to figure these things out in 10 minutes.
 
Think we'll see a liquid cooler from the factory like V64?

I'm not in the market but I do feel better about this card having read the [H] compared to others.
 
Silver rating?

The fan is louder than most modern HVAC systems.

Some games were double digit frame rate less performance (one 30% less performance) than an equivalently priced card that came out 2.5 years ago.

Your personal system locked up constantly with a x399 motherboard from the same Company.

You can’t overclock without crashing.

Silver rating???
 
Archaea said:
Silver rating?

The fan is louder than most modern HVAC systems.

Some games were double digit frame rate less performance (one 30% less performance) than an equivalently priced card that came out 2.5 years ago.

Your personal system locked up constantly with a x399 motherboard from the same Company.

You can’t overclock without crashing.

Silver rating???
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Yes and you have to accept our subjective rating and wear it on a tshirt so eveyone knows you agree with it.

Fully addressed sound, you can read my comments as I carefully typed those out for you.

Yes, please read up on overall gameplay. If you want to base evaluations on framerates and not actual gameplay, we are likely not the site for you.

Yes it did, and we worked with AMD and that got fixed. Is fixed in the current driver.

Overclocking is fixed in the new driver.
 
I really feel like this was enough card for selling off the harvested dies from the professional line to at least put them to use. We were never going to get around the cost of the 7nm dies and the hbm2 so AMD probably had almost no wiggle room for the price. It's not like they're selling consoles as loss leaders. There is absolutely a horde of AMD gamers rocking freesync displays that couldn't wait to upgrade their vega 64's to something with more kick at 4k. I can't pan them for the effort since we can already see who redesigns take a long time to get into market (navi). I really wish the memory could have been more impactful for gaming, it just seems like the faster memory with a higher ceiling would have made some differences at 4k. I know there are supply limitations regardless so most of our speculation might not even matter if they just sell everything they have produced. The one great unkown with AMD has always been longevity. How long will this card end up being their high end offering? A lot of people are hoping less than a year, but in the past we've seen Fury and Vega hold the line seemingly indefinitely. Will it be 2+ years before we see something replacing the price point for AMD?
 
at a quick glance it seems like the game bundle this comes with wasn't considered at all. that adds some value i think.
 
Great in depth and fair review, so disappointing that the 16gb of ram does nothing for gaming especially shocked that cod uses it all and no real advantage was seen ..

you would think with all that much texture in vram it would give a boost somewhere .

oh well


great review as always guys .
 
DF-1 said:
at a quick glance it seems like the game bundle this comes with wasn't considered at all. that adds some value i think.
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2 of those games aren't even released yet, so it's hard to talk about performance in them just. Resident Evil 2 was very playable though, and performed great.

The bundle is a consideration, so we made sure to show a screenshot from the press deck that it comes with those games, but it is subjective, someone buying the video card may not want those games, or may never play them, it could be a value if you planned to buy all 3 games in the first place, but that can never be guaranteed, so for some, it's a value, for others, it may not be. But certainly, they are there, and if you want all 3 games and a new video card, well there you go.
 
Great review as always guys. Thank you very much.

As a dedicated Linux guy the AMD cards have been more attractive for awhile now with their excellent open source driver support. (ok its not pitch perfect yet but it gets better and better). Its nice to see AMD push a honest high end card again.

I love that you guys find the max playable settings then compare what the competition pulls there. Its a much better way to review GPUs then the methods most other sites use.

Silver sounds about right to me.... in terms of Windows usage anyway. For Linux users its 100% gold... = or better Linux performance, with 100% open drivers. Looks like AMDs windows driver could use a bit more direct game developer support, it would be good for all of us likely if developers added more optimizations those would likely translate to Linux via proton. :p
 
Thanks for the review! I think we all hoped it would perform better, but at least it's performance is close enough to give hope for Navi.

One question: any chance we'll see VR tests incorporated to your test suite soon? I ask because it's very easy for me to max out the VRAM on my 2080ti in VR by adjusting the SteamVR super sampling size. The particular title is DCS World, it's a flight sim. I realize a challenge is obtaining a repeatable VR benchmark, and VR is still very niche. Just wondering if you are considering it.

Thanks again!
 
Most embarrassing, but i don't mind admitting that cuz im a man.
But the almost 899 USD price here i have been whining about, well that are actually due to our record sales tax, if you take that off you do get to the MSRP from AMD

Still as it is, a little lower price or higher performance in relation to the competition would be very nice, now i am just hoping cards with other ( better ) coolers will not ruin my mood to buy.
BUT ! i am still going to wait until summer to see if i can get a NAVI card around then with this performance, if not i am hitting the put in basket button by then.

Indifferent to game bundle as those games are not something i would bet on i would be playing.
 
I wish AMD didn't rush this card to the shelves.

Drivers are still immature for a gaming card on release. I mean you can't even overclock it yet! I like they released it though, minus the fact they also didn't have very much stock on launch. I mean I tried to buy one and couldn't on day one and that about sums up my thoughts on the Radeon 7.

Maybe just maybe stock will improve and, we will finally get overclocking, so we can actually see what these things are capable of.

In all light of things I'm glad I got my Vega 64 for 400$ after the mining bust, been a great little hold over card with out having to pay that Nvidia RTX Tax.
 
Brent_Justice said:
You should re-read that page, starting with the first graph on the page.
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I did. It said:

"In this game the differences between DX12 and DX11 on the AMD Radeon VII are much closer than any other game. However, you can still see that technically DX11 is faster. We also tested at 4K to verify, and the 4K results also show DX11 being faster than DX12. Therefore, we will test in DX11 since that shows us the highest performance."
 
_mockingbird said:
I did. It said:

"In this game the differences between DX12 and DX11 on the AMD Radeon VII are much closer than any other game. However, you can still see that technically DX11 is faster. We also tested at 4K to verify, and the 4K results also show DX11 being faster than DX12. Therefore, we will test in DX11 since that shows us the highest performance."
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We do not understand your question apparently. Can you rephrase possibly?
 
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