Not so fine wine: Radeon VII vs RTX 2080

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5150Joker

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Techspot revisited the Radeon VII several months later after release to see if AMD driver updates have helped close the gap between it and the RTX 2080. Sadly, this didn't happen and in fact, in very popular multiplayer titles like Apex Legends, Fortnite and R6: Siege, the Radeon VII got smoked. Things didn't fare much better for team red at 4k with all its extra vram either.

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Clear Cut Winner
If we rewind a little, here's what we concluded after testing the Radeon VIIshortly after launch:

The Radeon VII is a fine graphics card, but it's not competitive enough against the RTX 2080. We review it exclusively as a gaming product (where that 16GB frame buffer is not really a factor) and frankly it under delivered. If it was more efficient than the RTX 2080 and ran quiet, maybe we could deem it a worthy alternative, but let’s not sugar coat this or beat around the bush, it’s not as efficient, it’s loud and for the most part it’s slower, only a little slower but it’s slower. For those reasons we can’t recommend the Radeon VII over the GeForce RTX 2080.

A few months later and not much has changed. We’ve had multiple driver releases and availability is decent now. There is a small group of believers that argue undervolting might deliver unexpected improvements, but at this point you'd need something of a miracle. Let’s not forget you can squeeze another ~10% out of the RTX 2080 without much of an increase in power draw and almost no impact on operating volume, which is great given most AIB models are virtually silent to begin with.
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Link to article:
https://www.techspot.com/review/1848-radeon-vii-vs-geforce-rtx-2080/#allcomments
 
as an owner of a RVII, i can agree mostly with that revisited review, i mean lets face it, the RVII on "AIR" runs HOOOOT, loud, and crazy power numbers, and also add to that the 700$ price tag. this card absolutley needed to be priced in the 499 range to be a go to card for great gaming performance and professional app use. THat would have been amazing. Now flip the pages a little, add a FCWB on this card, remove the power limits, registry tweak the powertables (using PPT mod) and this card is 2080+ performance with ease. This card wakes up when watercooled and restrictions taken off. If I didnt get this card at an amazing price from a seller here, i never would have spent 700$ on it, but now that I have it, I love the drivers, i love the control panel for OC'ing this card in the drivers, and once all the mods are applied, it is a decent performing card. As an owner of both a TitanXP and this card, its hard to tell the difference and in FC5, this card is faster at 3840x1080
 
https://hardforum.com/threads/hwub-radeon-vii-retest.1981897/#post-1044203896

Same people different medium :)

Maybe someone can make a new website and just copy and paste the findings of Hardware Unboxed and Techspot (in case you don't know it yet they are the same people just use a different medium (youtube vs website). Then you guys can copy 3 articles from the same original source...
 
If the Navi performance leaks are true, AMD has a bit of a problem with the product stack.
Use case is at stock in games for the following comments:
If RVII performance is less than a 2080 and the top Navi card is better than the 2070, what's the performance delta of the RVII/Navi? Seems like Navi will cannibalize RVII. Hopefully the RVII will keep the miners off of Navi if mining ever makes a strong comeback. Otherwise, RVII is about to be dead. That very well may be AMD's plan due to RVII production costs. There is no way I would buy this card at this stage of the game unless it was highly discounted and/or I was going to mine with it.
 
RAutrey said:
If the Navi performance leaks are true, AMD has a bit of a problem with the product stack.
Use case is at stock in games for the following comments:
If RVII performance is less than a 2080 and the top Navi card is better than the 2070, what's the performance delta of the RVII/Navi? Seems like Navi will cannibalize RVII. Hopefully the RVII will keep the miners off of Navi if mining ever makes a strong comeback. Otherwise, RVII is about to be dead. That very well may be AMD's plan due to RVII production costs. There is no way I would buy this card at this stage of the game unless it was highly discounted and/or I was going to mine with it.
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I think AMD had this pre-planned from the beginning and can easily phase out the RVII. The RVII chips will continue in another form as the Instinct MI50.
 
RVII is just like Vega. Runs hot with the Reference cooler, uses a lot of power, and performance just misses the mark. However, when better cooling is applied, voltage and frequency tweaking with PPT, they are MUCH better off. It puts Radeon VII beyond 2080 and Vega 64 in between 1080 and 1080TI. If only an AIB would release a RVII with an aftermarket HSF. *Ahem* Sapphire where are you?
 
RAutrey said:
If the Navi performance leaks are true, AMD has a bit of a problem with the product stack.
Use case is at stock in games for the following comments:
If RVII performance is less than a 2080 and the top Navi card is better than the 2070, what's the performance delta of the RVII/Navi? Seems like Navi will cannibalize RVII. Hopefully the RVII will keep the miners off of Navi if mining ever makes a strong comeback. Otherwise, RVII is about to be dead. That very well may be AMD's plan due to RVII production costs. There is no way I would buy this card at this stage of the game unless it was highly discounted and/or I was going to mine with it.
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I wouldn't trust any Navi performance leaks. But if it is cheaper to make than Radeon VII and almost as fast, I can see them phasing the VII out.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
https://hardforum.com/threads/hwub-radeon-vii-retest.1981897/#post-1044203896

Same people different medium :)

Maybe someone can make a new website and just copy and paste the findings of Hardware Unboxed and Techspot (in case you don't know it yet they are the same people just use a different medium (youtube vs website). Then you guys can copy 3 articles from the same original source...
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I hadn't seen that thread when I made this one. I wonder why Techspot decides to use different names for YT vs website? I guess it's kinda like Eurogamer and Digitalfoundry.
 
wantapple said:
3 months?
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Yeah.. I've always been under the impression that "fine wine" for AMD meant 1-2 years or more. Didn't the 290X start well behind the 780Ti and now would generally be better than a GTX 980 (non ti)? I would like to see 290X vs 980 revisited honestly, if anybody has done that.

I've been a vega 64 owner since launch however, I don't see these cards going that way. Overall gaming experience on a 1080 is still better as far as I know. Only in Far Cry 5 and New Dawn did my setup shine, but still stomped by a 1080Ti.

Not sure about Radeon VII but the V64 was clearly massively overclocked right from the factory to put it in league with the 1080, hence why nearly everybody undervolts them. With mature GCN drivers and the card pushed to the limit.. I didn't really expect much fine wine.
 
Mode13 said:
Yeah.. I've always been under the impression that "fine wine" for AMD meant 1-2 years or more. Didn't the 290X start well behind the 780Ti and now would generally be better than a GTX 980 (non ti)? I would like to see 290X vs 980 revisited honestly, if anybody has done that.

I've been a vega 64 owner since launch however, I don't see these cards going that way. Overall gaming experience on a 1080 is still better as far as I know. Only in Far Cry 5 and New Dawn did my setup shine, but still stomped by a 1080Ti.

Not sure about Radeon VII but the V64 was clearly massively overclocked right from the factory to put it in league with the 1080, hence why nearly everybody undervolts them. With mature GCN drivers and the card pushed to the limit.. I didn't really expect much fine wine.
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[H] disproved that back when they used to do reviews. They tested both AMD and nVidia drivers over time.

Sometimes AMD has a good bump a few weeks/months after a game launches, but that’s because their drivers sucked dick to begin with.
 
Mode13 said:
Yeah.. I've always been under the impression that "fine wine" for AMD meant 1-2 years or more. Didn't the 290X start well behind the 780Ti and now would generally be better than a GTX 980 (non ti)? I would like to see 290X vs 980 revisited honestly, if anybody has done that.
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Dayaks said:
[H] disproved that back when they used to do reviews. They tested both AMD and nVidia drivers over time.

Sometimes AMD has a good bump a few weeks/months after a game launches, but that’s because their drivers sucked dick to begin with.
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I’d hardly say they disproved it. They did their generational GPU comparisons and while the articles separate the cards by brand you can flip back and forth yourself to make comparisons between something like the 290x and 980.

I didn’t reread the article and cherry pick. I went with Rise of the Tomb Raider because it seemed middle of the road in terms of age (2016).
AMD:
https://m.hardocp.com/article/2018/09/04/amd_gpu_generational_performance_part_1/10

Nvidia:
https://m.hardocp.com/article/2018/07/25/nvidia_gpu_generational_performance_part_1/9

Same settings, same basic system (7700K@5GHz) and no the 290x doesn’t win, but I would call it comparable to the 980. Certaintly above the 780.
 
Mode13 said:
Yeah.. I've always been under the impression that "fine wine" for AMD meant 1-2 years or more. Didn't the 290X start well behind the 780Ti and now would generally be better than a GTX 980 (non ti)? I would like to see 290X vs 980 revisited honestly, if anybody has done that.

I've been a vega 64 owner since launch however, I don't see these cards going that way. Overall gaming experience on a 1080 is still better as far as I know. Only in Far Cry 5 and New Dawn did my setup shine, but still stomped by a 1080Ti.

Not sure about Radeon VII but the V64 was clearly massively overclocked right from the factory to put it in league with the 1080, hence why nearly everybody undervolts them. With mature GCN drivers and the card pushed to the limit.. I didn't really expect much fine wine.
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this may help, it cover 290X, 780Ti and also other relevant cards versus those as GTX 970 and GTX 980:

 
Nolan7689 said:
I’d hardly say they disproved it. They did their generational GPU comparisons and while the articles separate the cards by brand you can flip back and forth yourself to make comparisons between something like the 290x and 980.

I didn’t reread the article and cherry pick. I went with Rise of the Tomb Raider because it seemed middle of the road in terms of age (2016).
AMD:
https://m.hardocp.com/article/2018/09/04/amd_gpu_generational_performance_part_1/10

Nvidia:
https://m.hardocp.com/article/2018/07/25/nvidia_gpu_generational_performance_part_1/9

Same settings, same basic system (7700K@5GHz) and no the 290x doesn’t win, but I would call it comparable to the 980. Certaintly above the 780.
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Not sure what you're trying to show there.

This is the article I was talking about:

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/30/amd_video_card_driver_performance_review_fine_wine/
 
Araxie said:
this may help, it cover 290X, 780Ti and also other relevant cards versus those as GTX 970 and GTX 980:

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290X aged pretty well... but from what I have seen other cards like AMD released later like Fury didn't. On the Nvidia side Maxwell performance didn't drop off as much as Kepler did either. So it's really a gamble.
 
x3sphere said:
290X aged pretty well... but from what I have seen other cards like AMD released later like Fury didn't. On the Nvidia side Maxwell performance didn't drop off as much as Kepler did either. So it's really a gamble.
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what helped AMD was the fact that shared architecture across all their GPUs, damn even the newer navi is still GCN... that allowed that optimizations both on games and drivers side carried to older GPUS.. that stopped with polaris, changes made since polaris were enough to not carry games and driver optimizations to older GPUS, even when they had the stronger Fury line on hand, AMD just were focused on Polaris leaving Fury in the dust, they understanded that to achieve peak performance and better driver support they had to stop improving and optimizing every GPU.. same principle happened to Nvidia with maxwell and even when nvidia stopped further GPU optimizations, maxwell share a lot of Pascal and pascal share a lot with Volta and Turing, that's what help to keep Maxwell still relevant and good performer GPUS, thing that never happened to kepler..

So in that part actually 290X is not anything better than what it was in their time versus the 780Ti.. they have aged exactly the same, and actually maxwell's 970 and 980 have aged better..
 
Araxie said:
what helped AMD was the fact that shared architecture across all their GPUs, damn even the newer navi is still GCN... that allowed that optimizations both on games and drivers side carried to older GPUS.. that stopped with polaris, changes made since polaris were enough to not carry games and driver optimizations to older GPUS, even when they had the stronger Fury line on hand, AMD just were focused on Polaris leaving Fury in the dust, they understanded that to achieve peak performance and better driver support they had to stop improving and optimizing every GPU.. same principle happened to Nvidia with maxwell and even when nvidia stopped further GPU optimizations, maxwell share a lot of Pascal and pascal share a lot with Volta and Turing, that's what help to keep Maxwell still relevant and good performer GPUS, thing that never happened to kepler..

So in that part actually 290X is not anything better than what it was in their time versus the 780Ti.. they have aged exactly the same, and actually maxwell's 970 and 980 have aged better..
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But they didn't age the same...

Have a look here: https://babeltechreviews.com/the-retro-series-the-r9-290x-vs-the-gtx-780-ti/3/

Also, let's not forget 290X was intended to compete with the GTX 780, which it soundly whipped at the time. The 780 TI was released after the 290X in response to AMD.
 
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FlawleZ said:
But they didn't age the same...

Have a look here: https://babeltechreviews.com/the-retro-series-the-r9-290x-vs-the-gtx-780-ti/3/

Also, let's not forget 290X was intended to compete with the GTX 780, which it soundly whipped at the time. The 780 TI was released after the 290X in response to AMD.
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Its not like 290x was followed immediately by fury, and polaris; and stopped giving updates to them.

it first appeared in Oct 2013, got refreshed and pro-longed support with 390x in 2015. AMD only stopped giving updates to Hawaii and other older archs by June 2016 with Polaris release. Fury had the least amount of driver ups, of just 1 year.
One could state the 290x / Hawaii is the best graphics card of this decade. If you take the performance levels, and ability to compete.

The same chip Hawaii today is only slightly behind 980Ti

(not slightly but you know what i mean for GPU thats been around since 2013.)
 
cyklondx said:
Its not like 290x was followed immediately by fury, and polaris; and stopped giving updates to them.

it first appeared in Oct 2013, got refreshed and pro-longed support with 390x in 2015. AMD only stopped giving updates to Hawaii and other older archs by June 2016 with Polaris release. Fury had the least amount of driver ups, of just 1 year.
One could state the 290x / Hawaii is the best graphics card of this decade. If you take the performance levels, and ability to compete.

The same chip Hawaii today is only slightly behind 980Ti

(not slightly but you know what i mean for GPU thats been around since 2013.)
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Random benchmark from unknown youtuber with zero cred. SOTR becnhmarks as of 19-3-1919 from major HW site:

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pag..._graphics_performance_benchmark_review,7.html

Its a sign of desperation when people lower the standards of 'evidence' to such a degree that they seek out any info, no matter where its from or how shady, as long as it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. That Win 98 thing was really something too. :rolleyes:
 
amenx said:
Random benchmark from unknown youtuber with zero cred. SOTR becnhmarks as of 19-3-1919 from major HW site:

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pag..._graphics_performance_benchmark_review,7.html

Its a sign of desperation when people lower the standards of 'evidence' to such a degree that they seek out any info, no matter where its from or how shady, as long as it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. That Win 98 thing was really something too. :rolleyes:
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I didn’t watch their posted video but in the post they say the Hawaii chip is only slightly behind and then amend that to being more that slightly but has held up well.

Near as I can tell your guru3D link corroborates exactly the same thing, the 390x being slightly behind the 980ti.

So...why the rude snark?

And please mind I’ve already posted the [H] generational comparisons which show much the same. Hawaii aged very well even if fine wine drivers were “disproved”.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Hawaii aged very well even if fine wine drivers were “disproved”.
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Reading through this, it looks quite a bit as if we can look at AMD's drivers in terms of GCN optimization over the years, instead of just at individual GPUs.

Consider that if it took them years to get a handle on their own architecture, the older GCN parts would show more improvement vs. their launch performance than the newer parts. As the newest part, the Radeon VII should gain almost nothing from drivers- they were already optimized with Vega.

The hard part is that we can't really use any trend to predict performance. AMD was rightly skewered for their drivers up until their last few release cycles, and they have made very significant improvements since. Assuming that they have a decent handle on Navi, perhaps we won't have to make jokes about waiting for AMD's driver guy to catch up ;).
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Reading through this, it looks quite a bit as if we can look at AMD's drivers in terms of GCN optimization over the years, instead of just at individual GPUs.

Consider that if it took them years to get a handle on their own architecture, the older GCN parts would show more improvement vs. their launch performance than the newer parts. As the newest part, the Radeon VII should gain almost nothing from drivers- they were already optimized with Vega.

The hard part is that we can't really use any trend to predict performance. AMD was rightly skewered for their drivers up until their last few release cycles, and they have made very significant improvements since. Assuming that they have a decent handle on Navi, perhaps we won't have to make jokes about waiting for AMD's driver guy to catch up ;).
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Yeah I’m definitely not talking in regards to the VII just the older cards really. And your reasoning makes perfect sense, the oldest card has the most room to grow, and the newest on that arch is already jumping from a higher platform.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Yeah I’m definitely not talking in regards to the VII just the older cards really. And your reasoning makes perfect sense, the oldest card has the most room to grow, and the newest on that arch is already jumping from a higher platform.
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And somehow over time the Fury went backwards in performance. Seems like sabotage...
 
Nolan7689 said:
I didn’t watch their posted video but in the post they say the Hawaii chip is only slightly behind and then amend that to being more that slightly but has held up well.

Near as I can tell your guru3D link corroborates exactly the same thing, the 390x being slightly behind the 980ti.

So...why the rude snark?

And please mind I’ve already posted the [H] generational comparisons which show much the same. Hawaii aged very well even if fine wine drivers were “disproved”.
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My bad. Mistook SOTR for the BF1 bench just after it in the vid which shows the 980ti behind the 390x. More established sites show otherwise: https://www.techspot.com/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page2.html. The 980ti was in a league of its own and comparing it to the 390x based on outlier results is kind of face-palmy. My 'snarky' remark was more based on the posters earlier vid showing old cards benched on Win 98. So basically when a poster trolls in one post or vid, all their input becomes suspect afterwards.
 
amenx said:
My bad. Mistook SOTR for the BF1 bench just after it in the vid which shows the 980ti behind the 390x. More established sites show otherwise: https://www.techspot.com/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page2.html. The 980ti was in a league of its own and comparing it to the 390x based on outlier results is kind of face-palmy. My 'snarky' remark was more based on the posters earlier vid showing old cards benched on Win 98. So basically when a poster trolls in one post or vid, all their input becomes suspect afterwards.
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Just to still stir the pot some, while the 980ti is further beyond the 390x, it still posts some respectable numbers.

Also fun to see in there is the 290 (non x) beating out both the OG Titan and the 780ti both which once easily beat it I believe.

Cards age funny at times. 8800GT(G92), and now (in my opinion) 290x(HawaiiXT) and very likely the 1080ti. Above and beyond performance for above and beyond the expected normal lifespan.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Just to still stir the pot some, while the 980ti is further beyond the 390x, it still posts some respectable numbers.

Also fun to see in there is the 290 (non x) beating out both the OG Titan and the 780ti both which once easily beat it I believe.

Cards age funny at times. 8800GT(G92), and now (in my opinion) 290x(HawaiiXT) and very likely the 1080ti. Above and beyond performance for above and beyond the expected normal lifespan.
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This really seems like a pointless argument. "Aging better" is often just a case of launching with poor drivers.

Which isn't exactly a huge positive, nor is it guaranteed that it will play out the same way in the future.
 
Nolan7689 said:
Also fun to see in there is the 290 (non x) beating out both the OG Titan and the 780ti both which once easily beat it I believe.
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Part of that is going to be which 290 you're benchmarking. The ones available upon release had a pretty horrific cooler on them; people were taking wire cutters to the slot covers to 'open them up' a little. Still loud as hell, though.

If they got one with a decent aftermarket cooler there was a pretty decent delta from stock even with the earlier drivers, IIRC.
 
Snowdog said:
This really seems like a pointless argument. "Aging better" is often just a case of launching with poor drivers.

Which isn't exactly a huge positive, nor is it guaranteed that it will play out the same way in the future.
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It’s a case of poor drivers, but I’m also looking at performance in newer games. That’s the aged part, the drivers being poor 4 years ago is irrelevant if a game released tomorrow still runs well.

And now you or someone else can counter with “ oh but that’s just games not actually being demanding.” To which I can just shrug, long lived cards are neat. Sorry.
 
FlawleZ said:
And somehow over time the Fury went backwards in performance. Seems like sabotage...
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nah it didn't go backwards. Some titles just do not perform well with just 4GB. If you test same old titles, you'd see there's almost no gain (maybe fps or 2)
There are things to consider from windows updates too, those could hurt. Though as fury-x owner i haven't seen performance going down over time. Just stagnation.

There were definitely some boosts in vulkan though in doom. There were 2 or 3 updates that upped fury's vulkan performance in doom by 20-40FPS. (to point where I'm getting ~165FPS on avg on nightmare @1080p, and around 190FPS avg on ultra @ 1080p. On the other hand the linux performance on fury-x has been steadily increasing.


Nolan7689 said:
Just to still stir the pot some, while the 980ti is further beyond the 390x, it still posts some respectable numbers.

Also fun to see in there is the 290 (non x) beating out both the OG Titan and the 780ti both which once easily beat it I believe.

Cards age funny at times. 8800GT(G92), and now (in my opinion) 290x(HawaiiXT) and very likely the 1080ti. Above and beyond performance for above and beyond the expected normal lifespan.
Click to expand...

The 7970 also aged really well. The performance increased through the roof on those.
(7970, 280x) At the moment they are competing with gtx780, and gtx1650.
// I see 7970 as one of the greatest GPU's made by ATi/AMD. I respect it, since i ran 6970, and 6990 - when i ran crysis 3 on them on highest it wasn't nice, and then a single 7970 could do more - game was actually fluid, with less heat at that. (this was also the last good generation of asus directcu II / matrix cards.)
 
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IIRC the "Fine Wine" argument came about due to AMD's hardware generally having more forward thinking hardware improvements. First for DX12 etc.

So your age old AMD card can still run the latest stuff, albeit slowly, but it still can.

Personally though Wine's not my thing as I prefer to get proper shit-canned on Nvidia (whisky). :p
 
cyklondx said:
The 7970 also aged really well. The performance increased through the roof on those.
(7970, 280x) At the moment they are competing with gtx780, and gtx1650.
// I see 7970 as one of the greatest GPU's made by ATi/AMD. I respect it, since i ran 6970, and 6990 - when i ran crysis 3 on them on highest it wasn't nice, and then a single 7970 could do more - game was actually fluid, with less heat at that. (this was also the last good generation of asus directcu II / matrix cards.)
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Agreed just hadn’t mentioned it being unsure of how the RAM was still handling things these days.
 
at those frame rates the difference is not noticeable, i am more interested in the min frame rates which seem to be very good for Nvidia and AMD
 
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