Finally, a day that's cause for celebration for AMD at the top-end. Nvidia's been having things a little too easy lately but along comes AMD's Radeon VII 16GB HBM2, a premium graphics card with a premium price.
The Radeon VII will set you back around $700, and in terms of performance, AMD is claiming it's roughly in line with Nvidia's $800 GeForce RTX 2080. But is it really?
The reviews have been dropping; opinions are divided on AMD's first 7nm GPU. The Radeon VII utilises a Vega II chipset and is in some ways potentially a stop-gap until Navi drops, possibly even later this very year. What you do get for your money though is video card with a whopping 16GB of second-gen HBM2 memory. It's gluttonous, it's excessive, but you can be sure you won't be bottlenecked by VRAM for some time to come.
But what about the all-important performance of the Radeon VII?
With our graphics card benchmark database here on GD you can compare the 1080p and 4K frame rates of just about any modern graphics cards out there. We’ve got a massive range of Radeon VII benchmark results available, covering just about all the major AAA game releases of recent years at both 1080p and 4K resolutions.
You can see the full game FPS benchmark results for each graphics card over on the GPU pages here on GD, as well as directly compare how multiple cards stack up against one another using our hardware comparison tool.
So, is the $699 AMD Radeon VII a worthwhile competitor to Nvidia's ray-tracing capable GeForce RTX 2080?
AMD Radeon VII 16GB vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 8GB 1080p Game FPS Benchmarks
If you're gaming at 1080p, there's little argument that both of these graphics cards are bewilderingly unnecessary unless you absolutely need to get your money's worth out of your 144Hz monitor. It just isn't the target resolution of these GPUs. Even with every graphics setting maxed out in all of these games, these graphics cards are often pulling in frame rates in the hundreds.
Getting down the specifics, the GeForce RTX 2080 has a slight performance advantage over the Radeon VII at 1080p. The HBM2 memory won't even get a chance to stretch its legs here and so the RTX 2080 pulls ahead by a handful of frames in almost every test. There's really not a lot in it though, so aside from the ray-tracing capabilities of the RTX 2080, the Radeon VII offers comparative performance for a hundred bucks less.
In general, the GeForce RTX 2080 runs 5-10% faster than the AMD Radeon VII at 1080p.
AMD Radeon VII 16GB vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 8GB 4K Game FPS Benchmarks
Once you're paying $700 or more for a graphics card, 4K performance is probably a top priority. Neither the Radeon VII nor the RTX 2080 are capable of consistently hitting 60 frames per second on Ultra at 4K though, and will need a handful of graphics settings dialed down to achieve this. There's a much better 4K card out there in the shape of the RTX 2080.
However, in terms of what they can do, we see they trade blows in a number of these tests. In games which use DirectX 12, the Radeon VII often comes out on top of the more expensive RTX 2080, while in other titles we see the 2080 pull ahead. Nvidia's lead here is actually much smaller, and there are quite a few 4K tests where the Radeon VII pulls well ahead. Typical 4K frame rates favour the RTX 2080 by just 2 or 3%.
Rather than being a graphics card right at the top of the pack then, it would appear the Radeon VII is probably best suited to 1440p displays. Which is all quite odd and makes the 16GB HBM2 seem even more excessive than it is. Considering how prohibitively expensive HBM2 is compared to GDDR6, the memory seems an unnecessary added cost forced by AMD railroading its chip design into HBM. If it would've been a simpler process for AMD to swap out the memory for GDDR6 we're sure they would have, and in doing so dropped the price and ensured a genuine competitor to Nvidia's GeForce RTX range.
A reminder as well that you can see these FPS game benchmark results for just about every major graphics card here on GD. You can compare any two AMD or Nvidia GPUs at both 1080p and 4K and get an instant readout on performance. Just head to any graphics card page to get the ball rolling, or use our Graphics Card Performance Head to Head page.
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As someone who generally prefers AMD cards, I'd rather buy an RTX 2080 instead of Radepn vii. I don't need all those FP core/high memory bandwidth because I need a graphics card just for gaming. I like how desperately AMD tried to market Radeon vii as a gaming card in ces when it's clearly not a gaming card because all
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that compute/HBM2 performance is essentially wasted for gaming. At least with RTX 2080 you'll get all the ray tracing features and the card is about 2/3 of the power consumption of Radeon vii (85W difference) so that will save your electricity bills.
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vs ?
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Lol if you think I'm about to change my company preference, then I'm not. What I like about AMD cards is their usually higher price/performance value compared to Nvidia's. It was the case when I was deciding between RX 580 and GTX 1060. Also, some of the games that I like have Vulkan or DX12 API's which perform better
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If you don't mind me asking, what are you using the 32GB RAM?
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on AMD's architecture. That being said, I will by an Nvidia GPU if its price/performance value is better than AMD's. Both Radeon vii and 2080 price is way beyond how much I'm willing to spend on a GPU. I'm currently happy with my RX 580, but there is a rumor that RX 3080 will be 15% faster than Vega 64 for just 250$.
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If that's going to be the case, I'll probably upgrade.
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@Tforulez It's for future proofness, same reason why I have an i7 8700k. The RAM had a nice discount on a black friday sale so it was worth it. I game at 1080p so I don't need a top of the range GPU, but I think that it's simply the most cost efficient strategy to invest more in core system components like the CPU to
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maximize its longevity and do mainstream performance GPU upgrades throughout its lifetime.
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just asking cause here 32 GB memory costs more than an RX 580 8GB...
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watch DF review on youtube , perhaps it might change your view
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I'd rather buy an AIB rtx 2080 for $700
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1080TI is better and cheaper than both.
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it is very difficult to get 1080Ti below $800 now
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That's a tough sell, both GPUs are priced at £650 in the UK.
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Despite crypto dying this card is still selling like hot cakes. I mean vega 64 was also out of stock barely 24hrs after it released but that was mainly due to miners. I think a lot of people were waiting for this card but not for mining purposes. It says out of stock everywhere
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Because there barely was any to begin with.
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An the morons kept peddling the illusion that AMD will save us. As religious fanatics once again are proved to be wrong but i guess this third consecutive fu ck up will not stop them from regurgitating the same sh ite over and over again.
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The card cost 1000 $ fricking dollars in my country while i can find the competitor for 800$. Consumes more power, operates at a higher temperature with less performance.
What a deal?! It's a steal! AMD has indeed saved us! :)))
And I thought Nvidia RTX 2080 was overpriced sh ite.
AMD was like: Nvidia hold my beer!
They are just a joke in the GPU department
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The card isn't even listed in my country's shops^^ and its already out of stock everywhere as I see...
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The reference Radeon VII doesn't go over 67C on full load... why would you assume it runs hot? https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_vii_16_gb_review,7.html
Also, it's not a gaming GPU... HBM2 has no advantage for games over GDDR5/6, but that 16GB of HBM2 and Interposer cost combined 420$ to AMD...
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Also the Radeon VII has 2:1 FP16/FP32 core ratio and the 1:2 FP64/FP32 core ratio, the rtx 2080 and gtx 1080ti has 1:64 FP16/FP32 core ratio and 1:32 FP64/FP32 core ratio, the Radeon VII has 128x more FP16 cores per FP32 core and 8x times more FP64 cores per FP32 core, neither the FP16, not FP64 are used for gaming(so far) and for the foreseeable future. And those FP16 and FP64 cores take a lot of die space, and that increases die size, thus cost, power consumption and heat.
This is not really a gaming GPU, in a sense that it's packed with tons of expensive technology that is useless for gaming, namely HBM2, and tons of FP16 and FP64 cores.
The only problem with this GPU is that they marketed it for gaming...
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Many reviews say it is thermal throttled all the time with some parts of the gpu reaching almost 115°C
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btw techpowerup measured 76°C on full load
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/32.html
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https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/33.html
see the junction temperature?
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it doesn't matter what the average temps are (they come from 60 sensors) the gpu downclocks if the junction temp goes above 115°C
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76C is still great, considering that the maximum safe operating temperature is 95C+ and the maximum operating temperature is 105C.
Though I've noticed that temperatures vary a lot in different reviews, strange.
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Hmm... well which part is 115C exactly? The VRMs on the Rx 480 could operate to up to 125-130C, so I doubt the Radeon VII ones are worse.
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but does the rx480 downclock based on those temps?
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nope. And again 115C is for which part of the GPU? I doubt the VRMs choke at 115C.
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it is the highest reading of the 64 sensors on the gpu die
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Hmm... don't know then, will research further.
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Is beyond me why are people defending companies that don't give a fu ck about them and only care about profit. The amazement is even greater seeing they do this even when these companies are shown to be incompetent and a joke.
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Not defending any company... I hate AMD, Intel and Nvidia equally, those duopolizing, stagnating, slow-ass, profit seekers have ruined hardware evolution(progression), let alone revolution... I love facts on the other hand, logic, I like to play spectate the game they are playing... it's entertaining. On top of that, since we are limited in choice, we have to pick the lesser evil.
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So "mister fact" which fact did i got wrong, huh?:))) Can you explain? I am curious!
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that nobody is defending a company... -_-
It runs cool, the Tjunction temperature of 110C is 10-15C lower than the maximum safe operating temperature and 67-76C(depending on which review you look at) is still very cool considering that the maximum safe operating temperature is 95C and maximum operating temperature is 105C...
You also listened to what a company tells you, instead of critically thinking. This GPU is not optimized for gaming... the abundance of FP16/FP64 cores show that, which is why it's got a bigger die size than it should have and higher power consumption, on top of that it's got 16GB of HBM2 memory, when 8GB at 500GB/s would have been ideal for just gaming. This is a workload GPU that can game, just like the Quadro Gp100 and p6000.
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Sir my statement was: RTX 2080 runs at a lower temperature then Radeon 7. This is true for AIB parterns and founders edition. I looked for example at Gamers Nexus reviews of RTX founders edition and Radeon 7.
Nobody forced them to market a workload GPU as a gaming GPU. Nobody forced them to put 16 GB of HBM2 on the GPUS. Ergo why the joke. Capish sir?!!:)))i
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Well, the architecture forced them to put 16GB of HBM2 memory or in general HBM2 memory. With only 8GB the bandwidth would bottleneck, at 16GB it's overkill, since HBM2's bus width scales with the capacity of the Vram.
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You are talking as if they were not responsible for the architecture. LOL. As a i said nobody forced them to market a workload GPU as a gaming GPU.
Your excuses for them not being a joke are a joke indeed.
Your apology was basically :" their fu ck up is because their architecture is a joke".
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What's with all this defending companies stuff mate, all I'm doing is giving you the whats and the whys of the GPU...
I don't care about AMD or Nvidia or Intel, I hate them equally, those corporate bastards, purposefully slowing down technology evolution by just giving is more of the same, but slightly better, while ignoring tons of architectural techniques and technologies, improvements in the ISA and overall architectural improvements. Trying to make as small die as possible to be sold at as high price as possible to increase profit margins, while being just good enough to compete with each other and releasing products that just better enough to be called new...
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So then you agree they are a joke? You can't have it both ways!
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I don't have it both ways, neither do I want it both ways, I just want good products and this duopoly is crap, thanks to these freaking licensing laws we are quite screwed.
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On the other hand doesn't stop me from knowing as much as possible about their products and all their quirks, analyzing what they do and give an opinion about it.
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Now you are talking about things that are irrelevant to the topic. Poisoning the well is kind of illogical sir. You are all over the place sir. Going from topic to another. :)))
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I'm staying on the same topic of not defending any company, but analyzing their products, their decisions and actions... no clue what you are talking about... -_-
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to Psychoman: Sir what "duopoly, licensing laws and what you want" have to do with what we were talking about. We were talking about AMD being a joke; about their GPU being more expensive then the competitor while performing worse in all the important areas(temperature, performance, power consumption).
Side stepping the issues with irrelevant things i am afraid that it does not help you .
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Anyway i don't care about this gpu, i was waiting for navi,and this one is pretty far from that, so i'll keep waiting. Using this card for gaming is like buying 3000$ xeon tu run minesweeper, i mean on paper it's a tank but it's pretty useless for gaming, and it will not even shake the market imo. Really looking forward to navi for my mext upgrade.
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Why did they market this card for gaming? -_-
AMD really will never understand what marketing and consumer mindshare are, nor how important they are... This GPU is packed with useless for gaming tech, namely tons of FP16 cores and FP64 cores, inflating the price, die size and power consumption and thus cost, neither of which are used in games(so far) and probably won't be in the foreseeable future...
Same with HBM2, it has no benefit for gamers and the 16GB HBM2 + interposer cost a combined 420$ to AMD alone...
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So AMD gamers can play Resident Evil 2 Remake at 4K/MAX settings but Nvidia gamers can't? XD Another win for team RED! :)
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Just disappointing...
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lmao the card is already sold out world wide ..seriously this the vega 64 launch all over again
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I just see a GPU that wast so much VRAM, at least if it is being used for gaming.
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Poll question is bit unfair, you don't have to pay 800USD for 2080, it has MSRP of 699USD and there are models for that MSRP. Also it is unfair, because we don't know what will happen to Radeon VII pricing, considering that UK got only 100, I expect price will spike up pretty fast as supply runs out.
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So, taking more expensive models with real price vs MSRP of RVII is kind of unfair, they have same MSRP and should be treated as MSRP vs MSRP. And for 699USD, I would get GeForce and call RTX bonus I don't care about. Because I really don't need 16GB of VRAM. If it was cheaper, then I would be happy to get RVII.
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Though with TDP of 295W on Radeon, I am worried about heat and that is why I lean more towards nVidia, simply because their card might be cooler, quieter and less power hungry. Though I need to see reviews for confirmation on that.
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Oh, look at that, I was right, card is a lot more power hungry, fans are a way louder at 1k higher RPM, performance is all over the place to where it is sometimes equivalent to 2070 and sometimes it manages to shine. So basically it is 7nm Vega and I would still go with 2080, if I was in the market.
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Also if you seriously are considering R VII, I would recommend waiting for partner models. From what I saw up to no. And that is after me watching reviews...
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I just used the MSRP for the first-party models
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Every single AMD GPU at launch is underwhelming. Two to three years later they improve drastically because of driver updates.
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And that's the time when another gen come out...
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It doesn't mean everyone always buys the new generation of GPUs.
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Why shall i buy a gpu that gets good when the next generation comes out? I would go for the new gen, it's the most logic thing to do. I had an rx480 8gb and it was really good at launch, sure it improved but now it makes no sense to buy one
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AMD doesn't have anything new at that price range. The RX 580 is basically the same as the 480. So, might as well.
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Let's say you buy a card for 300$ knowing that it will improve by the next gen release. For the same price you'll get the new gen card. What would you do?
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Keep the $300 card since i have no need to upgrade every single year.
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lets be honest if read some the reviews the driver have not matured was hot issues on the YouTube reviews but Amd is fixing them so they can give proper review so stay tuned for that
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This.
This just proves my point about AMD, Nvidia is superior performance and quality, plus they run much cooler.
I tried to tell people but did anyone listen? NO!
Almost no one listens to a word I say. -_-
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yeah put use more power some can not afford that power requirements
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This proves neither of your points. XD
Nvidia has consistently had worse quality during Fermi and Pascal's life cycle than AMD and the rest of the time they are on par at best... the VRMs in a reference rx 480 were as good as those in a gtx 1080ti...
And from what I saw the reference Radeon VII runs slightly cooler than reference FE edition of the gtx 1080ti... and quite cooler than the rtx 2080 reference model...
On top of that the Radeon VII is packed with FP16 and FP64 cores, so yeah...
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https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_vii_16_gb_review,7.html
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maybe cooler but still consumes more power. You gotta accept that AMD is generations behind nvidia in terms of power efficiency.
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No it's not... again not a gaming GPU... it has tons of FP16 cores and FP64 cores... the gtx 1080(ti) and rtx 2080(ti) have 128x less FP16 core to FP32 core ratio and 8x times less FP64 cores to FP32 core ratio... -_-
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Look at the GP100 it has 3584 cores and HBM2, but consumes more power than the gtx 1080ti(gp102) that has 3840 cores and GDDR5X(gddr5x consumes more than twice more power than HBM2), about 300W for the GP100 and 250W for the gtx 1080ti why? The GP100 has more FP64 cores... same with the Radeon VII... useless for gaming, but for work it's awesome. The only problem of the radeon VII is that they marketed it as a gaming GPU...
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@Psychoman stop fanboying dude, we all know that AMD GPUs draw more power. Even the rx 570 draws more power than gtx 1060. And what do you mean it's not a gaming GPU? Lisa Su herself said that it's a gaming GPU. Who are you to tell on AMD's behalf?
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The amount of people that kept screaming "wait for Vega", this probably hurts. HBM seems so useless for general gaming, the added cost isn't really helping AMD.
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Whilst I want AMD to win, I agree with you on this. Since the Fury series, HBM hasn't done any favours except make their cards poor value compared to Nvidia.
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Imagine the same cards with the same performance at $100 less because the cheaper memory option was used.
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I was just recently reading about this. Apparently the costs of developing an entirely new GPU that supports GDDR6 were simply too high. So they just rebranded their existing workstation cards.
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Neither the Fury nor Vega are built to be gaming GPUs, in a sense that they are packed with Fp16 and FP64 cores that are useless for gaming, while increasing die sizes and thus power and heatoutput and again being useless for gaming, on top of that HBM1/HBM2 is pointless for games over GDDR5/6, it's very useful for compute.
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I think AMD is just pursuing the server/computing market since, first it has tons more money in it and second people didn't buy their GPUs for gaming as much as they did Nvidia's, even though AMD had superior architectureS from 2007-2016(until Pascal) for gaming(and compute at the same time)...
Considering that tons of people want AMD to be very competitive with Nvidia, just to get cheaper Nvidia GPUs it serves everybody right now that AMD doesn't really care for gamers... next time people should buy the product they want to be good, not just use it to lower the prices of the brand they want to buy.
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"next time people should buy the product they want to be good" not gonna lie, this cracked me up... Buy product which is best for you and which has the best value.
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No my point is that when a company releases good product people should buy it, not just want it to be good, then if it turns out to be good and people just use to as a price reduction for some other brand to buy their products cheaper, regardless of how good they are...
And amd have a history of releasing better and cheaper GPUs than their competition and yet the best they managed to get was 50% market share, with the hd5000 series, when Nvidia couldn't release Fermi for many months... -_-
go figure...
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yes i agree with that psycho
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Even though is underwhelming im kinda glad they reached around 1080 ti level of performance,cause AMD kinda reached the pinnacle of their arhitecture,i mean back in 2013 290x was a damn beast,but after that we got 390x which was the same thing,3-4% better,fury X which was sometimes beaten by 390X in DX12 VRAM intensive
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Than we had 480/580/590 witch were like 10% better with improved power effeciency and drivers,so if they came with something that can match 1080 ti perf there is still hope,they refreshed too much,and focused mostly on ryzen and ps5/xb2 gpus,and they really fell behind,they're like 1 generation behind nvidia right now
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Never plan on gaming above 1080p anyway. Well, at least until the same that has happened to 1280x1024 monitors happens here. Until they stop producing 1080p monitors, I'll game away. Never really cared much for graphics and stuff like that, only immersion and Distant LOD. Always have and always will buy something in line with RX 580/590. From 4870, over to R9 280X... next upgrade is probably R? 680
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I plan to play at 1080p ultra settings until a mid range GPU capable of at least solid 60 fps at ultra settings with medium AA gets released in the market, until then i will stick with my gtx 1060 and 1080p 60 HZ monitor.
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So the 7nm "2080 killer" is in fact ties with the 16nm 1080Ti which is more than 3 years old...
And runs hotter while consumes more power and being also louder
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I recommend everyone to read the detailed reviews before downvoting me or buying one
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I recommend you to look at the benchmarks better before you spread misinformation - it ties with the RTX 2080 +-, in some games better, in some games ties, in some games worse ... but value is clearly better.
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You can deny it all day, unless you cherry pick the amd favouring games the averages will show that it ties with the 1080Ti No amount of downvotes change that
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If you dont believe me check for yourself https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/28.html
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just wanted to correct small mistake, 1080ti was released in 2017.
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Fair enough, but my point still stands
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Well 1080ti is faster than 2080 in some games...