8 ms·

AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot at the High End

92 points by gbrown_ 8y ago

tutanchamun 8y ago
Taken from the other thread: Other reviews: - (guru3d) https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-vii-16-gb-review,1.html https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-vii-16-gb-r... - (tomshardware) https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-vega-20-7nm,5977.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-vega-20-... - (techpowerup) https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/ https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/ - (arstechnica) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/amd-radeon-vii-a-7nm-long-step-in-the-right-direction-but-is-that-enough/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/amd-radeon-vii-a-7nm-... - (gamersnexus) https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3437-amd-radeon-vii-review-not-ready-for-launch https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3437-amd-radeon-vii-re... - (gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-solid-gaming-card-but-thats-just-1832412200 https://gizmodo.com/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-solid-gaming-card-b... - (gamespot) https://www.gamespot.com/articles/radeon-vii-review-can-amds-new-card-handle-4k-pc-g/1100-6464872/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/radeon-vii-review-can-amds... - (digitaltrends) https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-radeon-vii-review/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-radeon-vii-revie... - (extremetech) https://www.extremetech.com/computing/285286-amd-radeon-vii-review-this-isnt-the-7nm-gpu-youre-looking-for https://www.extremetech.com/computing/285286-amd-radeon-vii-... - (pcper) https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-VII-Review-Supercharged-Vega https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-VII-... - (techspot) https://www.techspot.com/review/1789-amd-radeon-vii/ https://www.techspot.com/review/1789-amd-radeon-vii/ - (tweaktown) https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8894/amd-radeon-vii-review-team-red-back-enthusiast-gpus/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8894/amd-radeon-vii-review... - (engadget) https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-video-4k-benchmarks/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-vi... - (pcmag) https://www.pcmag.com/review/366382/amd-radeon-vii https://www.pcmag.com/review/366382/amd-radeon-vii - (techradar) https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii - (hothardware) https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-review-and-benchmarks https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-review-and-be... - (kitguru) https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/zardon/no-custom-radeon-vii-at-launch-amd-say-partners-free-to-make-them/?PageSpeed=noscript https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/zardon/no-custom-radeon-vi... - (hardwarezone) https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/review-amd-radeon-vii-review-finally-high-end-card-amd https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/review-amd-radeon-vii-review... - (rockpapershotgun) https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-7-review/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-7-rev... - (hexus) https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/126752-amd-radeon-vii/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/126752-amd-radeon-vi... - (bit-tech) https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-vii-review/1/ https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-vii-re... - (legitreviews) https://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-vii-16gb-video-card-review_210489 https://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-vii-16gb-video-card-... - (overclock3d) https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/amd_radeon_vii_review/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/amd_radeon_... - (techgage) https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-vii-1440p-4k-ultrawide-gaming-performance/ https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-vii-1440p-4k-ultrawi... - (computerbase - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerbase.de%2F2019-02%2Famd-radeon-vii-test%2F3%2F%23abschnitt_benchmarks_in_1920__1080_und_2560__1440 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... - (pc games hardware - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgameshardware.de%2FRadeon-VII-Grafikkarte-268194%2FTests%2FBenchmark-Review-1274185%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A... - (harwareluxx - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardwareluxx.de%2Findex.php%2Fartikel%2Fhardware%2Fgrafikkarten%2F48510-7-nm-gpu-und-16-gb-hbm2-die-radeon-vii-im-test.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3... - (golem - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2Fnews%2Fradeon-vii-im-test-die-grafikkarte-fuer-videospeicher-liebhaber-1902-138906.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3... - (hardware.info - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnl.hardware.info%2Freviews%2F9051%2Famd-radeon-vii-review-nieuwe-kans-voor-vega-op-7-nanometer https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3...
- petercooper 8y ago
  - (linus tech tips) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhEgNvzv50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhEgNvzv50
- pantalaimon 8y ago
  (phoronix) https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-vii-linux https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-v...
tutanchamun 8y ago
EDIT: if the chart on the Anandtech review is true I have to take back what I wrote below. I didn't know the AMD Radeon Instinct MI50 (6.7 TFLOPS FP64, 16 GB memory with ECC and also 1 TB/s bandwidth) only costs 1000 USD, I expected it to be closer to the FirePro cards. So if you don't need active cooling this seems like a even better choice. Good that AMD reverted their decision on FP64 which means the card has 3.5 TFlops. The only real competitor in the consumer space seems to be the Nvidia Titan V which has 6.9 TFlops, 12 GByte of memory with 652.8 GB/s and costs 3000 USD. The Radeon 7 only has half of the TFLOPS for FP64 but 16 GByte with 1024 GB/s and only costs 700 USD. I don't have a use case for double precision but I'm sure people who need it will like the card.
- bitL 8y ago
  The compute performance was quite low for 3.5TFlops, in F@H even beaten by 2070... I am wondering if it's again drivers/SW holding AMD back, like with Deep Learning (in theory 15TFlops, in practice 7.5 etc.)
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    NVidia's Turing cores are clearly more dynamic than AMD's. There are also driver issues for sure. ROCm and RadeonGPU-Pro (two different OpenCL implementations) have numerous differences in performance. ROCm 2.1 is still absolutely awful at Blender for example (definitely use RadeonGPU-PRO drivers for that instead). In some cases, I bet on Ahmdal's law. NVidia has fewer shaders at a higher clock than AMD. AMD's architecture is implicitly more parallel than NVidia's, so Ahmdal's law will hurt it (AMD's 4096 shaders on Vega64 will use more RAM than NVidia's 2304 CUDA shaders on the 2070). In others, it seems like AMD's drivers are still unoptimized. Something weird is going on with Blender's code and ROCm for example. -------- EDIT: I've seen some profiler data, and it seems like AMD's GPUs are rarely compute-ALU bound. They are often memory-bound. So AMD has far too strong compute for the graphics problems at hand. Alternatively, AMD's algorithms may be poorly tuned: they probably should be more compute heavy and try to use less RAM Bandwidth.
  - throwaawyw 8y ago
    3.5 Tflops at double precision. The applied math/scientific computation people are going to love this.
baybal2 8y ago
300W power consumption, and it still only caught up with Nvidia cards drawing less than 200W on gaming performance
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  This is classic AMD... medium performance for medium pricing.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Still kind of shocking that $700 is "medium pricing" now.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
      AMD's pricing tends to tumble kinda quick. Expect a $500 cost in 6 months and $300 in a year. The $700 dollar is probably due to low yields right now.
      - twtw 8y ago
        That's very unlikely. 16 GB of HBM2 alone probably costs AMD around $300, and HBM2 prices are unlikely to fall soon (they've actually been trending up, if what I've read is to be believed).
        snvzz 8y ago
        Navi is expected by late H1, and at that point VII won't matter.
        Nursie 8y ago
        Isn't Navi expected to be more of a mid-market Polaris replacement, rather than a Vega successor?
        8y ago
IloveHN84 8y ago
For me, 700$ are still high end. Time ago the high end was above 500$ and the price climbed during this time thanks to cryptomining. With 200/300 you could buy a modest graphic card that could last 3 years playing top titles. Now in that price range you can just keep up one year and then it's completely trash
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  I think a RX580 or Nvidia 1060 is still perfectly great for modern gaming and can be picked up for $200 or less.
  - holtalanm 8y ago
    rx 580 8GB is good. the 4GB version is lagging behind a little -- VRAM spills into system RAM regularly. I assume the 1060 3GB has a similar problem. source: I have a 4GB and am currently saving up to upgrade. edit: also, the rx 580 4GB generally runs at a lower clock than the 8GB counterpart, which affects performance, as well.
    - skohan 8y ago
      Which titles are using more than 4GB these days?
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        https://techreport.com/r.x/2019_02_06_AMD_s_Radeon_VII_graphics_card_reviewed/memory.jpg https://techreport.com/r.x/2019_02_06_AMD_s_Radeon_VII_graph... Seems to be a VRAM-based calculation. There have been some youtubers looking into the "pop in" effect on GPUs with less VRAM. Basically, GPUs will render images at a lower texture level if the texture wasn't fitting in VRAM. So the failure case is pretty smooth these days and hard to notice. Basically, the mountain range in the background may only be a 2k texture, but may pop into a 4k texture after a bit. Because the 2k texture is a mipmap of the 4k texture, its actually hard to notice. So you can stretch lower VRAM Settings these days better than you'd expect. Another thing: just because VRam is allocated doesn't necessarily mean that the VRAM is being used. If you look at a wall in any video game, all the textures are going unused. Taken to the extreme: there are people and objects "behind" a lot of geometries that you'll never see in the game, but will be allocated to VRAM. As such, a game may allocate 9GB total, but not really need the last 2 or 3 GB. So even if a game reports 9GB or 10GB of usage, you may get by with a 8GB card. ------------- In any case, we're long past the 4GB of RAM mark. Practically speaking, games require 6GB at least and may break 8GB in the near future IMO. 8GB seems to be sufficient for now though (thanks to pop-in, VRAM overallocation, etc. etc.)
twtw 8y ago
I'm sorta surprised that the specs are so similar to the MI50. Seems like this might cannibalize the sales of MI50 for applications that don't use fp64 (i.e. all ML/DL uses).
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Well, that's the thing. Its clearly a discount MI50. PCIe 4.0 and a coherent GPU-fabric however are MI50 only features, so anyone buying bundles of GPUs for hardcore compute will want to stick with the MI50 for sure.
bluedino 8y ago
Could this be the piece Apple was waiting for to release the new Mac Pro?
- minikites 8y ago
  At this point I expect the Mac Pro to go the way of AirPower with Apple never mentioning it again and calling the iMac Pro "good enough".
  - auggierose 8y ago
    To be honest, for many purposes it is good enough. I love this machine. The Vega 64 inside the iMac Pro even has 16GB instead of the standard 8GB.
tracker1 8y ago
Happy to see at least SOME competition, would be nice to see AMD offer something by end of the year competative to RTX 2080 Ti, which should at least drive some pricing competition. I wouldn't be surprised to see a $100-200 drop for RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti because of this.
vkaku 8y ago
TL;DR: - Stock/Better than RTX 2080 performance at 1440p/4k. - Needs driver updates for overclocking and for matching 1080p performance. - Heat design bad on founder card. - Expensive and mostly Sold out. I'll wait for Navi.
piinbinary 8y ago
It seems that this has a better process (7nm vs. 12nm), more memory (and bandwidth), and more power draw than the RTX cards. So why does it have equal/lower performance? Is it just that it has fewer transistors (13.2B vs. 18.6B)? (And if so, why doesn't the smaller process allow more transistors?) Or is there also a difference in the architecture where a better design could get more performance out of the same amount of silicon?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  It seems like NVidia's fixed-function graphics are still superior over AMD's. From a raw compute perspective, the AMD card performs as well as you'd expect. The phoronix OpenCL benchmarks prove that point. But in gaming, people have been blaming AMD's low allocation of ROP units and poor geometry pipeline. A lot of it is drivers I bet. NVidia got a lot more money and puts more effort into drivers for sure. AMD pushes Vulkan / DirectX12 for that reason, since the raw hardware is better exposed to the programmer.
- Ilverin 8y ago
  'Yields' are what fraction of the chips produced end up usable rather than damaged/broken. With 7nm, yields are down. With larger chips by area, yields are always lower than smaller chips. So AMD can save money by putting extra memory rather than gpu silicon because the memory costs less than gpu silicon. https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-video-4k-benchmarks/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-vi...
  - holtalanm 8y ago
    umm.. the Radeon VII's memory makes up over half of the production cost of the card. HBM2 is not cheap.
    - Ilverin 8y ago
      Per square millimeter, memory costs less than gpu silicon. (and Radeon VII's memory takes up more square millimeters than half). https://www.anandtech.com/show/13923/the-amd-radeon-vii-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13923/the-amd-radeon-vii-revi... (Also yield decrease per transistor added is nonlinear, so going from a 331 square mm to say 495 square mm would probably decrease yields by roughly half, even though number of transistors would be less than doubled).
shmerl 8y ago
The pricing puts it outside of what I'd consider a gaming oriented card. Same can be said about Nvidia's RTX by the way. Nice performance though, it's the highest performance "gaming" card with open drivers today.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
The big surprise is the disabled PCIe 4 support. It makes sense in isolation, but since they plan on launching Zen2 ASAP with PCIe4 being one of its flagship features this would be very complementary. Doesn't the left hand of AMD talk to the right hand?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  AMD's gotta have a reason to sell the higher-end MI50.
  - bpye 8y ago
    Maybe these are binned chips? Don't make PCIe 4.0 spec? That's okay, sell them as consumer parts.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    They could have sold a ton of Zen2 / Radeon7 bundles. Instead they chose to sold a few dozen more MI50's.

92 points by gbrown_ 8y ago

Taken from the other thread: Other reviews: - (guru3d) https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-vii-16-gb-review,1.html https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-radeon-vii-16-gb-r... - (tomshardware) https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-vega-20-7nm,5977.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-vega-20-... - (techpowerup) https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/ https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/ - (arstechnica) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/amd-radeon-vii-a-7nm-long-step-in-the-right-direction-but-is-that-enough/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/amd-radeon-vii-a-7nm-... - (gamersnexus) https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3437-amd-radeon-vii-review-not-ready-for-launch https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3437-amd-radeon-vii-re... - (gizmodo) https://gizmodo.com/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-solid-gaming-card-but-thats-just-1832412200 https://gizmodo.com/amds-radeon-vii-is-a-solid-gaming-card-b... - (gamespot) https://www.gamespot.com/articles/radeon-vii-review-can-amds-new-card-handle-4k-pc-g/1100-6464872/ https://www.gamespot.com/articles/radeon-vii-review-can-amds... - (digitaltrends) https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-radeon-vii-review/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-radeon-vii-revie... - (extremetech) https://www.extremetech.com/computing/285286-amd-radeon-vii-review-this-isnt-the-7nm-gpu-youre-looking-for https://www.extremetech.com/computing/285286-amd-radeon-vii-... - (pcper) https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-VII-Review-Supercharged-Vega https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-VII-... - (techspot) https://www.techspot.com/review/1789-amd-radeon-vii/ https://www.techspot.com/review/1789-amd-radeon-vii/ - (tweaktown) https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8894/amd-radeon-vii-review-team-red-back-enthusiast-gpus/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8894/amd-radeon-vii-review... - (engadget) https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-video-4k-benchmarks/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-vi... - (pcmag) https://www.pcmag.com/review/366382/amd-radeon-vii https://www.pcmag.com/review/366382/amd-radeon-vii - (techradar) https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii - (hothardware) https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-review-and-benchmarks https://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-vii-review-and-be... - (kitguru) https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/zardon/no-custom-radeon-vii-at-launch-amd-say-partners-free-to-make-them/?PageSpeed=noscript https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/zardon/no-custom-radeon-vi... - (hardwarezone) https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/review-amd-radeon-vii-review-finally-high-end-card-amd https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/review-amd-radeon-vii-review... - (rockpapershotgun) https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-7-review/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-7-rev... - (hexus) https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/126752-amd-radeon-vii/ https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/126752-amd-radeon-vi... - (bit-tech) https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-vii-review/1/ https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/graphics/amd-radeon-vii-re... - (legitreviews) https://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-vii-16gb-video-card-review_210489 https://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon-vii-16gb-video-card-... - (overclock3d) https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/amd_radeon_vii_review/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/amd_radeon_... - (techgage) https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-vii-1440p-4k-ultrawide-gaming-performance/ https://techgage.com/article/amd-radeon-vii-1440p-4k-ultrawi... - (computerbase - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerbase.de%2F2019-02%2Famd-radeon-vii-test%2F3%2F%23abschnitt_benchmarks_in_1920__1080_und_2560__1440 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... - (pc games hardware - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgameshardware.de%2FRadeon-VII-Grafikkarte-268194%2FTests%2FBenchmark-Review-1274185%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A... - (harwareluxx - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardwareluxx.de%2Findex.php%2Fartikel%2Fhardware%2Fgrafikkarten%2F48510-7-nm-gpu-und-16-gb-hbm2-die-radeon-vii-im-test.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3... - (golem - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2Fnews%2Fradeon-vii-im-test-die-grafikkarte-fuer-videospeicher-liebhaber-1902-138906.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3... - (hardware.info - google translate) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnl.hardware.info%2Freviews%2F9051%2Famd-radeon-vii-review-nieuwe-kans-voor-vega-op-7-nanometer https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&u=https%3...

petercooper 8y ago
- (linus tech tips) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhEgNvzv50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhEgNvzv50
pantalaimon 8y ago
(phoronix) https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-vii-linux https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-v...

tutanchamun 8y ago

EDIT: if the chart on the Anandtech review is true I have to take back what I wrote below. I didn't know the AMD Radeon Instinct MI50 (6.7 TFLOPS FP64, 16 GB memory with ECC and also 1 TB/s bandwidth) only costs 1000 USD, I expected it to be closer to the FirePro cards. So if you don't need active cooling this seems like a even better choice. Good that AMD reverted their decision on FP64 which means the card has 3.5 TFlops. The only real competitor in the consumer space seems to be the Nvidia Titan V which has 6.9 TFlops, 12 GByte of memory with 652.8 GB/s and costs 3000 USD. The Radeon 7 only has half of the TFLOPS for FP64 but 16 GByte with 1024 GB/s and only costs 700 USD. I don't have a use case for double precision but I'm sure people who need it will like the card.

bitL 8y ago
The compute performance was quite low for 3.5TFlops, in F@H even beaten by 2070... I am wondering if it's again drivers/SW holding AMD back, like with Deep Learning (in theory 15TFlops, in practice 7.5 etc.)
- dragontamer 8y ago
  NVidia's Turing cores are clearly more dynamic than AMD's. There are also driver issues for sure. ROCm and RadeonGPU-Pro (two different OpenCL implementations) have numerous differences in performance. ROCm 2.1 is still absolutely awful at Blender for example (definitely use RadeonGPU-PRO drivers for that instead). In some cases, I bet on Ahmdal's law. NVidia has fewer shaders at a higher clock than AMD. AMD's architecture is implicitly more parallel than NVidia's, so Ahmdal's law will hurt it (AMD's 4096 shaders on Vega64 will use more RAM than NVidia's 2304 CUDA shaders on the 2070). In others, it seems like AMD's drivers are still unoptimized. Something weird is going on with Blender's code and ROCm for example. -------- EDIT: I've seen some profiler data, and it seems like AMD's GPUs are rarely compute-ALU bound. They are often memory-bound. So AMD has far too strong compute for the graphics problems at hand. Alternatively, AMD's algorithms may be poorly tuned: they probably should be more compute heavy and try to use less RAM Bandwidth.
- throwaawyw 8y ago
  3.5 Tflops at double precision. The applied math/scientific computation people are going to love this.

baybal2 8y ago

300W power consumption, and it still only caught up with Nvidia cards drawing less than 200W on gaming performance

WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
This is classic AMD... medium performance for medium pricing.
- detaro 8y ago
  Still kind of shocking that $700 is "medium pricing" now.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    AMD's pricing tends to tumble kinda quick. Expect a $500 cost in 6 months and $300 in a year. The $700 dollar is probably due to low yields right now.
    - twtw 8y ago
      That's very unlikely. 16 GB of HBM2 alone probably costs AMD around $300, and HBM2 prices are unlikely to fall soon (they've actually been trending up, if what I've read is to be believed).
      - snvzz 8y ago
        Navi is expected by late H1, and at that point VII won't matter.
        Nursie 8y ago
        Isn't Navi expected to be more of a mid-market Polaris replacement, rather than a Vega successor?
        8y ago

IloveHN84 8y ago

For me, 700$ are still high end. Time ago the high end was above 500$ and the price climbed during this time thanks to cryptomining. With 200/300 you could buy a modest graphic card that could last 3 years playing top titles. Now in that price range you can just keep up one year and then it's completely trash

Synaesthesia 8y ago
I think a RX580 or Nvidia 1060 is still perfectly great for modern gaming and can be picked up for $200 or less.
- holtalanm 8y ago
  rx 580 8GB is good. the 4GB version is lagging behind a little -- VRAM spills into system RAM regularly. I assume the 1060 3GB has a similar problem. source: I have a 4GB and am currently saving up to upgrade. edit: also, the rx 580 4GB generally runs at a lower clock than the 8GB counterpart, which affects performance, as well.
  - skohan 8y ago
    Which titles are using more than 4GB these days?
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      https://techreport.com/r.x/2019_02_06_AMD_s_Radeon_VII_graphics_card_reviewed/memory.jpg https://techreport.com/r.x/2019_02_06_AMD_s_Radeon_VII_graph... Seems to be a VRAM-based calculation. There have been some youtubers looking into the "pop in" effect on GPUs with less VRAM. Basically, GPUs will render images at a lower texture level if the texture wasn't fitting in VRAM. So the failure case is pretty smooth these days and hard to notice. Basically, the mountain range in the background may only be a 2k texture, but may pop into a 4k texture after a bit. Because the 2k texture is a mipmap of the 4k texture, its actually hard to notice. So you can stretch lower VRAM Settings these days better than you'd expect. Another thing: just because VRam is allocated doesn't necessarily mean that the VRAM is being used. If you look at a wall in any video game, all the textures are going unused. Taken to the extreme: there are people and objects "behind" a lot of geometries that you'll never see in the game, but will be allocated to VRAM. As such, a game may allocate 9GB total, but not really need the last 2 or 3 GB. So even if a game reports 9GB or 10GB of usage, you may get by with a 8GB card. ------------- In any case, we're long past the 4GB of RAM mark. Practically speaking, games require 6GB at least and may break 8GB in the near future IMO. 8GB seems to be sufficient for now though (thanks to pop-in, VRAM overallocation, etc. etc.)

twtw 8y ago

I'm sorta surprised that the specs are so similar to the MI50. Seems like this might cannibalize the sales of MI50 for applications that don't use fp64 (i.e. all ML/DL uses).

dragontamer 8y ago
Well, that's the thing. Its clearly a discount MI50. PCIe 4.0 and a coherent GPU-fabric however are MI50 only features, so anyone buying bundles of GPUs for hardcore compute will want to stick with the MI50 for sure.

bluedino 8y ago

Could this be the piece Apple was waiting for to release the new Mac Pro?

minikites 8y ago
At this point I expect the Mac Pro to go the way of AirPower with Apple never mentioning it again and calling the iMac Pro "good enough".
- auggierose 8y ago
  To be honest, for many purposes it is good enough. I love this machine. The Vega 64 inside the iMac Pro even has 16GB instead of the standard 8GB.

tracker1 8y ago

Happy to see at least SOME competition, would be nice to see AMD offer something by end of the year competative to RTX 2080 Ti, which should at least drive some pricing competition. I wouldn't be surprised to see a $100-200 drop for RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti because of this.

vkaku 8y ago

TL;DR: - Stock/Better than RTX 2080 performance at 1440p/4k. - Needs driver updates for overclocking and for matching 1080p performance. - Heat design bad on founder card. - Expensive and mostly Sold out. I'll wait for Navi.

piinbinary 8y ago

It seems that this has a better process (7nm vs. 12nm), more memory (and bandwidth), and more power draw than the RTX cards. So why does it have equal/lower performance? Is it just that it has fewer transistors (13.2B vs. 18.6B)? (And if so, why doesn't the smaller process allow more transistors?) Or is there also a difference in the architecture where a better design could get more performance out of the same amount of silicon?

dragontamer 8y ago
It seems like NVidia's fixed-function graphics are still superior over AMD's. From a raw compute perspective, the AMD card performs as well as you'd expect. The phoronix OpenCL benchmarks prove that point. But in gaming, people have been blaming AMD's low allocation of ROP units and poor geometry pipeline. A lot of it is drivers I bet. NVidia got a lot more money and puts more effort into drivers for sure. AMD pushes Vulkan / DirectX12 for that reason, since the raw hardware is better exposed to the programmer.
Ilverin 8y ago
'Yields' are what fraction of the chips produced end up usable rather than damaged/broken. With 7nm, yields are down. With larger chips by area, yields are always lower than smaller chips. So AMD can save money by putting extra memory rather than gpu silicon because the memory costs less than gpu silicon. https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-video-4k-benchmarks/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/amd-radeon-vii-review-vi...
- holtalanm 8y ago
  umm.. the Radeon VII's memory makes up over half of the production cost of the card. HBM2 is not cheap.
  - Ilverin 8y ago
    Per square millimeter, memory costs less than gpu silicon. (and Radeon VII's memory takes up more square millimeters than half). https://www.anandtech.com/show/13923/the-amd-radeon-vii-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13923/the-amd-radeon-vii-revi... (Also yield decrease per transistor added is nonlinear, so going from a 331 square mm to say 495 square mm would probably decrease yields by roughly half, even though number of transistors would be less than doubled).

shmerl 8y ago

The pricing puts it outside of what I'd consider a gaming oriented card. Same can be said about Nvidia's RTX by the way. Nice performance though, it's the highest performance "gaming" card with open drivers today.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

The big surprise is the disabled PCIe 4 support. It makes sense in isolation, but since they plan on launching Zen2 ASAP with PCIe4 being one of its flagship features this would be very complementary. Doesn't the left hand of AMD talk to the right hand?

dragontamer 8y ago
AMD's gotta have a reason to sell the higher-end MI50.
- bpye 8y ago
  Maybe these are binned chips? Don't make PCIe 4.0 spec? That's okay, sell them as consumer parts.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  They could have sold a ton of Zen2 / Radeon7 bundles. Instead they chose to sold a few dozen more MI50's.