We’ve always turned to NVIDIA for high-end gaming graphics cards. But AMD looks to be doing everything they can to fight the tide. It’s driven them to design the first-ever GPU with a 7nm graphics chip called Radeon VII. The new graphics card was announced at CES 2019.
Specs and performance
The Radeon VII is built on the world’s first 7nm Silicon chip and features 60 compute units with 3,840 stream processors running at clock speeds up to 1.8GHz. It also features a 4096-bit HBM2 memory interface with a 16GB high bandwidth memory; added to 1TB/sec memory bandwidth.
This GPU comes with a gamer-friendly triple-fan cooling solution designed to produce little noise.
According to AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su, the new GPU will offer competitive performance including AMD’s RX Vega with no difference in power consumption.
Footage of the GPU running Devil May Cry at 4K resolution and ultra settings was shown by AMD at CES. It depicted frame rates beyond 70fps. With that one Terabyte-per-second memory, the Radeon VII graphics card should comfortably offer superior performance to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 for playing games such as Fortnite, Far Cry 5 and Battlefield V. Although AMD didn’t demonstrate this.
Release date and price
AMD says the new graphics card will be available to customers from 7th February. It will cost $699. This is exactly the same price as a standard NVIDIA RTX 2080.
For each graphics card or gaming PC that comes preinstalled with the Radeon 7, customers will receive a souvenir of games such as Resident Evil 2, The Division 2 and Devil May Cry 5.
The catch
Juxtaposed with AMD’s previous top graphics card the Vega 64, the release of a high-performance gaming GPU like Radeon VII shows immense effort from AMD. Especially when you consider the staggering amount of memory this card offers.
We have here a graphics card that promises better frame-rates than NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 titles. Plus better performance for high-end games that support Vulkan. There isn’t much we could ask to build a better gaming pc.
