AMD is the first tech company to market a 7nm gaming GPU. Nor intel nor Nvidia have reached this process node lithography.
The 300W AMD Radeon VII features a Vega 20 processor with 16GB of HBM2 on a 4,096-bit bus. Should those numbers impress you? Yes, they definitely should.
AMD’s new model is an excellent addition to the GPU and PC build market already saturated by Nvidia’s Turing-based graphics cards. Even so, the expensive GeForce RTX 20180 Ti is still is the best GPU out there for gaming.
Radeon VII doesn’t hold a candle to GeForce RTX 2080 series or even the RTX 2070 series. But it does represent a considerable competition for GeForce RTX 2060 graphics cards.
Overall, the AMD Radeon VII is a high-end alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs, and maybe that’s enough. The card became available on February 7 for $600.
AMD Radeon VII is a card for PC build enthusiasts
AMD’s Vega 20 graphics processor is a 7nm node that operates much higher clock rates than its predecessor, the Vega 10.
Vega 20 also sports 13.2 billion transistors, 700 extra transistors than the Vega 10. AMD says these parts improve the GPU’s video encode support at 4K.
Because of all of its improvements, Radeon VII offers a higher peak FP64performance than any other card in AMD’s consumer lineup. In fact, only Nvidia’s high-end Titan V card competes with this.
According to AMD; the compute abilities of the Radeon VII are as follows:
| Radeon RX Vega 64 | Radeon VII | Radeon Instinct MI60 | |
| Peak FP64 | 0.84 TFLOPS | 3.46 TFLOPS | 7.4 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP32 | 13.4 TFLOPS | 13.8 TFLOPS | 14.7 TFLOPS |
| Peak FP16 | 26.7 TFLOPS | 27.7 TFLOPS | 29.5 TFLOPS |
| Peak INT8 | 53.4 TOPS | 55.3 TOPS | 59 TOPS |
| Peak INT4 | 106.8 TOPS | 110.7 TOPS | 118 TOPS |
AMD Radeon VII specs
There are 16Compute Units per each shahader engine, plus 64 Stream processors, and four texture units per CU. Overall, there are 4,096 Stream processors and 256 texture units in the GPU.
However, Radeon doens’t utilise the complete Vega 20. Instead, it disables part o the processor and yields 3,840 Stream processors and 40 texture units.
Each Shader Engine also sports four render back-ends capable of 16 pixels per each clock cycle. The serult is 64 ROPs.
| Radeon VII | GeForce RTX 2080 FE | Radeon RX Vega 64 | GeForce GTX 1080 FE | |
| Architecture (GPU) | Vega 20 | Turing (TU104) | Vega 10 | Pascal (GP104) |
| Shaders | 3840 | 2944 | 4096 | 2560 |
| Peak FP32 Compute | 13.8 TFLOPS | 10.6 TFLOPS | 12.7 TFLOPS | 8.9 TFLOPS |
| Tensor/RT Cores | N/A | 368/46 | N/A | N/A |
| Texture Units | 240 | 184 | 256 | 160 |
| Base Clock Rate | 1400 MHz | 1515 MHz | 1247 MHz | 1607 MHz |
| GPU Boost Rate | 1750 MHz | 1800 MHz | 1546 MHz | 1733 MHz |
| Memory Capacity | 16GB HBM2 | 8GB GDDR6 | 8GB HBM2 | 8GB GDDR5X |
| Memory Bus | 4096-bit | 256-bit | 2048-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 1 TB/s | 448 GB/s | 484 GB/s | 320 GB/s |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 |
| L2 Cache | 4MB | 4MB | 4MB | 2MB |
| TDP | 300W | 225W | 295W | 180W |
| Transistor Count | 13.2 billion | 13.6 billion | 12.5 billion | 7.2 billion |
| Die Size | 331 mm² | 545 mm² | 486 mm² | 314 mm² |
AMD Radeon VII 16GB final verdict
Pros
- Performance is excellent at 2560 x 1550 pixels and maximum quality
- Great for 4K gaming albeit with dialled-back settings
- 16GB of HBM2 is ideal for memory-intensive workloads
- It comes with three-game bundle adds, some substantial value
The bundles include Resident Evil 2 Remake, Devil May Cry 5, and The Division 2.
Cons
- Performance lags behind Nvidia’s’ Geforce RTX 20180, although it costs the same price. Also, it’s deafening when under heavy load.
Verdict
It’s a good thing AMD launched a GPU than compete and even surpasses GeForce RTX 2060 graphics cards. The 16GB of HBM” plus the three-game bundles give the Radeon VII value beyond it’s $699 price tag. However, we’d like to see a lower-priced alternative mainly because Nvidia’s cards going for the same price are better.
