The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Testbed Setup
To preface, because of the SMU changes mentioned earlier, no third party utilities can read Radeon VII data, though patches are expected shortly. AIB partner tools such as MSI Afterburner should presumably launch with support. Otherwise, Radeon Wattman was the only monitoring tool possible, except we observed that the performance metric log recording and overlay sometimes caused issues with games.
On that note, a large factor in this review was the instability of press drivers. Known issues include being unable to downclock HBM2 on the Radeon VII, which AMD clarified was a bug introduced in Adrenalin 2019 19.2.1, or system crashes when the Wattman voltage curve is set to a single min/max point. There are also issues with DX11 game crashes, which we also ran into early on, that AMD is also looking at.
For these reasons, we won't have Radeon VII clockspeed or overclocking data for this review. To put simply, these types of issues are mildly concerning; while Vega 20 is new to gamers, it is not new to drivers, and if Radeon VII was indeed always in the plan, then game stability should have been a priority. Despite being a bit of a prosumer card, the Radeon VII is still the new flagship gaming card. There's no indication that these are more than simply teething issues, but it does seem to lend a little credence to the idea that Radeon VII was launched as soon as feasibly possible.
| Test Setup | |||||
| CPU | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz | ||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g) | ||||
| PSU | Corsair AX860i | ||||
| Storage | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) | ||||
| Memory | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
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| Case | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition | ||||
| Monitor | LG 27UD68P-B | ||||
| Video Cards | AMD Radeon VII AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (Air) AMD Radeon R9 Fury X NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti |
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| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Release 417.71 AMD Radeon Software 18.50 Press |
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| OS | Windows 10 x64 Pro (1803) Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
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Thanks to Corsair, we were able to get a replacement for our AX860i. While the plan was to utilize Corsair Link as an additional datapoint for power consumption, for the reasons mentioned above it was not feasible for this time. On that note, power consumption figures will differ for earlier GPU 2018 Bench data.
In the same vein, for Ashes, GTA V, F1 2018, and Shadow of War, we've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous GPU 2018 data.
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drgigolo - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
Yeah, of course I am looking at it that way :-) But I also like tech, and find the progress lacking these last years. Longer development cycles and diminishing returns for a lot more dollars.remedo - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Why isn't there any benchmarks for machine learning or deep learning?imaheadcase - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Because the card is not for that...loleva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It kind of is... it is a Radeon Instinct M150 with less memory.DigitalFreak - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
The buy a Radeon Instinct M150GreenReaper - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Sure, if you want to pay two and a half times as much! Maybe get two and blow the rest on juice.eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Well, you are buying a Vega 20 gimped... >:/So you do in reality... >:/
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
In short, ML results take longer to put together than these relatively short embargoes allow for. It's also not a primary market for this card, so other things such as gaming performance testing get priority.That said, we're curious about it as well. Now that we're past the embargo, check back in later this month. We have an RTX Titan review coming up, which will give us a great opportunity to poke at the ML performance of the Radeon VII as well.
eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
I will be curious to see that. Compute/ML/Rendering/Content Creation comparison. I was more looking for this in all honesty since we knew what to expect from the card from the beginning.HStewart - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I would think this is expected, AMD trying there best to go against NVidia video and probably release because some of struggles that RTX is having with unit issues.But in stage in my life, personally I don't need a high end graphics card but I would go nVidia because of past good experience. But in any case how many owners actually need high end card. For majority 90+ % of people Integrated graphics are good enough for spreadsheets, internet and word processing