Radeon VII a win or fail?

[nashathedog]

Yes the RTX 2080 is a better gpu overall,
So why go for a V7 instead of an RTX 2080?
For me the answer's Freesync,
I know Nvidia have unlocked the drivers to allow it's use but they claim it only works properly with a handful of adaptive sync monitors & they're not willing to provide a list of those it doesn't work properly with & what the problem is, Their answer seems to be go buy our card and try it out for yourself, Why would I want to risk it? I have one of the better first gen monitors & I know it's adaptive sync works flawlessly with AMD gpu's, Yes I could send the gpu back within the 14 day return window with no questions asked but that's not what the return rule is for, if we start abusing it in that way we'll end up losing it so I prefer to only return a gpu (and I have returned a few) when it has a real fault like coil whine or artifacting etc, that means playing it safe. So I go with what I know works.

Then people should also learn to temper those expectations. If anybody has the slightest idea of who AMD are as a company then they would know they're coming back from a very long and very damaging financial situation, and frankly getting the Radeon 7 out at all was a small miracle. You can't just bang out competition-beating architecture overnight with zero money, so if people were expecting a game-changing product from a respun existing architecture repurposed from a datacenter compute card then frankly they're idiots and the disappointment is of their own making.

If you don't know who AMD are as a company and where they've come from, they've just dropped a card out of the blue that matches the RTX 2080, which is not a 2 year old product.

+1

 

[Boomstick777]

Looks like a beast of card, trading blows with RTX 2080 and that massive frame buffer. Good to see an alternative option.

RTX 2080 / Radeon 7, have awesome performance and pricing isn't that bad (I mean bad but not that bad).

It's the 2080 Ti pricing that's bonkers, saw one going for £2000. Absolute madness. Could buy both the RTX 2080 and Radeon 7 and a CPU..

I think either R7 or RTX 2080 is good choice for high end gaming. RTX 2080 Ti for the crazies xD

 

[JediFragger]

/waits for @Boomstick777 to put his order in....

 

[B1scu1T]

For me this card is AMD doing nothing more than the bare minimum to remain relevant, presumably because they had to announce something at the keynote and their next gen isn't ready.
It's not a bulk sell mid-range card, its not a range topping revolution, its not a price competitive market shifter... it's exactly what it physically is, a professional card sold to consumers on a thin margin that just about competes with the opposition's overpriced, purpose built card.

I'm pretty ambivalent towards it to be honest, i wish it had really pushed the market in one way or another, but instead its just... kinda there, in the same market segment as what we already had and werent't happy with as a value proposition... but I'm at least glad AMD is still dropping relatively competitive products.

 

[Participant]

So, exactly the same as RTX then.

Correct, that's disappointing too, though it has more technology than the R7 with DLSS and RT.

 

[nashathedog]

For me this card is AMD doing nothing more than the bare minimum to remain relevant, presumably because they had to announce something at the keynote and their next gen isn't ready.
It's not a bulk sell mid-range card, its not a range topping revolution, its not a price competitive market shifter... it's exactly what it physically is, a professional card sold to consumers on a thin margin that just about competes with the opposition's overpriced, purpose built card.

I'm pretty ambivalent towards it to be honest, i wish it had really pushed the market in one way or another, but instead its just... kinda there, in the same market segment as what we already had and werent't happy with as a value proposition... but I'm at least glad AMD is still dropping relatively competitive products.

Hi, Doing the bare minimum to remain relevant isn't what it's about, This is the best they can do at this moment in time plain & simple, They've been working on a shoestring budget for several years while money was being diverted to the development of Zen (Ryzen), Ryzen's been selling well which has given them the opportunity to eventually become competitive in the gpu arena again,
The boss (L.Su) has said that due to how Ryzens been doing she's now able to divert more funds to RTG (Radeon) but converting that into R&D & better gpu's takes time, we're talking years so for now it's a waiting game. The best gaming gpu AMD could possibly put out right now would be a version using the core of the MI60 (the VII is a version of the MI50) but that has 32gb's of memory and would probably push pricing through the roof meaning it's not a viable product for them or us.
Personally I think the only reason they released the VII was because MI50 sales have slowed down but that's just conjecture.

 

[ALXAndy]

Looks like a beast of card, trading blows with RTX 2080 and that massive frame buffer. Good to see an alternative option.

RTX 2080 / Radeon 7, have awesome performance and pricing isn't that bad (I mean bad but not that bad).

It's the 2080 Ti pricing that's bonkers, saw one going for £2000. Absolute madness. Could buy both the RTX 2080 and Radeon 7 and a CPU..

I think either R7 or RTX 2080 is good choice for high end gaming. RTX 2080 Ti for the crazies xD

This. Not every one wants to buy from Nvidia, so it gives them something.

The drivers are a total mess, but I am sure they will be fixed. I'm more looking at this card a year from now than right now. It's already been shown that a Vega 64 can beat a 1080 with good drivers in DX12 games, and I would say that it won't be much longer before every game released (at least the big ones) is DX12 also.

I was rather annoyed at the Vega 56/64 launch. AMD tried all of the dirty tricks in the book to make it sound better than it was. However, with the DX12 titles I have played on mine I must say I am very impressed. Well, apart from the DX12 games that are not really DX12 and had it patched in and thus run worse than DX11.

This launch? I am finding it hard to fault, other than the drivers. I see Lisa Su took over? good call. No more smoke and mirrors, no BS it's basically exactly what she said it would be.

 

[B1scu1T]

Hi, Doing the bare minimum to remain relevant isn't what it's about, This is the best they can do at this moment in time plain & simple, They've been working on a shoestring budget for several years while money was being diverted to the development of Zen (Ryzen), Ryzen's been selling well which has given them the opportunity to eventually become competitive in the gpu arena again,

"Best they can do", and "the bare minimum" in this context are not mutually exclusive terms, although I agree that "best they can do" is probably the better description.

The boss (L.Su) has said that due to how Ryzens been doing she's now able to divert more funds to RTG (Radeon) but converting that into R&D & better gpu's takes time, we're talking years so for now it's a waiting game. The best gaming gpu AMD could possibly put out right now would be a version using the core of the MI60 (the VII is a version of the MI50) but that has 32gb's of memory and would probably push pricing through the roof meaning it's not a viable product for them or us.
Personally I think the only reason they released the VII was because MI50 sales have slowed down but that's just conjecture.

Surely the MI60 would have almost identical performance to MI50 from a gaming perspective anyway? 16GB framebuffer is already unlikely to get saturated and the extra 4 CU's arent going to significantly change the performance.

I actually think, with that in mind, "best they could do" might have been to tape out a 16GB or 12GB (three stacks?) chip with a 64CU core, but it wouldn't have made any financial sense to introduce an extra production line for such a low margin part.

 

[Nasher]

For me this card is AMD doing nothing more than the bare minimum to remain relevant, presumably because they had to announce something at the keynote and their next gen isn't ready.
It's not a bulk sell mid-range card, its not a range topping revolution, its not a price competitive market shifter... it's exactly what it physically is, a professional card sold to consumers on a thin margin that just about competes with the opposition's overpriced, purpose built card.

I'm pretty ambivalent towards it to be honest, i wish it had really pushed the market in one way or another, but instead its just... kinda there, in the same market segment as what we already had and werent't happy with as a value proposition... but I'm at least glad AMD is still dropping relatively competitive products.

They have just skipped on gimmicks (like RTX and DLSS) and loaded it up with very fast memory etc. Which is the reason we still see Vega performing well when old nvidia cards fade away performance wise.

Trying to compete with the 2080ti is a waste of time. It's priced far in to irrelevance. Almost all cards sold cost less than £400.

 

[B1scu1T]

They have just skipped on gimmicks (like RTX and DLCC) and loaded it up with very fast memory etc. Which is the reason we still see Vega performing well when old nvidia cards fade away performance wise.

Trying to compete with the 2080ti is a waste of time. It's priced in to irrelevance. Almost all cards sold cost between about £200-350.

Yeah completely agree with this. Yet to see any relevance for DLSS or Ray Tracing in actual games we would play when the industry has got so good at faking features such as lighting anyway.

The £200-350 price point is part of my ambivalence towards this. Its basically the same value proposition as an RTX2080, which was basically the same as a 1080ti... neither of which were really exciting, so unless you're part of the minority which spends that kind of money the only real reason to buy it is if you don't like handing cash to Nvidia (which I don't, particularly). I just don't feel like this does anything for the market other than keep AMD "in the game".

I would like to say "until we get Navi"... but at this point I feel I have said something similar after all the AMD releases in the past few years, so I'll hold my tongue and just see what happens. My second hand Vega 56 Nitro+ LE does enough for me and likely will for the forseeable future.
At least, as @nashathedog mentioned, RTG will have received better funding this time around so chances are better for a market shake-up.

 

[ICDP]

From my perspective as an RTX 2080 owner I would call it a much bigger failure than Radeon VII if we judge purely on what AMD and Nvidia set out to achieve.

• Nvidia wanted to sell us features such RTX and that DHSS or whatever it's called. It was meant to shape the future of gaming, yet 5 months later only 1 game has RTX. As a 4K gamer it is utterly worthless as I have zero intention of playing at 1080p.
• AMD wanted to stay relevant at the higher end and were presented the option to release a farmed off M51 Instinct GPU as a gaming GPU.

From any reasonable measure only AMD achieved their goal. Ironically I would say the 2080 is a better rounded GPU apart from the VRAM which is potentially going to be a problem at 4K and even 1440p.

 

[Kelt]

Vote with your wallets folks. GPU prices are simply pushing me towards budget PCs for general usage with a separate next gen console for gaming on the sitting room OLED.

Or like me (if GPU prices remain at this ridiculous level) will just drop out of buying new, and just go second hand.

 

[Harlequin]

DLSS is nvidias name for DirectML

 

[Brazo]

Hi, Doing the bare minimum to remain relevant isn't what it's about, This is the best they can do at this moment in time plain & simple, They've been working on a shoestring budget for several years while money was being diverted to the development of Zen (Ryzen), Ryzen's been selling well which has given them the opportunity to eventually become competitive in the gpu arena again,
The boss (L.Su) has said that due to how Ryzens been doing she's now able to divert more funds to RTG (Radeon) but converting that into R&D & better gpu's takes time, we're talking years so for now it's a waiting game. The best gaming gpu AMD could possibly put out right now would be a version using the core of the MI60 (the VII is a version of the MI50) but that has 32gb's of memory and would probably push pricing through the roof meaning it's not a viable product for them or us.
Personally I think the only reason they released the VII was because MI50 sales have slowed down but that's just conjecture.

Best they can do is about right. Kinda sympathetic and concerned at the same time.

 

[nashathedog]

Best they can do is about right. Kinda sympathetic and concerned at the same time.

Ryzen being in the market should mean AMD's already made it through the lean times, I'd of thought they're in the things are getting better phase now, it's just a case of waiting for the knock on effect to reach us.

 

[Tom B]

Although I'm planning to get one I will say fail

Reviewer drivers: Fail, the card is given a poor impression with no fault of the people doing the reviews
Performance: Fail. It matches a 2 year old nvidia card that was available for the same price.
Price: Fail. It's too expensive for what it is.

I'm getting one because it's an good upgrade over my 980ti and I use Linux which tends to have better support for AMD.

 

[Rroff]

Win or fail the main thing is AMD are gaining experience at 7nm here and hopefully can use what they've learnt from this card going forward to make better products in the future.

Performance: Fail. It matches a 2 year old nvidia card that was available for the same price.

On that note I see it as a fail - I'd be less harsh if it came in and disrupted the pricing at the 2 year old performance tier but with node it is using, HBM2 and an expensive component selection that isn't happening.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Winning

 

[BongoHunter]

Ryzen being in the market should mean AMD's already made it through the lean times, I'd of thought they're in the things are getting better phase now, it's just a case of waiting for the knock on effect to reach us.

I think it's more complex than that - AMD is a small company compared to its competitors in terms of engineering manpower, Ryzen took a lot of that - and they're probably only just getting towards a position where resources can be moved over, they still only control a tiny fraction of the CPU market, and are taking big hits cost wise to re-establish themselves (especially in the data centre market). Eventually cash and resources will make its way to the GPU division - but companies like this at the very top of technology are the very opposite of agile. Time and success will have to be maintained for a few years to free up enough cash and recruit the right people to really make a difference.

 

[nashathedog]

I think it's more complex than that - AMD is a small company compared to its competitors in terms of engineering manpower, Ryzen took a lot of that - and they're probably only just getting towards a position where resources can be moved over, they still only control a tiny fraction of the CPU market, and are taking big hits cost wise to re-establish themselves (especially in the data centre market). Eventually cash and resources will make its way to the GPU division - but companies like this at the very top of technology are the very opposite of agile. Time and success will have to be maintained for a few years to free up enough cash and recruit the right people to really make a difference.

Good points.