Radeon VII a win or fail?

[vapor matt]

Looking at reviews for hours you can see the card has potential, I have one on its way. The drivers could have been better for launch that’s for sure, but you can see it’s not bad apart from driver issues. The fan curve can be corrected in later drivers and performance will improve. It’s just a shame AMD didn’t work harder for release drivers.

Nvidia has had its problems to with RTX GDR6 degrading and card failures on £1400 cards also nothing to shout about on nvidia’s behalf.

I expect this v7II to trade blows with the 2080 and 1080ti and mature like vega 64 did. But AMD take such a hit with poor reviews from the off because of immature drivers they do themselves no justice in this release and launch. A shame should have learnt that from vega64 launch.

I will be trying this card over the weekend and hope AMD can resolve launch driver quickly.

 

[pieman109]

Typical AMD gpu launch if you ask me, duff drivers, underwhelming performance, too costly and 2 years too late. At least theres a choice now from whom to buy from but (and I hate to say it) nvidia is a better choice atm until AMD hopefully get their act together and improve things.
My main issue with the card is the cooler assembly. theres only one exhaust point for the hot air to escape from and that space is constricted by the illuminated Radeon logo, the opposite side is totally blocked off by the motherboard (unless a pci-e riser is used) and the end of the card is blanked off.
I'd want to see what some board partners could do with this card's cooling solution as that appears to be a main stumbling block with a lot of potential buyers I reckon.
And why do AMD always set their voltages so high? Most of AMD's recent cards have all benefited from undervolting so I reckon theres a fair chance this one will too. Afterall, MOST peeps who'll buy this card will be enthusiasts and will be ok will fiddling/tweaking and undervolting will be no problem for them to do.

 

[IT Troll]

At that price, it's a fail. Especially with the supply constraints hiking it up further to £800. Should be £600 max, ideally £550 if they want to pull sales away for Nvidia. I fear we are doomed to a future of ridiculously priced graphics cards.

 

[TheMadHatter]

So is uncle Jensen still arrogant when he said radeon vii was underwhelming ?

 

[4K8KW10]

So is uncle Jensen still arrogant when he said radeon vii was underwhelming ?

He was not serious. The card is good and I guess he will lose his mind once AMD release a card that is faster than his "mighty" RTX 2080 Ti.

 

[Quartz]

I've read a number of the reviews and grunt-wise it seems a worthy competitor to the RTX 2080, against which it wins some and loses some. The big problem for me is the noise. At +6dB it's 4x noisier than the competition. It needs a better cooler. Hopefully OEMs will come up with quieter triple or quad slot coolers.

 

[TheMadHatter]

He was not serious. The card is good and I guess he will lose his mind once AMD release a card that is faster than his "mighty" RTX 2080 Ti.

But isn't that the problem "once" and release a card better than the 2080ti we could be on to the 3080 or 4080 ti's

 

[chroniclard]

Seems like a LC version would do wonders, though not for the price.

 

[GAC]

for me its a bit of a fail especially as it seems to be just a rebadged instinct card, exact same specs. seems like its just a stop gap to say "hey we have a fast card also" or maybe its just spare stock they either havent sold of the instinct card or these are gpus that failed a test which could be a thing with the state of some of the reviewers having issues.

if this was a new card amd could have done something with this by having 10-12gigs of hbm2 and under cut the 2080 by £100 which would have been a slight win, but yet again it seems to be the same old amd top end card, very hot, very noisy and a pig with power.

 

[Martini1991]

He was not serious. The card is good and I guess he will lose his mind once AMD release a card that is faster than his "mighty" RTX 2080 Ti.

By the time amd beat the 2080ti Nvidia will have a 3080ti based on history

 

[Squid Vicious]

I understand why this card exists - AMD needs something, anything, in the upper end of the market and rebadging a compute card was the easiest option whilst they continue to work on something more competitive.

Still, I think a version with 8GB memory at £500 would have been much more competitive offering.

I do look forward to see how it performs once people have been able to tweak volts and clocks.

 

[Bloot]

It's expensive no doubt about it, it should cost $75-100 less. But performance wise, I find it pretty good, and drivers will improve it for sure.

 

[Tute]

It’s somewhere in between for me. In terms of the market it’s decent but then I think the graphics card market is messed up at the moment and releasing this card at this price point does nothing to help that.

 

[Rannoch]

It’s a classic AMD launch.

 

[Darujhistan]

Well, it's not a win that's for sure.

I think just like the RTX range, in particular the 2080ti, the 590 and the latest 2060 it's on the a whole a fail. All the last 4 major releases give very non-existent to terrible price/performance, and most have issues, 2080ti mass fails and was a complete rip-off, the 590 was just the 580 again after the 480 again and the 380 again, it didn't have major 'issues' though, the 2060 was another over-priced card that the VRAM capacity of a £200 card but for £350.

None of these cards of 'fails' really none are disasters, but the terms Gregster used were 'win' or 'fail' so I'll have to say that the last 4 releases have all been fails.

This is the GPU market today though, it's not these cards in particular, it's a broken GPU market, where you pay more for 2 year old performance, or nearly double what you paid 2 years ago to have the 'best' GPU.

 

[EsaT]

I understand why this card exists - AMD needs something, anything, in the upper end of the market and rebadging a compute card was the easiest option whilst they continue to work on something more competitive.

It exists only because NVidia bumped prices up, instead of giving proper update with clearly lot more "bang per buck".
AMD certainly didn't plan on making another really expensive to make card for gamers.
But Nvidia opened narrow market slot for AMD to do that.

It’s a classic AMD launch.

Guess you're not old enough to remember Nvidia classics like bumpgate and Fermi.
https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/graphics/fermi-card-on-stage-wasn-t-real/1/

 

[Rannoch]

It exists only because NVidia bumped prices up, instead of giving proper update with clearly lot more "bang per buck".
AMD certainly didn't plan on making another really expensive to make card for gamers.
But Nvidia opened narrow market slot for AMD to do that.


Guess you're not old enough to remember Nvidia classics like bumpgate and Fermi.
https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/graphics/fermi-card-on-stage-wasn-t-real/1/

Missed that. I wasn’t gaming so much back then. My first real card was a 5850 1GB

 

[Minstadave]

I find it really disappointing tbh:

- crap drivers
- noise and heat issues
- cooler contact issues
- performance of a 2 year old 1080Ti at the same price and power draw

The thing I find oddest and I mentioned this in the R7 thread is this is a terrible result for a die shrink. The GPU is tiny compared to Vega 64 and has less shaders and less texture units. Why is it not justja straight shrinks of Vega? To get the acceptable performance needed they've ramped the clocks and burnt through the power savings from the new process.

Then AMD have slapped on too much expensive HBM2 and made a hash of the launch.

It'll be interesting to see if and when a larger GPU comes out.

 

[Martini1991]

Fermi isn't really the same thing.
Fermi had a ton of problems in comparison to the 5xxx series. But Fermi was the better performer.

The 470s were absolutely cracking cards.

 

[Arcane]

It's not a "fail" really, it's (within the margin of error) the same performance as Nvidia's card at roughly the same price, it'll improve with age driver wise and come down in price (just like AMD cards always do). Once it's sub £600 it'll be snapped up just like the 64 and 56 are. It's just not particularly exciting.