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Radeon VII a win or fail?

Associate
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28 May 2017
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Looks like a good performer just needs better cooling, better drivers. the noise from the fans would do my head in , are they really not making 3rd party cards for this? didnt they say the same thing about vega?
 
Soldato
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22 Apr 2016
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3,425
It’s neither a win or a fail. I think you have to see them for what they are. This isn’t a new architecture or line of GPUs that AMD have been working on. It’s simply a ‘broken’ repurposed compute chip that can live another day as a gaming chip. With that in mind it was never going to wow or impress.

It does however on average keep up with 1080ti levels of performance (welcome to 2016). I just don’t see why anybody would buy one at the current price point. A £500 card would make more sense to the consumer given the cards reviews.
 
Caporegime
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18 Oct 2002
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Like VEGA stock VEGA 7 uses a lot of power. Undervolt and it seems just like VEGA 64 it gains perforamnce at reduced power. Look at these numbers. Be interesting to hear user feedback.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ao43xl/radeon_vii_insanely_overvolted_undervolting/


The problem with that is AMD set the voltages for a reason.
And you can also under volte Turing and get a good reduction in power
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9idtco/rtx_2080_downvolt_the_easy_way/


I don;t think such comparisons are valid though, the average user is not going to be tweaking like that and there is no guarnatee that lower voltages would work.
 
Associate
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The Optimum Tech review was quite interesting as he talks about undervolting & managing the fan speeds which are done via junction temperature on this card - see below:

https://youtu.be/tHxXgOTMVLc?t=699

& from Bluntys video re: noise:

https://youtu.be/_zihIrmKqNg?t=312

For similar money to the 2080 with similar performance I think its good AMD have brought something out. Its a bit of an anomaly though as we all know how everyone felt about the 2080.. 1080ti perf 2 years later? Nice to see the benefits of 7nm though... ie: same power but x more perf.

I also think its a forward looking card & it will stretch its legs with new games & drivers. We'll see:p
 
Associate
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I'd say its medium. If the 2080 wasn't so underwhelming I don't think it would exist, but in the current fairly rubbish situation of stagnant performance and high prices its no worse than anything else. :rolleyes:
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Apr 2016
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3,425
The problem with that is AMD set the voltages for a reason.
And you can also under volte Turing and get a good reduction in power
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9idtco/rtx_2080_downvolt_the_easy_way/


I don’t think such comparisons are valid though, the average user is not going to be tweaking like that and there is no guarnatee that lower voltages would work.
I genuinly think imcompetence is the only reason they ‘Over volt’ the cards out the box. Under volting makes such an improvement and I haven’t heard of a detrimental case of under volting.

That said I agree with you the average end user (probably 99%) wouldn’t do it hence why the out of box reviews for all Vegas have beeen so poor.
 
Soldato
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The KOP
The problem with that is AMD set the voltages for a reason.
And you can also under volte Turing and get a good reduction in power
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9idtco/rtx_2080_downvolt_the_easy_way/


I don;t think such comparisons are valid though, the average user is not going to be tweaking like that and there is no guarnatee that lower voltages would work.

While I agree for the most part, at the same time Vega got quite the following from people being able to under volt and with great success.

I expect Vega 7 to be no different.

Not quite sure why amd default with higher voltage it's not the first time either.
 
Caporegime
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Dormanstown.
While I agree for the most part, at the same time Vega got quite the following from people being able to under volt and with great success.

I expect Vega 7 to be no different.

Not quite sure why amd default with higher voltage it's not the first time either.

What happens here is different to the real world.

While I'll tweak my Vega 64 (Or at least I did until Wattman just decided to cease working) my friend who owns a Vega 64 will leave it exactly as it comes from the box. Even down to the first set of drivers until he's prompted by me to update them when he messages me about a problem.
 
Soldato
Joined
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Belfast
The problem with that is AMD set the voltages for a reason.
And you can also under volte Turing and get a good reduction in power
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/9idtco/rtx_2080_downvolt_the_easy_way/


I don;t think such comparisons are valid though, the average user is not going to be tweaking like that and there is no guarnatee that lower voltages would work.

Thanks for the link, I will give this a go on my RTX 2080.

You are correct up to a point, because most enthusiast Radeon VII users will know how to undervolt and the fact it is possible within that actual drivers makes it an absolutly simple task. It is literally, move a slider in your driver control panel. No harder than deciding what settings to use in a game profile. With Nvidia you must use 3rd party utility and enable voltage control and is not officially witin Nvidia control panel. That is a very fundamental difference and an important one to consider.

https://hardforum.com/threads/nvidia-scanner-voids-your-rtx-2080-and-2080-ti-warranty.1968255/

Radeon VII is not 10%-15% slower than a 2080, according to most reviews it is between 5%-10% slower than the OC 2080 FE overal, betteer in DX12 but slower in DX11. Any objective person should see that R7 can and does absolutey trade blows with 2080 in most modern games.

I agree that out of the box, as it stands RTX 2080 is an overall better GPU but only marginally. Radeon VII has its advantages and cannot be seen as a failure. My concern is that with 8K gaming 8GB may become a limiting factor quite quickly on the RTX 2080.
 
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Soldato
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East Sussex
I think the noise and fan control issues will be resolved quite quickly, but it does indicate they have come to market a little quickly, maybe more quickly than they wanted, but being as they have no other gaming cards in production I can see why they have gone this way. I should imagine that aftermarket coolers will show up soon too.

I would alse hope the VII follows it's Vega predecessors with regards to driver maturity and expect reasonable gains over the next few months.

In terms of success or failure - that all comes down to performance per £ for me, a quick look over some reviews indicates it sits between and 1080 and 1080 TI (broadly?!?! - ish with current drivers) and price wise it's £650 cost of entry (if you can get one!), at that price it's probably doing ok - except for the fact the 2080 is the same price and clearly superior for the moment - so I'm not seeing the consumer appeal unless you have to have something produced by the red team and not the green.

Vega56/64 is a much better proposition from AMD at the moment IMO
 

TNA

TNA

Caporegime
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13 Mar 2008
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Greater London
Seen quite a few mixed opinions on this new card from forum users and some reviewers liking it and disliking it, so what does everyone here think?

Personally, I am on the fence because it is AMDs fastest gaming card ever and does have good performance. 16GB VRAM is a plus also but noise is meh! It looks a decent 4K card in truth but lower resolutions do kind of make me look at other cards. Price is fair in my opinion but an 8GB variant at £100 cheaper would have been sexy. If I was after a new GPU, would I have jumped on it? Probably not in truth but that doesn't make this a decent card. Overclocking needs looking at and if Roman couldn't do it, something is wrong there. Anyways, a good launch?
It gets a meh from me. Yesterday’s performance for today’s prices. On top of that it runs loud and it is on 7nm...

Looks sexy though at least :)
 
Associate
Joined
28 Sep 2018
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2,242
Does nothing to the overall market.

AMD hasn’t put any competitive pressure on NVIDIA.

Numerous driver issues lead to a bad reputation that takes much longer to recover from than a delayed launch.
 
Soldato
Joined
27 Mar 2010
Posts
3,069
It's not a fail but it's not a win.
It's clear there has been a serious engineering and architecture design problem within Amd for the last 3 years. It's very similar to bulldozer and piledriver, in that it should have been axed either at the first stage or the 2nd. Traditionally Amd always worked around by using a x2 cf chip, however as cf and sli support started to fade n game engines, that and the manufacturing expense and their inefficient gcn designs meant they hit a brick wall a few years back.

Just as turing is a stop gap, so is this V7.
The amd fans will defend it, the nvidia fans will joke upon it. As an lc64 user I''m mainly ****** with the crap launch with so many bugs and issues that need ironing out.
 
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