Radeon VII

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Here we go...

 

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Beautiful name. AMD's official preview figures suggest it should match an nVidia RTX 2080 in DX11 and DX12 and handily beats it in Vulkan. Hopefully it'll come in well under the £700-800 its competitor sells for...

 

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Launches on 7th of February for $699.

 

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Wonder if they'll release an 8GB HBM version. That could reduce the cost substantially, and potentially not impact performance much.
That performance at $499/599 could be more interesting.

Yep, the 16 GiB of VRAM will surely be pushing the price way up. A $599 8 GiB version would surely be a preferable choice for most right now.

 

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Some more details:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13832/amd-radeon-vii-high-end-7nm-february-7th-for-699
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcL4XFwptHo

So it has 128 ROPs,a base clock of 1450MHZ and a maximum boost clock of 1850MHZ. So clockspeeds seem to be only around 20% higher,and the transistor count increase is quite small over Vega MK1,ie,700 million transistors.

Makes sense, since their claim is 25% more performance for the same power. Vega was stupidly clocked to begin with (hence the crazy stock voltages) so only increasing clocks by 20% should make it a bit less power hungry out of the box compared to Vega 64.

To be honest this feels like a PR product, nothing more.

It is. This is essentially a result of AMD still working on a new architecture but needing to compete with the nVidia RTX series somehow. They've taken an originally designed-for-compute card and made it into a gaming product. They're pricing it high presumably because of the high build costs and the fact they know they aren't going to win any big market share with it anyway (due to nVidia now supporting VRR and other features on their cards like DXR and DLSS). Like the RX 590, it's stopgap largely for shareholders and to keep AMD in the GPU news cycle.

I'm sure the card will be competitive but most gamers will choose the RTX 2080 at this price point. Double the VRAM probably won't entice people more than DXR/DLSS.

 

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Going by AMD's own numbers, power requirements have probably gone up for Vega7. If they Claim Vega7 is 25% faster at same power and Vega 7 is 29% faster than Vega64, then we might be looking at 320w or soemthign outrageous. However, I suspect the reality is sticking to a 300w ceiling and performance is closer to the 22-25% improvement, so at least 10% behind 2080.

Erm no, some of that performance improvement will come from doubling the number of ROPs. Also the boost clock is already known: 1800 MHz. Whether it can actually hold those clocks for more than a millisecond is another matter...

Some sites suggest the TDP will remain at 295 W.

 

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By virtue of you splicing up my quote, I think you've missed my point.

I would much rather have AMD say "we have a strategy, we're sticking to it" and not release the Radeon 7, rather than release another short-term PR stunt and raise even more questions about their ability to produce gaming cards.

While I kind of agree, unfortunately shareholders win out always. Additionally, this card will be significantly faster than their current flagship, even if it is just a die shrink with clock boosts. It's a legitimate product for consumers even if it doesn't excite us here.

 

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So rumours suggest there'll be no custom cards and only a limited number of cards available (anywhere from 5k to 60k). As suspected, this card is rather useless aside from as a stopgap for "staying in the game" and so AMD can go down in history as having the first 7nm GPU.