In the past, one GPU vendor sometimes zigs when the other zags - Nvidia went all-in for 3-D glasses and monitors a few years back, while AMD threw its weight behind Eyefinity and multi-monitor gaming. Even if you agree that Nvidia’s RTX technology is a risky bet, AMD hasn’t baked anything equivalent into the Radeon VII. ExtremeTech historically takes a very dim view of buying hardware for features you can’t use, for reasons we explored in-depth as part of our RTX 20 Ti review.īut therein lies the rub. Nvidia’s justification for these price increases has been to point at its new ray tracing feature as justification. The RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 are slightly faster than the GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1080 respectively (think 8-12 percent), but carry higher prices than their predecessor GPUs did. Of its new high-end GPUs, only the RTX 2080 Ti genuinely moved the ball forward on performance. Nvidia’s RTX refresh cycle this past fall didn’t do much to improve performance-per-dollar. The Story So Far…īefore we dive into performance figures, let’s revisit how the GPU market has evolved in the past six months. Junction temps of 110C are not unusual or considered problematic. This shouldn’t be considered a problem, and the GPUs are designed to hold these temperatures safely. According to AMD: “Controlling based on Junction Temperature from the extensive sensing network allows each GPU to reliably maximize its performance potential while reporting an additional temperature that is more representative of the hottest parts of the GPU.”ĪMD notes that Junction temps will be higher than what gamers are used to seeing in the past. Going forward, Radeon VII GPUs will use the maximum temperature measured across the die, known as the Junction temp, to control GPU behavior. Radeon VII has a total of 64 temperature sensors mounted across the die, 2x the number of Vega 64. The Radeon VII uses a new type of thermal monitoring system rather than the old, edge-mounted GPU thermistors it had previously deployed. Those hoping that AMD would have a new major AI or machine learning initiative to announce - something akin to DirectX ray tracing support or new antialiasing methods - will be disappointed. AMD did note to us that it had reduced the GPUs internal latency and made a few performance-enhancing tweaks to the architecture, but data here was limited. The clock gains from the 7nm shift are very modest. Most of the improvements between Radeon Vega and Radeon VII boil down to the huge increase in RAM bandwidth and total VRAM buffer. Clock rates have improved only modestly, with the base clock up by 1.09x and the boost clock increasing by 1.13x. As the table above indicates, the Radeon VII die is ~67 percent the size of the Vega 64 die. We already have some information on this point. Today’s review will focus on the consumer side of the equation.Īs with the first 7nm GPU, all eyes are going to be on the Radeon VII to see how well it performs on the process node. We intend to write a separate article investigating compute and scientific workloads on the Radeon VII, which will give us an opportunity to examine this side of the GPU more thoroughly. Unfortunately, this news wasn’t communicated until right before the review NDA, which means we won’t have time to take a particular examination of the GPU in that context. This significant repositioning puts a new spin on the Radeon VII, positioning it more clearly for double-precision compute workloads. Instead, the Radeon VII is capable of a whopping 3.46 TFLOPs, or just under half of the MI60’s maximum performance (1/4 FP32 performance total). Initially, AMD communicated that its Radeon VII GPU was capable of just 0.88 TFLOPS (1/16th of FP32 performance). Until today, the highest FP64 performance you could buy in a consumer GCN GPU was the Radeon 7990, a short-lived dual-GPU product that’s nearly five years old. The Radeon VII has another advantage over other cards on the market, though AMD kept this one tight to their vest. If you care about sheer memory capacity in your graphics card - and to be clear, there are professional and scientific applications that benefit from large GPU buffers - the Radeon VII is the only card on the market that gives you this much RAM for under a thousand dollars. AMD shrank the die significantly between the two GPUs and used the space savings to squeeze in another set of HBM2 chips, doubling available RAM bandwidth. The Radeon VII is based on the same 7nm silicon as the Radeon MI50 and MI60.
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