Radeon VII turns 7, 4K results show it remains behind GeForce RTX 2080
Radeon VII launched on February 7, 2019, after AMD revealed the card at CES 2019. AMD positioned it as the first 7nm gaming GPU, with 60 compute units, 16GB of HBM2, and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The launch price was $699 in the US.
Vega architecture has been one of the most widely used by AMD, it remained in use for integrated graphics for much longer than discrete series. The latter followed up on Fiji design by featuring innovative HBM2 memory, something that hasn’t been explored since due to very high costs. AMD gambled with HBM and unfortunately, the GDDR standard has won.
Still premium, but slower than RTX 2080
A new 7th anniversary retrospective from ComputerBase includes updated performance tables that underline where the card sits today. In its UHD (3,840 × 2,160) performance rating, Radeon VII posts a 49.0 FPS geometric mean across the selected games. That is below GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition at 53.6 FPS, which works out to about a 9% lead for RTX 2080 in the same dataset.
Source: ComputerBase
Overclocked config reaches 53.3 FPS, which still does not pass the RTX 2080’s 53.6 FPS stock result, and it remains well behind the RTX 2080 FE overclocked at 58.4 FPS.
Performance these days is just one of the issue. The card had some drawbacks out of the box when it came out in 2019: efficiency and acoustics (and let me remind you AMD did not release VII as custom model). Undervolting was often the only way to fix both issues. So German media also tested the unit with voltage dropped from 1.05 V to 0.95 V, which would deliver over 30% higher FPS per watt. In its power table at UHD gaming load, Radeon VII averages 277 W at stock and 207 W undervolted, a reduction of about 25% in that measurement set.
Radeon VII (Original) and 50th Anniversary Edition, Source: AMD
Did it achieve its goal? It delivered what AMD promised on the spec side, a 7nm Vega 20-based gaming card with 16GB HBM2 and 1 TB/s bandwidth, and it served as a bridge product before RDNA cards arrived. The broader goal of taking the performance crown in its price tier did not happen, at least in the common “RTX 2080 class” comparison.
AMD ended Radeon VII production in August 2019.
Source: ComputerBase
