Radeon VII: AMD’s cutting-edge return to enthusiast gaming

Radeon VII breaks new ground for AMD, and for graphics cards in general. It’s the company’s first truly high-end 4K GPU, capable of surpassing 60 frames per second at High or Ultra settings. It’s the first-ever consumer graphics card built using the next-gen 7nm manufacturing process, and the first to ship with a massive 16GB of ultra-fast high-bandwidth memory (HBM) (go.pcworld.com/hbdm). Radeon VII is even the first AMD graphics card that shifts away from reporting the GPU temperature alone to monitoring a more holistic array of 64 thermal sensors spread across the die. This is impressive hardware, the likes of which gamers haven’t seen before.

It’s no GeForce killer, though. The $700 Radeon VII trades performance blows with the similarly priced Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and even the two-year-old GTX 1080 Ti. Nvidia’s recent embrace of adaptive sync monitors eliminates AMD’s FreeSync monitor pricing advantage. And AMD’s graphics card lacks the real-time ray tracing hardware offered by GeForce RTX GPUs, though very few games take advantage of those capabilities at this point.

But don’t let those trade-offs deter you. Nvidia’s offerings have plenty of their own limitations, and AMD’s Radeon VII is a very competitive bleeding-edge beast of a graphics card. Let’s dig into why.

SPECS AND FEATURES

AMD’s name for this card contains several clever nods. Not only is the Radeon VII the first 7nm consumer graphics card, it’s the second generation of the company’s Vega architecture, following in the footsteps of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64. Here’s how the three GPUs compare in raw under-the-hood specs:

Even though the Radeon VII harbors fewer streaming processors than Vega 64, it demolishes its predecessor in sheer performance, as you’ll see in our benchmarks later. There are several reasons for that. First off, AMD tuned Radeon VII to run at much higher clock speeds than Vega, with maximum boost clocks roaring ahead by more than 200MHz—no small feat. (Note: The “peak engine clock” specification listed in the chart above refers to “the highest achievable frequency” in certain content creation workloads, while the traditional “boost clock” specification is for games.)

AMD also optimized the second-generation Vega architecture to provide lower latency, as well as more bandwidth to the render output units (ROPS). Those tweaks help improve gaming performance, while