AMD Radeon VII GPU gives gamers a bigger playground

After the not so successful release of the power-hogging AMD Vega 56 and 64, attendees at CES 2019 knew they were in for something special after the company announced that they would rectify that mistake with a new and improved graphics card. This new card came in the form of the new AMD Radeon VII, the world’s first GPU using a 7nm process.

7nm Processor
The Radeon VII will feature a 7nm processor giving you a 29 percent performance bump in gaming and a 36 percent performance increase in content creation from the company’s previous flagship GPU, the Vega 64. And, all this performance improvement at the same power consumption as the Vega 64.

Whisper-quite Performance
AMD’s new flagship card also features several improvements in the cooling system. At CES 2019, we saw the Division 2 running at 4K on the Radeon VII, almost silently, which is quite impressive.

4K gaming at up to 60 FPS
The Radeon VII will deliver a base clock speed of 1.45GHz with a boost frequency of 1.8GHz, offering 13.8TFLOPs of single-precision performance. What does this translate to in terms of gaming performance; we’re talking, 1440p to 4K gaming at up to 60 FPS, depending on which game you are running. With 16 gigabytes of HBM2 memory, the Radeon VII will also be an excellent choice for content creators.

At CES 2019, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su also announced that the Radeon VII would compete with Nvidia’s RTX 2080. At CES 2019. The Radeon VII cards will cost $700 (INR – 50,000/-), replacing Vega 64 as the AMD’s most expensive GPU. But how does AMD’s new flagship card stack up against their previous flagship the AMD Vega 64 and Nvidia’s powerhouse, the RTX 2080?

Let’s find out:
For the following benchmarks, we used an Intel Core i7-8700K processor with 16GB of DDR4 RAM.
For the following benchmarks, we used an Intel Core i7-7700K processor with 16GB of DDR4 RAM.

From these benchmarks, we can safely say that the Radeon VII can easily go head-to-head with the RTX 2080 and offers a significant increase in performance from AMD’s Vega 64. However, there are still a few things to consider when going in for one of these high-end cards. The RTX 2080 will set you back a $100 more than a Radeon VII, but it does offer a minor bump in performance and will also enable ray tracing, while the Radeon VII is relatively new and remains untested in several games, add to that we haven’t yet seen its capabilities in content creation.

To sum it up, all we can say is that AMD has built quite an impressive card in the Radeon VII. What does this mean for the consumer: AMD finally has a high-end graphics card that can compete with Nvidia’s flagship offerings. Nvidia hasn’t really had a competitor in the GPU market now for a good couple of years and just like AMD’s Ryzen series is keeping Intel honest, consumers now have a GPU that will help keep Nvidia honest, which is a big win for the consumer.