hey everyone Eber here with Hardware Canucks and it's almost time for AMD's
Radeon vii gpu to launch on February the 7th but we decided to take a little bit
of a closer look a few weeks before the actual review goes live since there are
tons of things to go over now even after the announcement of this GPU at CES
there was still a lot of questions on how do you position the Radeon 7 GPU
and you know what the final specs are so I'm gonna put out every bit of validated
information that we have from AMD in preparation for the final reveal
that's going to take place in February even after the announcement at CES no
one seems to be really excited about this card but you never know
you know things may turn around the things may turn the other way around as
we're going through the testing procedure but anyways let's get into it
but first a quick message from our sponsor the new master liquid ml AI a
liquid coolers from Coolermaster come in both 120 and 240 millimeter variants now
with addressable RGB LEDs both the fans and the pump that can be controlled via
this hub with options to adjust the lighting effects and speed along with
the ability to control them through the respective motherboard software check
out the ML 120 and ML 240 ra iOS down below ok so here's the thing even though
we did have some hands-on time with the Radeon vii at CES it turns out as
usual AMD's trying to melt the coverage of this card for all it's worth now we
are aware that the launch date is set for February the 7th but it turns out or
interestingly enough there is a separate unboxing embargo for this GPU I think we
need to make it evident here that the unboxing embargo is between the date
this video goes live and the launch this is not the unboxing video by the way
but anyways back to the subject at hand the Radeon 7 gpu and more importantly
the 790 metres 2nd generation Vega architecture behind it while a lot of
people were looking for Navi to hit the scenes and say yes it looks like there
were other plans instead of using a brand new
architecture to test their 7nm process AMD decided to bring Vega back
like a zombie further refine it and heat it up with a massive 16 gigabytes of HBM
to memory I know that might be a disappointing for some of you guys but I
think it's a smart move rather than risking issues by trying to combine a
next-generation design with a pretty much untested manufacturing process the
problem is this also highlights how far AMD's behind on their GPU roadmap
you see in 2016 Navi was on track for a 2018 launch but obviously that didn't
happen since last year passed by pretty quickly actually
back then the move to 7nm Vega wasn't even on the radar now things in
the Radeon timeline have become a lot less clear between 2017 and 2020 I'm not
going to talk about rumours here but it looks like the way on sound card is
simply a placeholder for AMD to stay a bit relevant in the GP market by
becoming part of the news cycle at least until navi or their next generation
architecture is ready sometime the older vega 64 GPU actually represented the
architectures highest in configuration with 64 compute units and 4096 cores as
you can see the core was also pretty big which made it really expensive to
produce not only that but the 8 gigabyte of HBM to memory was cutting edge back
then and added a lot to the overall cost so the move to 7nm has allowed
AMD to minimize their core size from around 500 square millimetres to just a
tad over 300 square millimetres which is pretty impressive HP m2 has also become
less expensive so AMD took this opportunity to double it to 16 gigabytes
the cool thing is the smaller diarrhoea also includes a double sized memory bus
so the total number of transistors has actually increased from 12.5 billion to
13.2 billion now this all sounds really interesting but there have been some
cuts instead of featuring the Vegas 64 full amount of computing units AMD has
removed four of them that means the Radeon 7 will have less coarse
texture units and other on-die hardware we're not quite sure if these units have
simply been disabled or aren't present at all the answer to that will have to
wait for the final review video so stay tuned for that now this brings me to the
Radeon vii specs now some of these are educated guesses since we don't think
AMD made any changes to the overall layout of their compute units but right
now it looks like it will have around 38 40
stream processors 240 texture units and 64 our Opie's that will operate through
a 4096 bit HBM to interface with a massive bandwidth of about a terabyte
per second due to the 1k or its memory clocks the basin maximum frequencies on
this card are actually pretty close to what the rare Vega 64 liquid-cooled
versions head but it looks like the seventh animated process will allow for
pretty high speeds so what does that mean for performance well according to
some very carefully selected benchmarks from AMD even though the Radeon seven
has less cores in the Vega 64 it can actually outperform that card that
points to there being some additional enhancements built into the revised Vega
core other than just high clock speeds and more memory but outside of these
very basic numbers AMD told us to expect frame rates of this new card to
typically hit between 15 to 25% better than the original Vega GPU a few games
will feature performance above and below those points too now all of that sounds
impressive on paper but let's quickly recall where that places the Radeon
sound based on our RTX 2080 benchmarks across 13 games the RTX
2080 averaged about 30 percent faster than the vega 64 at both 1440p and 4k
which means the way and some will likely end up being behind the 2080
or basically tied up with the GTX 1080 ti of course a lot of this will be
dependent on whether a game was produced in partnership with AMD or Nvidia but
let's not get into that right now one of the main problems with this is pricing
because when AMD showed this slide at CES every lifestreams comments exploded
it seemed like AMD created a gtx 1080 ti competitor that's almost two years late
and costs as much as money even if AMD's promise of 25% improvement over
Vegas 64 is true that card was launched at just five hundred dollars back in
August of 2017 as a matter of fact that's only 15 to 20 dollars less than
some custom rtx 2080 cards okay so we do have tons of issues with RTX
features not being available but it's ray tracing D LSS and adaptive shading
are all feature boxes that NVIDIA has but AMD doesn't so other than the
possibility the Radeon 7 has some in performance at AMD's keeping behind
closed doors how could they justify a $700 price point
well it seems like the updated Vega architecture has received some very
serious enhancements to improve content creation performance this is a pretty
big deal since it could make the Radeon 7 a perfect dual-use TP for
gamers who also need work space acceleration like we've been seeing in
the past in programs like premiere of v-ray and blender and ease OpenCL has a
long way to go before its performance is anywhere near Nvidia's CUDA acceleration
but it looks like that might be changing at least that's what I hope
AMD's also including three free games with this card so you get Devil May Cry
5 at the division 2 and Resident Evil 2 but the value of those will be entirely
dependent on whether or not you are planning to buy those in the first place
we also can't forget that Nvidia is currently offering buyers of their
RTX 2080 free copies of anthem and battlefield 5 the be quiet dark based
Pro 900 and revision 2 is here with the modern IO for your type C accessories
and Qi charging gadgets the new hub is good for 8 fans and RGB strips plus
steam terior is incredibly modular for airflow water cooling invert systems and
now with the power supply shroud check out the v2 down below so overall the
reading of 7 looks like a pretty cool card with a triple fan cooler that's
topped with a solar Stroud the side is a glowing Radeon logo as well as a small
red square with an R right in the middle even though it's using a 7 nanometre
manufacturing process don't expect a lower power consumption which should be
obvious from the - 8 pin PCI power connectors actually the board's power is
still listed at about 300 watts so a stock way on seven will consume as much
as a Vega 64 or quite a bit more than an RTX 2080 the backplate is also pretty
impressive but that's pretty much a standard on every higher in graphics
card these days one thing I do need to mention is that board partners won't be
launching custom designs but right away and none of them could confirm whether
or not it would even happen from everything we've been hearing the
Radeon 7 will be in pretty short supply alright guys so this is one to
wrap things up since something has to be saved for the actual review but right
now the Radeon 7 looks like an interesting GPU even though
it's price might seem a little bit too high all we need right now is the
official benchmarks so definitely is tune in for that on the 7th of February
if I were you I'd actually you know add a notification or a reminder to my phone
will probably write it down somewhere so you don't actually miss that but is this
graphics card something that you'll likely buy or will everyone keep waiting
to see how a meeting video will fight it out in the mainstream market later this
year let us know in the comments down below an ebow with hybrid connects thank
you so much for watching make sure to check out some relevant
content over here subscribe to our boot sequence channel I'm signing off and
I'll see you guys in the next one