well guys after weeks of announcements the usual ridiculous unboxing embargoes
and other teases it's finally review day for the $700 AMD Radeon vii GPU you
honestly this launch had stretched out way too far but at least we're here now
now if you're looking for a bit more information on the underlying
architecture of this GPU you can actually check out our explain video
right over here because this video is gonna be primarily focused on the
benchmark results for both gaming and productivity and now that md's NDA is
lifted we can actually share a little bit more information about this new GPU
so let's say let's get into it right after this welcome the entire H series
from NZXT we're in the most elegant case lineups with the premium construction
you'll appreciate and the little details like purple USB ports / fresh routes
floor and the iconic cable cover we've got an ITX option the H 200 your
standard ATX mid tower at age 500 and the big guns the H700 all available
with a smart device for RGB illumination and fan control or the standard
variations with a smart interior to complement an easy assembly the H series
is Hardware canucks approved and is something for everyone check it out
below so the Radeon 7 is a great-looking
graphics card I love the overall look the triple fan setup should hopefully
keep temperatures under control while also offering much lower noise than the
reference Vegas 64 notice I said should well stay tuned because this card is not
quiet there's also a dual 8 pin power setup since this card is supposed to
consume about 300 watts at full load one thing that's been removed is crossfire
support either with an external connector or through the PCI bus instead
AMD is counting on DX 12 and Vulcan multi-gpu configurations
that's pretty disappointing but it basically follows industry trends to
move away from supporting multi-gpu configurations in drivers now having
spoken to board partners almost all of them are not planning on launching
upgraded versions of the 7 and that's just too bad but I hope things could
change later down the road now when we posted our last video a lot
of you guys did ask us about rumors regarding
availability first of all in North America aimed he's planning to sell the
Radeon 7 on their website kind of like what NVIDIA does with their founder
certain GPUs although what partners will have reference designs it's just that
you know they've told us that their stocks will be limited so we're just
going to wait and see how this all plays out in the upcoming days all right so
let's quickly recap what the Radeon vii is all about basically AMD has used a
modified version of Vega core that was originally used on the Vega 64 this time
it has a slightly updated architecture uses the 7 90-minute manufacturing
process and houses a huge 16 gigabyte of HP m2 memory even though it has less
course and texture units than the previous gen this new GPU is able to hit
much higher sustained clock speeds that along with other core improvements
should technically allow 3m7 to outperform the Vega 64 by a big margin
now there are a few other things that I wanted to talk about first and foremost
a lot of people think that this card is targeted towards professionals more than
it does gamers because the price of the GPU is around $700 personally I think
the Radeon 7 is more of a dual use card that can fit both sides equally well
though keep in mind that 16 gigabytes of onboard memory does make it feel like
something that would interest content creators who use high-level you know
programs or 3d programs like a Maya or 3ds max now another thing that should
also be mentioned is how AMD is planning to position the seven against Nvidia you
see most of us were hoping for an affordable alternative to the RTX cards
and technically that's not going to happen because the RTX 2080 and the Radeon
7 are priced at $700 at least on paper now AMD will have a fight on their hands
because there's been an increase in availability of $700 RTX 2080 cards
back at lunch finding one of those was almost impossible but that's been
changing some still hit $775 and above though I'm looking at you ASUS now we're
testing we chose a card that's right in the middle of everything the gigabyte RTX
2080 gigabyte OC which usually is between 750 and 760 dollars but
sometimes it goes for sale for as little as seven times
thirty dollars so here's the rest of the test system but we're also going to be
doing things a bit differently this time AMD is making some big claims about how
well the radeon vii does in creative focus applications that means a few
additional productivity tests will be added after the gaming benchmarks so
let's get on to things because this is going to be interesting and I wanted to
kick things off with an annoying point about the Radeon seven and that's this
so yeah even though that it has three fans this is a very loud card that's
really disappointing since Vegas 64 had the exact same issue and I was hoping
for something better this time around now on paper at least the Radeon 7
is quieter than the Vega card but it is also much louder than any of the Nvidia
cards even the most powerful card here the RTX 2080 is almost silent in
comparison we actually talked to AMD about this and they're very honest about
sound levels being an issue with Radeon 7 GPU and they're looking to address
that in future driver releases now one of the challenges that they're having
right now is the second generation Vega core uses a network of 64 thermal
sensors and uses the the maximum temperature across that to determine
frequencies and fan speeds this is called Junction temperature the problem
with the junction temperature determining performance in acoustics is
that when the GPU is under load it's typically 20 to 30 degrees or more about
what's reported as a traditional core temp for example here the GPU temperature
was read 75 degrees while the junction temperature ended up hitting 103 degrees
as a result the fans started spinning up to make sure that the court didn't
throttle so with that taken into account Indy told us that working on adding a
quiet mode later on but that would eventually cause a cheap you to hit
lower performance numbers so for now we're gonna be getting Radeon 7
performance numbers but with higher noise levels anyways speaking of
performance on to that part and feel free to pause here at any time since
we're gonna be going through these quite a bit faster as you're going through
these results you'll notice that the Radeon seven does manage to tie or beat
the RTX 2080 eighty a few times at 1440p but it typically sits somewhere
between the 2080 and the 2070 that's certainly not what gamers
had hoped for a given these $700 price point
moving on to 4k in each game and things don't really change all that much with
away on seven still losing in games where it was behind in 1440p but there
are some places where the larger memory pool makes a slight difference a good
example of that is Far Cry 5 what this shows is that a lot of today's games
aren't bottlenecked by memory but rather by the graphics core itself maybe things
will change 8k ever becomes a thing but window still
has issues getting 4k to work properly and they're nowhere near 8 kos
compatibility so adoption for beyond 4k displays for anything but professionals
is probably years away and now on to some productivity benchmarks remember
how AMD claimed that the Radeon 7 was really geared towards a real-time 8k
acceleration and rendering performance in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve
well I decided to put that to testing and the results were definitely
interesting now one thing to keep in mind is and I limited the amount of GPUs
in this case because I really didn't have the time to test everything so I
used four cards in total gtx 1080 ti rtx 2080 vega 64 and of course the Radeon 7
so i'ma kick things off with a 12-minute 4k timeline it's completely edited it's
a full project that we published a block a while back and I exported to the
YouTube 40% and interestingly enough there wasn't a major difference between
all four cards whatsoever every GPU rendered the exact same project
in less than 10 minutes now I took a one-minute 8k project and I exported to
the h.265 8k preset using Adobe Media encoder and once again there wasn't a
significant difference between all four GPUs but there was something interesting
that I noticed after or while testing the Nvidia cards and the AMD GPUs and
that is real-time playback performance as I was playing this 8k footage in real
time I noticed said both the Vegas 64 and the Radeon vii struggle to keep up with
the frame rates while I was just playing back this one-minute time line and
that's something that I wasn't able to notice with the rtx GPU and the gtx
1080 ti which was definitely interesting because you might have framedrops with
the AMD GPU's were on thousand versus you know 500 on the gtx cards so if you're
thinking about you know creating a work station based pc i would slightly lean
towards the nvidia series GPU is because codec solution seems to happen more
optimized for that which brings me to my last test using DaVinci Resolve I took
this 13-minute 4k timeline exported it to the YouTube 4k high preset with in
resolved and all four GPUs completed that task in
right under seven minutes so it's definitely faster than Premiere that's
something that I noticed with both these graphics cards but it really proves that
there isn't really a significant improvement with the Radeon 7gpu you even
though that it has 16 gigabytes of onboard memory it's just basically
performing identically to the GTX and the RTX series cards now on to
blender and for this one we're using a bill that's been recompiled to properly
utilize our RTX cards as soon as the main versions of this application
don't hit support invidiously latest architecture even in its unsupported
form the RTX 2080 still beats the Radeon 7 by 16 seconds on a pretty
simple render performance in v-ray for Sketchup shows the 2080 beating the
Radeon 7 again but this time by a larger margin than in blender
alright so finally let's move on to the last benchmark and that's power
consumption so this is a pleasant surprise since AMD has obviously made
huge strides in the performance per watt area versus the Vega 64 but this also
makes it apparent how far behind Nvidia they are right now while the Radeon 7 is
on an efficient seven anime manufacturing process it still requires
35 watts more than the rtx 2080 so that's about the benchmarks and I think it's
time to conclude this review so I'm gonna start with a few basic numbers the
Radeon 7 has improved or the Vega 64 by roughly 28% in 1440p and a whopping
31% in 4k and that is impressive considering that this car consumes less
power now when you put it up against the rtx 2080
that's where AMD is gonna face a bit of a problem because that's where this car
Falls pretty short in both 1440p and 4k not only that but having tested this
card in productivity as well it just couldn't cash the nvidia gpus because
you know the performance difference is barely anything and not also also to
mention this card is loud as hell and it's also one of the most power hungry
GPS that we've ever tested so far even compared to the RTX 2080
now normally we could overlook all of this if AMD
at least competitive on their price but at $700 the Radeon vii just
doesn't look like a good value even again see $750 gigabyte ocv used it
falls short in the price to performance bracket that's really not a position
where used to weigh down cards being in since they typically offer some awesome
value so guys there you have it I mean this launch really feels like AMD needed
to absolutely stay in the GPU news cycle and compete against what Nvidia is offering
because they have to stay irrelevant right but at this point in time the Radeon
7 is just too expensive it's too loud and power-hungry and I just really can't
recommend this GPU at the moment that's pretty much from me let me know what you
guys think about performance results and what your what where your expectations
for the weigh down seven are you surprised
are you disappointed I wanna know your thoughts in the comments I mean both
Hardware Canucks 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