Radeon VII Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ra...38566.html

A rumor started spreading around the web a couple of weeks ago alleging that less than 5,000 units of AMD's upcoming Radeon VII gaming graphics card will be available worldwide at launch. New reports this week seemingly lend credence to the claims.

Andrew "Gibbo" Gibson, a representative from British computer hardware retailer Overclockers UK, said yesterday on the company's forum that less than 100 units are being allocated to the UK. Overclockers UK is said to have stacked a total of 44 units with more arriving in the coming days, which would mean the company would have the majority of the UK's allotment.

A report today from French media Cowcotland says France and Spain are getting 20 units each. According to the publication, the price for the Radeon VII has been established at 739€ with value-added tax (VAT) included. This translates to $840.06, which falls in line with AMD's MSRP of $699 after subtracting VAT from the price, since France and Spain have a VAT rate of 20 percent and 21 percent, respectively. Although with such a limited amount of units (allegedly), it's hard to picture the Radeon VII selling at that price point.

Rumor has it that due to the restricted time frame, AMD's partners didn't have enough time to prepare their custom models. So whether it be Sapphire, MSI, Asus or Gigabyte, it's expected that every brand will practically sell the same Radeon VII graphics card but in different packaging.

There is no word on when the next wave of Radeon VII shipments will arrive. Chinese factories have halted production in celebration of the Lunar New Year. While the normal downtime is a full work week, some factories extend the period up to three weeks. In a worst case scenario, the next production run could start late February.

https://www.techpowerup.com/252269/uks-a...-at-launch

Update February 6, 2019: Our colleagues at Kitguru were able to talk more recently with Gibbo from OcUK, who now clarified there may be anywhere between 100-200 Radeon VII available in the UK at launch, and possibly more coming after that. Take all statements with a grain of salt accordingly. The original story is below.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd...977-8.html

At least for gaming, then, we’d stop short of spending $700 on Radeon VII. The $800 GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition we tested tends to be a bit faster, it uses a lot less power, and it’s significantly quieter. The many 2080s available between $700 and $800 exhibit very similar attributes as Nvidia's reference design. Since two of the three games in AMD’s bundle (Devil May Cry 5 and The Division 2) aren’t available yet, there's plenty of time for additional testing before losing out on those extras. And AMD says it’s working on a potentially more elegant way to handle cooling, rather than spinning its fans up from idle to maximum speed in a matter of seconds.
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But again, that’s for gaming. Content creation is another matter entirely. We don’t have many rendering or encoding workloads in our suite. However, as we recently saw in our Nvidia Titan RTX review, extra memory makes a big difference in workloads able to utilize it. In fact, it can be the difference between a successful run and a crash. Bandwidth-intensive metrics like LuxBall HDR show that Radeon VII is capable of beating monsters like Titan RTX in the right situations. AMD also puts the hurt on GeForce RTX 2080 in the SPECviewperf 13 energy and medical viewsets, both of which presumably benefit from lots of fast on-board memory. Catia, NX, and SolidWorks go AMD’s way, too.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/28...ooking-for

Once you factor in the Radeon VII’s increased performance, the GPU is indeed significantly more efficient. The Radeon VII consumes roughly 75 percent as much power as the Vega 64 per frame of animation drawn. Activate its underclocking feature, and this drops to 70 percent. But the RTX 2080 consumes just 63 percent the power of the Radeon Vega 64. AMD’s 7nm GPU draws roughly the same amount of power as its Nvidia rival, but it isn’t quite as efficient on the whole.

Finally, there’s noise. I don’t own a dB meter, but folks — Radeon VII ain’t quiet. Overall, it’s comparable to the Vega 64, but there are moments when the fans on the Radeon VII kick harder. They also tend to ramp up faster. Everyone has their own personal tolerance for this sort of thing, but I consider the noise profile of these cards to be a significant negative.

At this point, the noise situation has become ridiculous. Ever since at least Hawaii, reviewers have hit AMD for the noise profile of its reference designs. To its credit, the company has at least attempted to address this, but its most high-profile attempt to fix the problem with a water cooler created an even bigger mess. Vega 64 was a loud GPU, louder than I’m personally comfortable installing in my own system. Radeon VII doesn’t improve on this at all. At this point, it’s clear AMD doesn’t actually have any interest in building or outfitting its reference cards with coolers that match the performance of what Nvidia ships (and what Nvidia ships isn’t always great, either, mind you). Hawaii launched over five years ago. Why are we still waiting for AMD to actually fix this in a high-end GPU that isn’t the Radeon Nano?

I expect a $700 GPU to have a better noise profile than the $12 box fan I bought at Aldi.
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If AMD had managed to bring Radeon VII in at $600, it would have a genuine value argument to make relative to Nvidia’s product stack. If it had outpaced the RTX 2080 at the same price, it could argue for superior rasterization performance with higher noise levels as an acceptable trade-off. Instead, what we have here — at least in the consumer market — is a loud RTX 2080-equivalent without the admittedly dubious features Nvidia tried to use to justify its price increases.

You know what’s worse than an RTX 2080 with dubious features and a bad price point? A loud RTX 2080-equivalent with no new features at all and the same bad price point.

The story isn’t all bad here. AMD was able to take advantage of its shift to 7nm to improve its overall competitive standing against the RTX family, and the Radeon VII competes against the GTX 1080 Ti / RTX 2080 more effectively than Vega 64 fared against the older GeForce 1080. But I can’t hammer Nvidia for months over the price increases and positioning it introduced with Turing only to turn around and laud AMD for delivering a GPU that roughly matches on perf but offers fewer features and higher noise, uncertain as the value of those features may be.

This is not the 7nm GPU you’re looking for. We’ll have more to say on compute specifically in the near future.

https://techreport.com/review/34453/amd-...eviewed/11

Going by our 99th-percentile FPS metric for delivered smoothness, however, the GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 both outstrip the Radeon VII. Right now, even Nvidia's $500-ish RTX 2070 will generally offer you a 4K HDR gaming experience as smooth as what AMD's $699 fighter can deliver, and that's with our most favorable test case for Forza Horizon 4 rolled in. If you prefer MSAA to FXAA in that title, the ride on Radeons gets even rougher, and our conversations with the company suggest that's because of a ROP bottleneck that's not going away.

Even with its best foot forward in Forza Horizon 4, it's disappointing to see a product as expensive and as critical as the Radeon VII go down such a bumpy road at launch. We've been banging this drum for seven years now. AMD has proven that it can iron out those wrinkles with driver updates and time, and we don't think a 15% improvement in 99th-percentile frame rates is an insurmountably high bar to clear if the goal is to catch the RTX 2080. Such a figure might be a deterrent to dropping $700 on one of these cards until AMD's drivers shape up, though.
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For even money between the RTX 2080 and the Radeon VII, we'd put our bet on the green team for the moment. Perhaps thanks to the arrival of the Radeon VII, swift and whisper-quiet RTX 2080 partner cards are now selling for only small premiums over Nvidia's $699.99 suggested price. You'll enjoy faster and smoother gaming for your money than the Radeon VII can offer right now. We'll need to defer final judgment on the value of the Radeon VII's 16 GB of memory versus the RTX 2080's 8 GB complement, but that deficit didn't appear to cause issues for the Turing card even in Far Cry 5, a title that AMD highlighted as one of the worst memory hogs around for 4K gaming at max settings.

We imagine the Radeon VII might be the right card for some people. Perhaps your day-to-day work eats VRAM like there's no tomorrow, and you only care about gaming on the side. Maybe you don't care in the least about what you've seen of hybrid rendering with real-time ray tracing, and you passed up the GTX 1080 Ti at its zenith. Maybe you just can't bear the thought of putting one red cent in Jensen Huang's jacket fund. If any or all of those things describe you, the Radeon VII is as good as it gets for an alternative choice in high-end graphics right now. We just wish it was a smoother, quieter, and cheaper one.

https://techreport.com/news/34456/all-th...e-are-they

Have you read our review of AMD's latest and greatest? While we may not have showered the card with lavish praise, the Radeon VII is still the fastest single-GPU Radeon card that has ever existed. It's also the fastest 7-nm GPU to date. (Hah.) AMD said the card would be available at e-tail today, and sure enough, we've found listings for it in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Germany. Good luck actually trying to buy one, though—they're all sold out already. We were told that Amazon and AMD itself both had stock earlier, but both are out now.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/...II/35.html

Just like Founders Edition cards, Radeon VII does not include the highly popular idle-fan-stop feature which completely shuts off the fans during idle, Internet browsing and light gaming, eliminating all fan noise. To me this does look like a missed opportunity, as it could have provided a unique selling point compared to NVIDIA's offerings. In idle the card is whisper quiet though, thanks to good fan settings for that scenario. When gaming, fan noise is very high with 43 dBA, sitting between Vega 64 and Vega 56 reference, making Radeon VII one of the loudest graphics cards we have. Competing cards with NVIDIA GPUs do MUCH better here, even the Founders Editions, which typically emit more noise than custom designs from NVIDIA's board partners.
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Power efficiency of Vega 20 is improved, making up lost ground vs NVIDIA, but not enough to even match their last-generation Pascal architecture — and Turing, even on 12 nm is still much more efficient. It looks like AMD will have to come up with a completely new architecture, if they want to compete with NVIDIA in that metric. Power efficiency doesn't just mean "power bill", it actually affects thermals, too, because all the energy gets converted into heat, which drives up temperatures. These temperatures also dictate how big / noisy / expensive your cooler has to be, and how fast you can run the card with a given cooler, because more performance generally means more power draw. Last but not least, running more power through the card requires a more complex / expensive voltage regulation circuitry, too.
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We would have loved for Radeon VII to be a success, but looking at our numbers it seems that NVIDIA will still get away with controlling high-end graphics card pricing, even though it might not be able to justify it with RTX alone (as shown in their quarterly financials showing weak response to the RTX 20-series). At a better price, such as $599, the Radeon VII, despite its shortcomings, could have forced NVIDIA to trim pricing of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070, which would have spurred the upgrade itch among everyone, benefiting the PC gaming market as a whole. AMD also needs to fill the vast price/performance gorge between the RX 590 and the Radeon VII, with a real successor for the RX Vega 56. One way to do that would be a cut down "Vega 20" GPU die mated to just two 4 GB HBM2 stacks at 512 GB/s, and performance rivalling the RTX 2070. Those with a Pascal (or even first gen Vega) graphics card, are yet to be given one good reason to upgrade.