02-08-2019, 05:30 AM
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/34...for-launch
Quote:Due to time constraints following significant driver-related setbacks in testing, we will be revisiting the card with a heavier focus on these “content creator” tests.
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Because AMD completely overhauled its API calls for this card, no current software utilities work for it. Afterburner is broken, GPU-z needs an update (and its creator is on vacation), and Wattool is also largely non-functioning. This leaves us with AMD’s WattMan, which is also presently in a largely unusable state.
Aside from innumerable other bugs encountered, some of which we’ll list below, the most noteworthy was that manual overclocking yields worse performance than running stock in at least 9/10 cases. That one time it doesn’t is typically within variance. All “overclocks” must be validated with performance testing, as misreporting of the clocks will lead users to believe the OC is actually working. Here are two tables illustrating what’s really happening:
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AMD’s drivers have largely improved over the past months, which is perhaps why it’s so disappointing that the Radeon VII drivers are so riddled with bugs. The company has worked hard to eradicate this perception of bad drivers, and has done well to fix its image and its driver packages, but botched the entire thing in one go with Radeon VII. Here’s a small list of what we encountered – we didn’t write all of them down:...
- Occasional black screen & restart issues (full stock, no OC applied). Suspected related to ASUS motherboards
- Black screen / lock that requires hard shutdown (full stock, no OC applied)
- Stock/auto/out-of-box crash event during benchmark triggered hard reset, ultimately killing the ability to open Radeon Settings on the system. DDU and AMD’s clean uninstaller did not remedy the issue. “Driver gremlins” left behind, post-crash, completely broke AMD drivers. We re-imaged the system to bypass the problem.
- Some games hard crash, like Ghost Recon: Wildlands
- Some crashes cause fans to lock to 100% fan speed until power button is held/system is cold booted
- Manual overclocking seems to not do anything
- Power offset sometimes does not work (validated with power meters and clamps)
- Cannot adjust fan speed to 90%, but all other ranges work fine?
- Fan speed sometimes gets stuck at 100% and cannot be lowered, could not determine root cause
- Clock occasionally misreports, e.g. as “7800MHz”
- Crashes during OC stability testing can sometimes wipe-out drivers and require a clean reinstall as Radeon Settings will stop opening
- Performance monitor sometimes does not log for more than a few seconds on some installs (but works on others – root cause not found)
- Stats read-out in Wattman sometimes completely disappears, seemingly without reason (even under stock/unchanged settings)
- Fan options sometimes revert to old version (min/max RPMs rather than fan curve), seemingly without reason
What does matter is noise levels (where NVIDIA leads with strength), gaming performance (where NVIDIA’s two-year-old 1080 Ti ties the Radeon VII), functional overclocking (NVIDIA shockingly holds a lead at present), and production performance (some testing still TBD, with a large OpenCL lead for Radeon).
We have some follow-up targeted feature testing for Radeon VII that will get separate content pieces; unfortunately, because of the time lost to driver defects, we had to push some testing back for a separate content item. For now, though, from a gaming and enthusiast standpoint, the Radeon VII card is difficult to recommend. At price equivalence, at best, you get rough equivalence in frame throughput, a good PCB and VRM, and maybe good overclocking features at some point, depending. That has been our primary reason to recommend Vega 56 lately – its overclocking is genuinely fun for enthusiasts, something that NVIDIA has shied away from and nearly altogether dropped. With Radeon VII losing all of that, it is harder to justify. Our primary hope would be that driver updates resolve much of this, but we’ll have to check back for that. We do not review based on promises, just like we didn’t for RTX.
Options are good and we want to see AMD succeed in more of its GPU pushes. Competition fuels inspiration – something we know first-hand from having to compete in the media space – and we’d like to see a stronger volley back-and-forth. At present, the product simply isn’t ready for launch. It needs another few weeks in the incubator, at which point we’ll revisit its viability as we expand testing to more production applications.