Radeon VII Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/251444/amd-r...g-and-more

AMD pulled off a surprise at its CES 2019 keynote address, with the announcement of the Radeon VII client-segment graphics card targeted at gamers. We went hands-on with the card earlier this week. The company revealed a few more technical details of the card in its press-deck for the card. To begin with, the company talks about the immediate dividends of switching from 14 nm to 7 nm, with a reduction in die-size from 495 mm² on the "Vega 10" silicon to 331 mm² on the new "Vega 20" silicon. The company has reworked the die to feature a 4096-bit wide HBM2 memory interface, the "Vega 20" MCM now features four 32 Gbit HBM2 memory stacks, which make up the card's 16 GB of memory. The memory clock has been dialed up to 1000 MHz from 945 MHz on the RX Vega 64, which when coupled with the doubled bus-width, works out to a phenomenal 1 TB/s memory bandwidth.
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The Radeon VII is being extensively marketed as a competitor to GeForce RTX 2080. NVIDIA holds a competitive edge with its hardware being DirectX Raytracing (DXR) ready, and even integrated specialized components called RT cores into its "Turing" GPUs. The "Vega 20" continues to lack such components, however AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed at her post-keynote press round-table that the company is working on ray-tracing. "I think ray tracing is important technology; it's something that we're working on as well, from both a hardware/software standpoint."
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One way of reading between the lines would be - and this is speculation on our part - that AMD could working on retrofitting some of its GPUs powerful enough to handle raytracing with DXR support through a future driver update, as well as working on future generations of GPUs with hardware-acceleration for many of the tasks that are required to get hybrid rasterization work (adding real-time raytraced objects to rasterized 3D scenes). Just as real-time raytracing is technically possible on "Pascal" even if daunting on the hardware, with good enough work directed at getting a ray-tracing model to work on NGCUs leveraging async-compute, some semblance of GPU-accelerated real-time ray-tracing compatible with DXR could probably be achieved. This is not a part of the feature-set of Radeon VII at launch.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/28351...rojections

One logical question, based on Radeon VII’s overall improvements, is why AMD isn’t forecasting better performance for the card. On paper, the Radeon VII has enormous resources. Its peak pixel throughput blows the RTX 2080 Ti out of the water, as does its memory bandwidth. But the only benchmark where these changes really shine is Luxmark, where the Radeon VII is 1.64x faster than the Vega 64.
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The average performance improvement from Vega 64 to Radeon VII based on these figures is 28 percent. If you remove the two outliers (+68 percent in Fallout 76 and +7.46 percent in Hitman), the average improvement is 27.25 percent. Either way, we end up in about the same place. The gain is very slightly larger than the flat 1.25x improvement AMD projected at the initial unveil.

Based on this data, we can say a few things about the Radeon VII that we didn’t know previously. The GPU configuration honestly seems a little lopsided, in that it combines a huge increase in memory bandwidth and pixel throughput with no change in the total number of cores. Clearly, AMD added those resources for a reason. Given that 7nm Vega is intended for both HPC / AI markets, it makes sense to think they were added to address the AI/ML space.