you know what AMD fans i actually feel bad for you
for 10 years you've had to give your
hard-earned money to either Intel or NVIDIA or both if you wanted to build a
top of the line gaming rig AMD just
hasn't been able to get both their CPU
and GPU business units firing at the same time
but perhaps that all changes today
AMD stunned the industry as a whole when
they unveiled their g-force rtx competitor the Radeon 7 just one
month ago and then they stunned me in particular when it
arrived in our office on time for their target launch date of february 7th
and isn't it beautiful it is and it's got RGB
but is it good enough to pressure NVIDIA to lower their higher than ever prices
for enthusiast gaming gpus well we'll find out soon thanks to war
thunder the realistic free-to-play online game for sponsoring this video
check out the link below to get either a premium tank or aircraft and three days
of premium play for free
let's begin with the bad news for those of you who like living on the bleeding
edge AMD's seven nanometer vega offering
has no support for ray tracing nor does it have any kind of equivalent to
NVIDIA's deep learning optimized tensor cores
now AMD has said that they're looking into implementing something similar to
dlss super sampling in the long term using microsoft's new direct ml API but
only time will tell if they get that done and what kind of performance hit
we'd be looking at what we've got here is actually if you look closely it's right
in the name basically a die shrunk and
optimized vegas sequel but
that's not necessarily a bad thing let's take a closer look
right out of the gate it's clear that AMD considers cooling to be of the
utmost importance while the previous gen vega 64 used a blower design the Radeon
7 rocks three cooling fans on a large
not to mention heavy vapor chamber cooler just like its rtx competitors
speaking of which not only is the Radeon 7 a taller card than the rtx 2080 that
AMD has positioned it against it's also got twin
8 pin pci express power connectors to allow it to suck up more juice come to
think of it that's kind of weird normally die shrinks come with a power
savings ah right so
as far as we can tell they basically put their entire power budget savings
towards cranking the clock speeds up on this thing interesting so okay then an
overclocked and evolved vega i can dig it did they do anything else
to differentiate it from last gen oh right
yeah they did how does double the hbm2
memory at double the bandwidth sound to
put that into perspective the Radeon 7 has faster memory than any of the gtx
titans or rtx titans for that matter but will that massive memory bandwidth and
significant core clock increase make up for the loss of a handful of stream
processors and will its resulting overall performance make up for the lack
of ray tracing or tensor cores at this price to find out we've brought out both
our Intel and AMD gaming test benches to pit it head to head against not only the
rtx 2080 and 2080 ti but also the vega
64 to see just what impact those compromises had on the card's
performance so as is tradition by now AMD seems to do worse in directx 11
titles than NVIDIA but maintains an edge
or trades blows with team green whenever directx 12 is in play which extends to
far cry 5 and especially cs go where our
rtx 2080 gets beaten by a pretty significant margin when we throw
synthetics into the mix we see a reversal of the directx 11 and 12
performance from earlier which come to think of it is why we stopped
using synthetic benchmarks years ago i mean this isn't even this isn't even
representative of real world performance Anthony was the one who brought them
back i think i'm gonna have a word with them when we're done this video about
just killing them again once and for all anyway moving on to productivity we've
got more tradition with AMD's Radeon 7
pulling ahead of even the 2080 ti in
longer blender renders while falling far behind in v-ray in luxmark the 7
straight-up embarrasses NVIDIA across the board but then in spec view perf
which gives us a broader look at its workstation chops we've got a game of
leapfrog going on so workloads that are particularly memory hungry like kittia
energy medical and siemens nx show pretty strong wins for AMD that in some
cases again eclipse even the 2080 ti
while NVIDIA takes the crown and workloads that require raw compute
strength sometimes again by broad margins when we look at thermals
things get a little interesting now traditionally GPU temperatures are
measured by a sensor at the edge of the die and this is the temperature we're
showing you guys right now but AMD has
actually doubled the number of sensors on the Radeon 7 and both the fan speed
and boost controls are mated to what they're calling the junction temperature
with a target of 110 degrees celsius so
the tl dr then is that the junction is the highest reading out of all 64
sensors and they claim that by doing things this way they can squeeze more
efficiency out of the GPU unfortunately that also means that the
fans begin to ramp up much sooner than you might be used to at a junction
temperature of 95 degrees AMD does say though that you can
increase this to 105 in their watman software without any risk of damaging
the card speaking of wattman we found that we
couldn't really push the core clocks up at all without running into issues with
either early thermal throttling or general instability so this supports our
pre-overclocked hypothesis but we will have to wait for more mature drivers and
for partner boards with more robust power delivery before we can say
anything conclusively so verdict time then
given our results and the Radeon 7 700
price tag we're kind of inclined to agree with NVIDIA ceo and curiously dr lisa sue's
uncle jensen huang it's a bit underwhelming yes for the
same price as a reference rtx 2080 you get similar performance in traditional
games but NVIDIA's overall feature set
is simply more robust maybe you don't care about real-time ray
tracing or maybe you don't care about g-force experience or maybe you don't
care about NVIDIA's superior hardware h.264 encoder
but take it all together odds are you'll care about at least
one of NVIDIA's features so in our minds then the Radeon 7 needed to beat the rtx
2080s price not match it and the frustrating thing
is that if it weren't for the massive hbm2 frame buffer they probably could
have the word on the street is that just shy of half of the cost of this card is
in that 16 gigs of memory that depending on the game might never be utilized more
than 75 now if we had to guess we'd say what
probably happened here was that rather than re-engineering a gaming tuned card
with 8 or 12 gigs of memory and i don't know more stream processors or something
AMD recycled their enterprise compute card the Radeon instinct mi 50 which
would also explain the excellent productivity numbers whatever the reason
though that compromise means that while the Radeon 7 is an excellent maybe even
ideal card for content creators by day
gamers by night or really anyone who uses opencl a fair bit
the value proposition against team green is merely
okay for pure gamers don't get me wrong this gives us a
choice in the market for sure and i'm i'm super glad that AMD released it
today it's just not quite the price or
performance disrupter that we were all hoping for in the wake of NVIDIA's stiff
rtx tax and as it stands it looks like we're just gonna have to
live with digging deeper into our pockets for our graphics cards
from now on thanks to war thunder for sponsoring
this video war thunder is the realistic free-to-play vehicle combat game and you
can fight with millions of players from all over the world in combined arms
battles in the air over land and at sea
it includes 1200 historically accurate tanks aircraft helicopters and ships
from the 1930s all the way to the 1990s
it's available for pc ps4 and xbox one
and you can join the battle today by clicking on the link below to get a free
premium tank or aircraft and three days of premium time as a bonus for
registering so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit
that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch
store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
guys should totally join
even AMD's uncle doesn't like it