Get a Job. - Radeon VII Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,636 words · ~8 min read
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you know what AMD fans i actually feel bad for you
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for 10 years you've had to give your
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hard-earned money to either Intel or NVIDIA or both if you wanted to build a
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top of the line gaming rig AMD just
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hasn't been able to get both their CPU
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and GPU business units firing at the same time
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but perhaps that all changes today
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AMD stunned the industry as a whole when
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they unveiled their g-force rtx competitor the Radeon 7 just one
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month ago and then they stunned me in particular when it
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arrived in our office on time for their target launch date of february 7th
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and isn't it beautiful it is and it's got RGB
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but is it good enough to pressure NVIDIA to lower their higher than ever prices
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for enthusiast gaming gpus well we'll find out soon thanks to war
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let's begin with the bad news for those of you who like living on the bleeding
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edge AMD's seven nanometer vega offering
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has no support for ray tracing nor does it have any kind of equivalent to
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NVIDIA's deep learning optimized tensor cores
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now AMD has said that they're looking into implementing something similar to
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dlss super sampling in the long term using microsoft's new direct ml API but
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only time will tell if they get that done and what kind of performance hit
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we'd be looking at what we've got here is actually if you look closely it's right
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in the name basically a die shrunk and
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optimized vegas sequel but
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that's not necessarily a bad thing let's take a closer look
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right out of the gate it's clear that AMD considers cooling to be of the
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utmost importance while the previous gen vega 64 used a blower design the Radeon
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7 rocks three cooling fans on a large
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not to mention heavy vapor chamber cooler just like its rtx competitors
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speaking of which not only is the Radeon 7 a taller card than the rtx 2080 that
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AMD has positioned it against it's also got twin
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8 pin pci express power connectors to allow it to suck up more juice come to
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think of it that's kind of weird normally die shrinks come with a power
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savings ah right so
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as far as we can tell they basically put their entire power budget savings
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towards cranking the clock speeds up on this thing interesting so okay then an
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overclocked and evolved vega i can dig it did they do anything else
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to differentiate it from last gen oh right
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yeah they did how does double the hbm2
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memory at double the bandwidth sound to
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put that into perspective the Radeon 7 has faster memory than any of the gtx
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titans or rtx titans for that matter but will that massive memory bandwidth and
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significant core clock increase make up for the loss of a handful of stream
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processors and will its resulting overall performance make up for the lack
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of ray tracing or tensor cores at this price to find out we've brought out both
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our Intel and AMD gaming test benches to pit it head to head against not only the
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rtx 2080 and 2080 ti but also the vega
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64 to see just what impact those compromises had on the card's
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performance so as is tradition by now AMD seems to do worse in directx 11
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titles than NVIDIA but maintains an edge
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or trades blows with team green whenever directx 12 is in play which extends to
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far cry 5 and especially cs go where our
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rtx 2080 gets beaten by a pretty significant margin when we throw
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synthetics into the mix we see a reversal of the directx 11 and 12
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performance from earlier which come to think of it is why we stopped
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using synthetic benchmarks years ago i mean this isn't even this isn't even
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representative of real world performance Anthony was the one who brought them
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back i think i'm gonna have a word with them when we're done this video about
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just killing them again once and for all anyway moving on to productivity we've
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got more tradition with AMD's Radeon 7
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pulling ahead of even the 2080 ti in
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longer blender renders while falling far behind in v-ray in luxmark the 7
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straight-up embarrasses NVIDIA across the board but then in spec view perf
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which gives us a broader look at its workstation chops we've got a game of
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leapfrog going on so workloads that are particularly memory hungry like kittia
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energy medical and siemens nx show pretty strong wins for AMD that in some
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cases again eclipse even the 2080 ti
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while NVIDIA takes the crown and workloads that require raw compute
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strength sometimes again by broad margins when we look at thermals
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things get a little interesting now traditionally GPU temperatures are
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measured by a sensor at the edge of the die and this is the temperature we're
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showing you guys right now but AMD has
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actually doubled the number of sensors on the Radeon 7 and both the fan speed
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and boost controls are mated to what they're calling the junction temperature
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with a target of 110 degrees celsius so
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the tl dr then is that the junction is the highest reading out of all 64
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sensors and they claim that by doing things this way they can squeeze more
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efficiency out of the GPU unfortunately that also means that the
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fans begin to ramp up much sooner than you might be used to at a junction
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temperature of 95 degrees AMD does say though that you can
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increase this to 105 in their watman software without any risk of damaging
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the card speaking of wattman we found that we
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couldn't really push the core clocks up at all without running into issues with
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either early thermal throttling or general instability so this supports our
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pre-overclocked hypothesis but we will have to wait for more mature drivers and
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for partner boards with more robust power delivery before we can say
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anything conclusively so verdict time then
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given our results and the Radeon 7 700
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price tag we're kind of inclined to agree with NVIDIA ceo and curiously dr lisa sue's
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uncle jensen huang it's a bit underwhelming yes for the
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same price as a reference rtx 2080 you get similar performance in traditional
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games but NVIDIA's overall feature set
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is simply more robust maybe you don't care about real-time ray
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tracing or maybe you don't care about g-force experience or maybe you don't
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care about NVIDIA's superior hardware h.264 encoder
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but take it all together odds are you'll care about at least
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one of NVIDIA's features so in our minds then the Radeon 7 needed to beat the rtx
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2080s price not match it and the frustrating thing
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is that if it weren't for the massive hbm2 frame buffer they probably could
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have the word on the street is that just shy of half of the cost of this card is
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in that 16 gigs of memory that depending on the game might never be utilized more
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than 75 now if we had to guess we'd say what
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probably happened here was that rather than re-engineering a gaming tuned card
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with 8 or 12 gigs of memory and i don't know more stream processors or something
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AMD recycled their enterprise compute card the Radeon instinct mi 50 which
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would also explain the excellent productivity numbers whatever the reason
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though that compromise means that while the Radeon 7 is an excellent maybe even
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ideal card for content creators by day
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gamers by night or really anyone who uses opencl a fair bit
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the value proposition against team green is merely
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okay for pure gamers don't get me wrong this gives us a
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choice in the market for sure and i'm i'm super glad that AMD released it
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today it's just not quite the price or
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performance disrupter that we were all hoping for in the wake of NVIDIA's stiff
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rtx tax and as it stands it looks like we're just gonna have to
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live with digging deeper into our pockets for our graphics cards
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registering so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit
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that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
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store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
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guys should totally join
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even AMD's uncle doesn't like it