Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

I was sent a special reviewer's package for the AMD Radeon VII, with the card and a stand for the card inside the box.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

For those interested, AMD shared the above images of what the actual retail packaging will look like – but this is not how I received my sample, so I obviously can't photograph it myself or tell you what comes in the box.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

Back to my unboxing experience, though, the included stand is made out of something like acrylic and it is very heavy – it's simply an ornament to place the card into. It does have a dummy GPU die encased within itself at the front, though, which shows the 4 stacks of HBM2 memory around the GPU itself.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

We've already taken a tour of the Radeon VII card in our unboxing video that went live earlier this week, but it is definitely worth pointing out the key features of the card again.

The first of these is AMD's decision to move to a triple-fan cooler – it seems like AMD's reference designs have been using loud blower-style fans for as long as I can remember, so we are optimistic this card will run a bit cooler, and also a bit quieter, but we will test that later in the review. It is also worth pointing out that we measured each fan at 75mm in diameter, blade to blade – so they're not massive, but we will see how they perform before coming to any judgement.

One potential negative consequence of moving away from a blower-style cooler to these three axial fans is that the card will dump a lot of its hot air inside your case, which can hurt compact ITX systems, but if you have a larger chassis with decent airflow, it shouldn't be a problem.

I'd also like to say here that I do like the silver shroud used with the Radeon VII. It looks very clean and is, in my opinion, overall a sleeker design compared to Vega 64. It appears to be anodised aluminium, too, which gives a very premium feel in the hand – as we would expect considering the price, but it is still a positive point for the Radeon VII.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

As for the card's dimensions, we haven't actually been given official figures, so I have done my best to take my own – though if official dimensions do come later, there may be slight variations between the sets of figures. That aside, I measured the card at 265x120x40mm – so it's only a dual-slot card, and at under 27cm long it is probably smaller than average for a graphics card in 2019.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

Moving on, the front of the card is home to the Radeon logo, and as expected this does light up with red LEDs once the system is powered on.

The Radeon VII's backplate is also plain silver, though it does feature a few stickers as well as some ventilation and a cut-out behind the GPU core.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2
Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

Power requirements consist of 2x 8-pin connectors, with the board's TDP rated at 300W.

Lastly, our display outputs include 3x DisplayPort connectors and 1x HDMI port.

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For AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group, 2018 was a bit of a breather year. After launching the Polaris architecture in 2016 and the Vega architecture in 2017, for 2018 AMD set about to enjoy their first full year of Vega. Instead of having to launch a third architecture in three years, the company would focus on further expanding the family by bringing Vega's laptop and server variants to market. And while AMD's laptop efforts have gone in an odd direction, their Radeon Instinct server efforts have put some pep back in their figurative step, giving company the claim to the first 7nm GPU.

Following the launch of a late-generation product refresh in November, in the form of the Radeon RX 590, we had expected AMD's consumer side to be done for a while. Instead, AMD made a rather unexpected announcement at CES 2019 last month: the company would be releasing a new high-end consumer card, the Radeon VII (Seven). Based on their aforementioned server GPU and positioned as their latest flagship graphics card for gamers and content creators alike, Radeon VII would once again be AMD’s turn to court enthusiast gamers. Now launching today – on the 7th, appropriately enough – we're taking a look at AMD's latest card, to see how the Radeon VII measures up to the challenge.

On the surface, the Radeon VII would seem to be straightforward. The silicon underpinning the card is AMD's Vega 20 GPU, a derivative of the original Vega 10 that has been enhanced for scientific compute and machine learning, and built on TSMC's cutting-edge 7nm process for improved performance. An important milestone for AMD's server GPU efforts – it's essentially their first high-end server-class GPU since Hawaii all the way back in 2013 – AMD has been eager to show off Vega 20 throughout the later part of its bring-up, as this is the GPU the heart of AMD’s relatively new Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 server accelerators.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

First and foremost designed for servers then, Vega 20 is not the class of GPU that could cheaply make its way to consumers. Or at least, would seem to be AMD's original thought. But across the aisle, something unexpected has happened: NVIDIA hasn't moved the meter very much in terms of performance-per-dollar. The new Turing-based GeForce RTX cards instead are all about features, looking to usher in a new paradigm of rendering games with real-time raytracing effects, and in the process allocating large parts of the already-large Turing GPUs to this purpose. The end result has been relatively high prices for the GeForce RTX 20 series cards, all the while their performance gains in conventional game are much less than the usual generational uplift.

Faced with a less hostile pricing environment than many were first expecting, AMD has decided to bring Vega 20 to consumers after all, dueling with NVIDIA at one of these higher price points. Hitting the streets at $699, the Radeon VII squares up with the GeForce GTX 2080 as the new flagship Radeon gaming card.

AMD Radeon Series Specification Comparison AMD Radeon VII AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 AMD Radeon RX 590 AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Stream Processors 3840 (60 CUs) 4096 (64 CUs) 2304 (36 CUs) 4096 (64 CUs) ROPs 64 64 32 64 Base Clock 1400MHz 1247MHz 1469MHz N/A Boost Clock 1750MHz 1546MHz 1545MHz 1050MHz Memory Clock 2.0Gbps HBM2 1.89Gbps HBM2 8Gbps GDDR5 1Gbps HBM Memory Bus Width 4096-bit 2048-bit 256-bit 4096-bit VRAM 16GB 8GB 8GB 4GB Single Precision 13.8 TFLOPS 12.7 TFLOPS 7.1 TFLOPS 8.6 TFLOPS Double Precision 3.5 TFLOPS (1/4 rate) 794 GFLOPS (1/16 rate) 445 GFLOPS (1/16 rate) 538 GFLOPS (1/16 rate) Board Power 300W 295W 225W 275W Reference Cooling Open-air triple-fan Blower N/A AIO CLC Manufacturing Process TSMC 7nm GloFo 14nm GloFo/Samsung 12nm TSMC 28nm GPU Vega 20 (331 mm2) Vega 10 (495 mm2) Polaris 30 (232 mm2) Fiji (596 mm2) Architecture Vega (GCN 5) Vega (GCN 5) GCN 4 GCN 3 Transistor Count 13.2B 12.5B 5.7B 8.9B Launch Date 02/07/2019 08/14/2017 11/15/2018 06/24/2015 Launch Price $699 $499 $279 $649

Looking at our specification table, Radeon VII ships with a "peak engine clock" of 1800MHz, while the official boost clock is 1750MHz. This compares favorably to RX Vega 64's peak engine clock, which was just 1630MHz, so AMD has another 10% or so in peak clockspeed to play with. And thanks to an open air cooler and a revised SMU, Radeon VII should be able to boost to and sustain its higher clockspeeds a little more often still. So while AMD's latest card doesn't add more ROPs or CUs (it's actually a small drop from the RX Vega 64), it gains throughput across the board.

However, if anything, the biggest change compared to the RX Vega 64 is that AMD has doubled their memory size and more than doubled their memory bandwidth. This comes courtesy of the 7nm die shrink, which sees AMD's latest GPU come in with a relatively modest die size of 331mm2. The extra space has given AMD room on their interposer for two more HBM2 stacks, allowing for more VRAM and a wider memory bus. AMD has also been able to turn up the memory clockspeed up a bit as well, from 1.89 Gbps/pin on the RX Vega 64 to a flat 2 Gbps/pin for the Radeon VII.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

Interestingly, going by its base specifications, the Radeon VII is essentially a Radeon Instinct MI50 at heart. So for AMD, there's potential to cannibalize Instinct sales if the Radeon VII's performance is too good for professional compute users. As a result, AMD has cut back on some of the chip's features just a bit to better differentiate the products. We'll go into more a bit later, but chief among these is that the card operates at a less-than-native FP64 rate, loses its full-chip ECC support, and naturally for a consumer product, it uses the Radeon Software gaming drivers instead of the professional Instinct driver stack.

Of course any time you're talking about putting a server GPU in to a consumer or prosumer card, you're talking about the potential for a powerful card, and this certainly applies to the Radeon VII. Ultimately, the angle that AMD is gunning for with their latest flagship card is on the merit of its competitive performance, further combined with its class-leading 16GB of HBM2 memory. As one of AMD's few clear-cut specification advantages over the NVIDIA competition, VRAM capacity is a big part of AMD's marketing angle; they are going to be heavily emphasizing content creation and VRAM-intensive gaming. Also new to this card and something AMD will be keen to call out is their triple-fan cooler, replacing the warmly received blower on the Radeon RX Vega 64/56 cards.

Furthermore, as a neat change, AMD is throwing their hat into the retail ring as a board vendor and directly selling the new card at the same $699 MSRP. Given that AIBs are also launching their branded reference cards today, it's an option for avoiding inflated launch prices.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

Meanwhile, looking at the competitive landscape, there are a few items to tackle today. A big part of the mix is (as has become common lately) a game bundle. The ongoing Raise the Game Fully Loaded pack sees Devil May Cry 5, The Division 2, and Resident Evil 2 included for free with the Radeon VII, RX Vega and RX 590 cards. Meanwhile the RX 580 and RX 570 cards qualify for two out of the three. Normally, a bundle would be a straightforward value-add against a direct competitor – in this case, the RTX 2080 – but NVIDIA has their own dueling Game On bundle with Anthem and Battlefield V. In a scenario where the Radeon VII is expected to trade blows with the RTX 2080 rather than win outright, these value-adds become more and more important.

Đánh giá radeon vii 16gb hbm2

The launch of the Radeon VII also marks the first product launch since the recent shift in the competitive landscape for variable refresh monitor technologies. Variable refresh rate monitors have turned into a must-have for gamers, and since the launch of variable refresh technology earlier this decade, there's been a clear split between AMD and NVIDIA cards. AMD cards have supported VESA Adaptive Sync – better known under AMD's FreeSync branding – while NVIDIA desktop cards have only supported their proprietary G-Sync. But last month, NVIDIA made the surprise announcement that their cards would support VESA Adaptive Sync on the desktop, under the label of 'G-Sync Compatibility.' Details are sparse on how this program is structured, but at the end of the day, adaptive sync is usable in NVIDIA drivers even if a FreeSync panel isn't 'G-Sync Compatible' certified.

The net result is that while NVIDIA's announcement doesn't hinder AMD as far as features go, it does undermine AMD's FreeSync advantage – all of the cheap VESA Adaptive Sync monitors that used to only be useful on AMD cards are now potentially useful on NVIDIA cards as well. AMD of course has been quite happy to emphasize the "free" part of FreeSync, so as a weapon to use against NVIDIA, it has been significantly blunted. AMD's official line is one of considering this a win for FreeSync, and for freedom of consumer choice, though the reality is often a little more unpredictable.

The launch of the Radeon VII and its competitive positioning against the GeForce RTX 2080 means that AMD also has to crystalize their stance on the current feature gap between their cards and NVIDIA's latest Turing machines. To this end, AMD's position has remained the same on DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and AI-based image quality/performance techniques such as DLSS. In short, AMD's argument goes along the lines that they believe that the performance hit and price premium for these features isn't worth the overall image quality difference. In the meantime, AMD isn't standing still, and along with DXR fallback drivers, they working on support for WinML and DirectML for their cards. The risk to AMD being, of course, is that if DXR or NVIDIA's DLSS efforts end up taking off quickly, then the feature gap is going to become more than a theoretical annoyance.

All told, pushing out a 7nm large gaming GPU for consumers now is a very aggressive move so early in this process' lifecycle, especially as on a cyclical basis, Q1 is typically flat-to-down and Q2 is down. But in context, AMD doesn't have that much time to wait and see. The only major obstacle would be pricing it to be acceptable for consumers.

That brings us to today's launch. For $699, NVIDIA has done the price-bracket shifting already, on terms of dedicated hardware for accelerating raytracing and machine learning workloads. For the Radeon VII, the terms revolve around 16GB HBM2 and prosumer/content creator value. All that remains is their gaming performance.