It’s been a few years since AMD has had a GPU that could compete with the high end cards that Nvidia releases. AMD has been comfortable being in that middle ground the last few years with their RX line. But that all changed yesterday with the announcement of the Radeon VII, which is being marketed as the world’s first 7nm GPU.
While the presentation seemed rather lackluster, there was some exciting information that came out of AMD’s keynote yesterday. First, the Radeon VII is 25% faster using the same amount of power as the Vega 64, which is a huge increase. The card has 16 GBs of VRAM, and a total memory bandwidth of 1TB/s. The card is a beast, and it comes with a hefty price tag: $699.
AMD says the card can compete with Nvidia’s RTX 2080, which retails for $799 for the founders edition, and third party cards range from $699-$799. While in the past you could count on AMD to be the more affordable option, that isn’t the case with the Radeon VII.
So, who is this card for? I think first off it is for AMD supporters who have wanted to see the company get back to producing a high end graphics card. I also believe that those going for a FreeSync 2 monitor would want a card to show off that technology.
But outside of that, it isn’t the showstopper a lot of people were expecting for a high end card. The memory technology is impressive, and it looks like it will be a killer 4K card. But with what Nvidia has put out the last year, it seems like AMD is once again a year behind.
The big thing missing is ray tracing support. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su did state that AMD has a ray tracing GPU in development. It is also true that very few games actually support ray tracing (and support it at a level that’s acceptable to PC gamers). But it still would have been nice to see this being supported from the start.
While the price has disappointed a few people, I’d like to wait and see how much third party vendors charge for their Radeon VII cards. The reference cards (cards that the GPU manufacturer release) are always more expensive than what third party puts out. It’s realistic that we’ll see a Radeon VII for $550-$600 once the third party cards start to release, which would be an excellent price for 4K 60FPS gaming.
This is also just the beginning of 2019 for AMD. They have said more cards are on the way, which is where my interest lies. I don’t need a 4K card, so I want to see their 1440p card. The Radeon VII is also based on their Vega 64 architecture, not their long talked about Navi architecture. We should be hearing more about that this year. Between the Ryzen 3000 series and their Navi line, we should be seeing some very competitive AMD hardware this year. Early rumors say that the new Ryzen 7 CPU coming out will be as fast as the Intel i9-9900K, which would be very impressive.
It does seem a bit weird for AMD to announce the Radeon VII since it feels like a stopgap card right now, but I think people will be happy with it. It’s always hard to wait for new PC gaming hardware, because there is always new technology around the corner. If $699 is too steep of a price for you, and you aren’t at a point for 4K gaming, I’d wait to see what else AMD does this year.
Overall it is nice to see AMD back and being competitive. It is great for the PC gaming market. I just hope we see those 1440p cards soon. I need an upgrade!
