Like everyone else, we're eager to get our hands on AMD's new Radeon VII graphics card and run it through a gamut of games to see how it performs, and especially how it compares to other high-end GPUs. That day will come, probably on or just before the February 7 launch date. In the meantime, it turns out AMD shared more of its own benchmark data than we initially thought.
During the AMD's keynote yesterday, Dr. Lisa Su talked about the Radeon VII while several graphs splashed on the big screen behind her. Those graphs contained only a handful of benchmarks, including a mix of content creation and actual games.
The folks at HardOCP noticed that AMD included a bunch more benchmarks buried in the footnotes section of its press release. It's a jumbled mess, so we cleaned things up for easy viewing. Here's a look:
Keep in mind that those are all AMD's own figures, and not ours. According the footnotes, AMD benchmarked both the Radeon VII and Radeon RX Vega 64 in a testbed consisting of an Intel Core i7-7700K processor (seems a bit outdated, TBH) and 16GB of DDR4-3000 memory. AMD doesn't mention the motherboard or storage drive, but does say the games were benched at 4K at max settings.
All of the scores are averages of three runs with the same settings. We don't want to extrapolate too much from this since these are not our own numbers, but overall AMD shows the Radeon VII running over 28 percent faster than the Radeon RX Vega 64.
The biggest difference came in Fallout 76, which AMD shows running over 68 percent faster on the Radeon VII. On the opposite end, the smallest performance gap came in Hitman 2, where the difference was less than 8 percent (probably CPU limited based on our own testing of the game).
Take from this what you will. The bigger question in our mind is how it compares to Nvidia's Radeon RX 2080. That will be the Radeon VII's chief competitor at its $699 price point. On stage, AMD showed the Radeon VII running neck and neck with the GeForce RTX 2080 in Battlefield 5 and Far Cry 5, and leaving it behind in Strange Brigade.
That's promising, though the GeForce RTX 2080 has the benefit of real-time ray tracing and DLSS, features that are not available in the Radeon VII. It's also worth pointing out that in our own internal benchmarks using 17 games at 4k 'ultra' settings, the RTX 2080 comes out about 45 percent faster than the RX Vega 64.
We look forward to testing AMD's new GPU in the coming weeks.
