One of the surprise announcements from AMD's keynote speech at CES 2019 was the unveiling of the Radeon VII 7nm graphics card. It's a high-end solution with performance that's said to rival the RTX 2080 and cost about the same with a launch price of $700. It's going on sale on February 7 and is AMD's first top-tier card in a year and a half.
Although there are no third-party results to parse through just yet, we do have a taste of what the card can do thanks to AMD's own internal benchmarks. We'd urge taking them with a pinch of salt as they are inherently biased, even if AMD hasn't deliberately cherry picked them, but we can draw some measure of understanding from them about what the Radeon VII might be capable of.
Note: All benchmarks are run at 4K, maximum settings with a Radeon VII, Intel 7700K, and 16GB of 3000MHz DDR4.
Based on results released by AMD itself, HardOCP has compiled everything together to create a profile of just how capable the Radeon VII is compared to AMD's current flagship card, the Vega 64. It averages out at around 29 percent more powerful across a number of games, with some performing as much as 68 percent better on a Radeon VII.
Those games are in the minority, with most performing around 20-30 percent better, while specific games like Hitman only manage 7.5 percent higher frame rates.
The ones that appear to enjoy the greatest performance enhancement with Radeon VII are Battlefield V, Deus X: Mankind Divided, Fallout 76, Doom, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Strange Brigade.
As with first-gen Vega and the GTX 10-series, AMD's greatest advantages over Nvidia appear to be in DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. That's where the largest gains have been made here too, so it may be that with better drivers and a wider spread of DX12 and Vulkan titles, AMD could increase its performance gain further.
Image and data source: HardOCP