CES 2019 | AMD officially unveils the 7 nm Radeon VII high-end gaming GPUs

AMD is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, so 2019 is extra important for the red team. On the one hand, AMD is analyzing its past achievements and is carefully considering its future moves, while on the other hand, the company is preparing to deliver the world’s first 7 nm desktop chips. This year also marks AMD’s first attendance at CES, and CEO Lisa Su graciously presented the company’s plans for 2019 and beyond. There were a few new pieces of info on the upcoming Ryzen 3000 and second gen EPYC CPUs, but Su dropped the bomb with a wealth of specs on the upcoming high-end gaming GPUs.

The official name of the 7 nm gaming GPU is Radeon VII (7) and it looks like AMD is positioning it as a direct competitor for Nvidia’s RTX 2080. As AMD’s gaming flagship is based on the MI60 Radeon Instinct chip, the Radeon VII will pack 60 compute units clocked at up to 1.8 GHz and includes 16 GB of HBM2 VRAM capable of 1 TB/s memory bandwidth. Compared to the Vega 64 GPUs, the Radeon VII is clearly more energy efficient, delivering 25% increased performance at the same power. In Battlefield V, AMD is citing 35% increased performance, Fortnite will get only 25% more FPS, while games that use the Vulkan API will see 42% increased performance.

While the Radeon VII GPU is primarily marketed as a gaming GPU, it also targets content creators, offering up to ~30% more performance in Blender / Adobe Premier and up to 62% improved compute power for the OpenCL platform. AMD even provided some cherry-picked numbers to show how the Radeon VII compares to Nvidia’s RTX 2080 in 4K games at max settings. Thus, in DX 12 games like Battlefield V, the Radeon VII scores 62 versus Nvidia’s RTX 2080 that scores 61 fps, and the same scores apply to DX 11 Farcry 5. Vulkan games like Strange Brigade show more gains, with the Radeon VII scoring 87 fps and the RTX 2080 only 73. For the live demo AMD decided to show off Devil May Cry 5 running at around 100 fps in 4K max settings.

The new Radeon VII will be available starting February 7 from retailers or directly from AMD’s site. The MSRP is set at US$699 and the GPU will come bundled with Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5 and Tom Clancy’s The Division for a limited time only.

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