After months of rumors and speculation, AMD finally took the wraps off its new GPU during its keynote at CES 2019 in Las Vegas today. Taking on the latest from both Intel and Nvidia, the new AMD Radeon Vega VII is the “next generation of high-performance gaming GPUs,” and leads the chipmaking industry as the world’s first 7nm gaming GPU for consumers, according to AMD CEO Lisa Su.
AMD’s Radeon Vega VII comes packed with 60 compute units and a clock rate of 1.8 GHz and is built on the second-generation AMD Vega architecture. Elsewhere, it sports 16GB of HBM2 memory at a bandwidth of 1TB a second. When compared to the last-generation Radeon RX Vega 64, the new Radeon Vega VII takes all that power and manages to push out more performance in some of the latest hit games. Running at 4K and on max settings, gamers can expect a 35 percent jump in Battlefield V, a 25 percent in Fortnite, and a 42 percent jump in Strange Brigade.
To back that up, AMD provided a live demo showing Devil May Cry 5 running at 4K on a desktop PC. David Polfeldt from Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment also appeared and provided shots of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 running at 4K settings with the Vega VII. For ultimate visuals, the game will support DirectX 12 and AMD Radeon FreeSync 2 HDR, as well as technologies such as shader intrinsics, rapid packed math, and asynchronous compute.
“AMD Radeon VII is the highest-performance gaming graphics card we ever created. It is designed for gamers, creators and enthusiasts who demand ultra-high-quality visuals, uncompromising performance. and immersive gaming experiences” said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD.
With content creation software, the new AMD Radeon VII can also deliver up to 36 percent more performance over the last-generation Radeon RX Vega 64. In Blender and DaVinci Resolve 15, AMD promises a 27-percent performance jump, and then a 62 percent jump in GPU compute workloads based on OpenCL scoring.
The AMD Radeon VII will be available on February 7 for prices starting at $700. That is $300 cheaper than Nvidia’s latest high-end GPU, and comparable to the RTX 2080 the Radeon VII was directly compared with in benchmarks. For a limited time, there will also be a “Raise the Game Fully Loaded” bundle with the graphics card included along with PC versions of Devil May Cry 2, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, and Devil May Cry 5.
Dell’s Alienware Area 51 2nd Generation Threadripper Edition will come with the new GPU on board.
