It was a fairly quiet year for AMD’s graphics department in 2018, but now that AMD has released the Radeon VII graphics card for gaming, 2019 is the year of the 7nm GPU.
We were left in anticipation for a new AMD graphics card for quite a while, but the Radeon VII managed to put AMD back on the map – even if it continues to be dominated by Nvidia. Thanks to the new 7nm GPU architecture, AMD was able to pack its latest graphics cards with more transistors than ever before, without increasing the power draw.
Priced the same as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, while delivering comparable performance – albeit without Nvidia Turing’s ray tracing or DLSS features – the Radeon VII has ensured that 2019 will be an exciting year for the best graphics cards.
While the AMD Radeon VII is at least partially related to Vega, we still don’t know whether or not it’s officially part of any Vega II lineup. Based on what we were hearing before CES 2019, the Radeon VII lines up with what we were expecting from Vega II, so we’ll be treating it as part of that lineup, even if it’s not official.
So, be sure to keep this page bookmarked, and we’ll dive into everything there is to know about AMD Vega II.
Cut to the chase
- What is it? AMD’s first 7nm consumer graphics cards
- When is it out? February 7, 2019
- What will it cost? $699 (about £550, AU$980)
AMD Vega II release date
AMD revealed the Radeon VII at CES 2019, as the first 7nm consumer graphics card. It actually released about a month later on February 7, 2019, offering buyers Devil May Cry V, Resident Evil 2 and the Division 2 as complementary additions.
The AMD Radeon VII had some supply issues when it first hit the market, but the high-end GPU is now widely available. This is good news, as AMD’s Navi cards may not even show up until October 2019. We have seen AMD CEO Lisa Su say that Team Red would “provide new details about the next generation of high-performance platforms and products” at Computex 2019. Either way, we’ll be sure to update this article with any new information that arises.
AMD Vega II price
Right now there’s only one AMD Vega II card, the Radeon VII, and that has launched at $699 (£649, AU$1,109), bundled with three games. We’re sure that AMD will fill out the product stack with lower priced GPUs in the future, but we don’t know what the pricing will look like quite yet. However, you can probably assume it’s going to compete with Nvidia’s Turing product stack directly.
AMD Vega II specs
The switch from a 14nm process to a 7nm process allows AMD to pack even more power into each GPU. For its graphics cards, this move means more transistors in each GPU without having to increase the die size or the power requirements.
And, the AMD Radeon VII is the fist 7nm graphics card for gamers, with 3,840 stream processors, 16GB HBM2 VRAM and 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. This goes directly against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, which has 2,944 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 448GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The Radeon VII will definitely outperform its competitor in some workloads thanks to sheer horsepower. But, it’s especially going to shine in creative workloads, meaning that it’s going to be the best graphics card for hobbyist video editors and content creators who don’t have the cash to drop on a professional product.
But, the AMD Radeon VII won’t offer the double-precision capabilities that the enterprise Radeon MI60 does, according to ExtremeTech, so it’s still very much a consumer graphics card.
Aside from standalone cards, it seems all but guaranteed that the Vega II series will find its way into mobile and lower-power devices as integrated graphics processors. With a new generation of Ryzen processors expected, a new generation of Vega graphics to integrate into APUs is only fitting.
In fact, laptops will soon see a flurry of 2nd Gen Ryzen Mobile processors equipped with brand new Vega graphics. Even the anticipated Xbox Scarlet Cloud could see Vega II built into its APU.
Source: techradar.com