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The new Radeon VII from AMD launches on February 7th. It should be on the level of the RTX 2080. This is now confirmed by leaked 3DMark benchmarks.

Radeon VII: AMD’s answer to the RTX 2080?

AMD is currently in quite a dilemma in the high-end graphics card market. The current graphics cards are not sufficient to compete with Nvidia in the high-end market at all. However, the Radeon VII presented at CES should now offer an answer. It is the consumer version of the Radeon Instinct MI50 and AMD’s first 7nm graphics card for end customers. Vega 20 is simply the 7nm version of Vega 10 and not a new architecture. A new architecture will only be Navi, which comes however not until the middle of the year and should not necessarily play a role in the high-end range.

At the presentation of the Radeon VII, AMD has mainly focused on the comparison with the RTX 2080. Despite the 16 gigabyte HBM2 memory and the 1 TB/s memory connection, which are more interesting for workstations and creative users, the graphics card is also said to be perfectly suited for gaming. AMD itself showed some benchmarks. However, there are no independent benchmarks yet. The Leaker TUM APISAK has now posted results of the 3DMark suite.

Sometimes faster, sometimes slower than the RTX 2080

The leaked values are the graphic points of the benchmarks Fire Strike, Fire Strike Extreme, Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy. These are gaming benchmarks that are often used as a reference and are correspondingly meaningful. The values look as if they have been rounded to the nearest hundredth step, but still give a preview of what we can expect.

AMD Radeon VII Graphics Score

FS – 27400

FSE – 13400

FSU – 6800

TS – 8700 — APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) 29. Januar 2019

In Fire Strike, the Radeon VII reaches 27,400 points. Compared to the competition from Nvidia, the GTX 1080 Ti as well as the RTX 2080 are a few percent behind. A similar picture can also be seen in Fire Strike Extreme (13,400 points) and Fire Strike Ultra (6,800 points). Also in these two benchmarks, the Radeon VII is two to three percentage points ahead of the GTX 1080 Ti and the RTX 2080. Only in Time Spy the picture is rather strange. Here, the graphics card is at 8,700 points, slightly behind the GTX 1080 Ti. The RTX 2070 is also 5 percent faster, while the RTX 2080 is 21 percent faster.

How accurate the benchmarks are, of course, can’t be said without exact details of the test environment. Nevertheless, the benchmarks, as long as they are authentic, are a good indication of where AMD wants to go. The Radeon VII even outperformed the predicted 25 percent increase in performance compared to the RX Vega 64. How good the graphics card is in independent tests remains to be seen. The extent to which it is a competitor to the RTX 2080, which on the one hand masters raytracing and on the other hand is even cheaper, can only be seen at the market launch.