Hands On With The AMD Radeon VII, Linux Ready To Light Up 7nm Vega

[theriddick]

It competes with RTX2080 on normal benchmarks apparently, but if the 2080 enables DLSS then things get complicated because your now comparing a lower res image with advanced AI FSAA upscaled to 4k, against 4k native..

Hopefully AMD come up with some magic themselves to implement some sort of DLSS, if only for a 10-20% gain, surely a card with loads of FP16 compute capability can do it?

The one thing NVIDIA cards have over AMD is variety, lots of board partner variants, even MINI form factors for 2080 exist, and likely the TI soon. Plus not everyone here is keen to pay for 16GB HBM2 when very few games actually need it (if your even a gamer).

[audi.rs4]

So the VII is supposed to compete with RTX 2080.. but somehow I am anticipating a huge disappointment with the benchmarks. I hope I am proved wrong, I really want AMD to step up their game on the graphics side.

On Windows, it likely will compete well against the RTX 2080 (guess). On Linux though, it will likely be closer to the RTX 2070. Hopefully though, we keep seeing big driver improvements and it gets closer to the RTX 2080 in Linux for most titles.

[Zoll]

So the VII is supposed to compete with RTX 2080.. but somehow I am anticipating a huge disappointment with the benchmarks. I hope I am proved wrong, I really want AMD to step up their game on the graphics side.

[ynari]

I figured SR IOV was very unlikely, but I hadn't spotted that the MI150 supports MxGPU - good call. At the very least it might mean that the Radeon VII might handle PCI resets properly without a hard reboot, unlike a lot of AMD's other consumer hardware.

I'm guessing that the VII will be less than sparkling against the RTX2080 overall, but if it does have SR-IOV that would be wonderful. Not holding my breath.

[microcode]

As far as I know that game doesn't have any support for scripted/automated benchmarks from the command line?

Maybe something could be hacked together with Sikuli or something, gonna see how much trouble it'd be to use Sikuli to set up benchmarks in games with bad accessibility.

[chithanh]

There is mainline support for the Radeon VII support on Linux baked into the latest components, but of course, especially with new hardware it's always recommended to be using the latest and greatest (ideally, Git master) versions of components for the best support and performance. On launch day I'll go into all of the Linux driver requirements/recommendations.

It would be great to have a summary on the OOTB experience with a plain Ubuntu install. Will it work at all, perhaps at reduced performance, but enough to be able to download and install the latest driver code?

[Jabberwocky]

I'm dying to know if the Radeon VII supports SR-IOV, please let us know when the embargo lifts.

[edenist]

Very nice of them to send you a review card, that means the Linux support must be good.

There's lots of reading between the lines going on with reads of this article ;-)

[Kimmono]

Very cool. The only reviewer I give a shit about, next to hairy Steve at Gamers Nexus.

+ AdoredTV

[ThoreauHD]

Very cool. The only reviewer I give a shit about, next to hairy Steve at Gamers Nexus.