AMD Radeon VII Linux Benchmarks - Powerful Open-Source Graphics For Compute & Gaming

Amazing GPU... for a not so amazing price.

[moilami]

I am surprised. AMD delivered a great card with very good open source drivers. It took them years, but now they are far ahead of nvidia.

RX 580 can be got for less than 200 euro and Vega 56 less than 400 euro. I would say great times for Linux gamers.

[audir8]

Good job AMD on getting 7nm out! I'll switch to AMDVLK from RADV if you fix problems like these. Specifically lockups on my new RX 580 when my 1700 is idle. Never had issues with 1700+1050.

Will be interested to see if; like the Vega56, Vega64 and the Vega APUs, this card will also hard-lock the system when trying to run console emulators.

[GreenReaper]

The Radeon VII is truly the Threadripper of GPUs. If you can make proper use of it, it's a bargain. Otherwise it's like using a pick-up truck to do the shopping - sure, you can stack in as many bags as you want; but it's louder and you'll pay way more in gas (unless tuned) and it might take longer on the hills as well.

The 30-40% power improvement bodes well. I look forward to seeing the impact on AMD's APUs, especially combined with AV1 support. It might take another year or so to get there, though, given how much 14nm capacity they still have. The only reason 7nm is this cheap is that these are reject or surplus server GPUs normally costing almost three times as much.

[Buntolo]

Hi Michael! Thanks for the very long (in a positive way) and detailed article.

I've found this typo on page 2:

>On the NVIDIA side

[riklaunim]

Most of what I've read points to Navi being lower-end GPUs, to replace Polaris (who still in most cases has a better perf/price ratio to Nvidia's competition almost 3 years after release). But maybe that's just confirmation bias...

And there supposed to be big Navi after the normal one and so on. Plus Nvidia isn't dumb, if needed they will find "cheap" cards to cover up competing products (or at least they think they will). And the new arch after Navi... Fun how you can always look into the future.

[smitty3268]

What is the reason for the increased performance of Radeon 7 (3840 stream processors) over Vega 64 (4096 stream processors)?

Baseline: Vega 64
From the article: Harmonic mean of FPS is increased by (90.901-71.441)/71.441 = 27%
Frequency is increased by (1750-1546)/1546 = 13%
Stream processors are decreased by (3840-4096)/4096 = -6%

The unexplained part is 27-13+6 = 20%. Is this caused just by the greater memory bandwidth, or has the stream processor efficiency been improved as well?

Stream processor throughput is up almost 9%, because of the clockspeed.
Anandtech mentioned that AMD is claiming 1%-2% increase due to better temperature measurements leading to less throttling.
For the other 17% I think there's no reason to think it's anything other than the 112% memory bandwidth increase.

Note that https://www.anandtech.com/show/13923...-vii-review/18 attempted clocking the CU's to the same speed, and the results between different tests differed quite a bit. I think the large gains are likely due to memory bottlenecks in those cases.

[caligula]

While I've actually done this myself on a card that was clearly defective and had literally zero mounting pressure, as an engineer I still have to point out that doing this on a correctly designed card can potentially have destructive consequences. Gaining a couple of °C in return for a cracked GPU or PCB is not worth it.

Yes true. But overall, I think the cooling solution isn't optimal. You could definitely do better.

[Iiari]

Good to know it meets AMD's claims. I don't think I can really justify replacing my 1080 Ti just in the name of better open source support though. Here's hoping Navi SKU will beat out the 1080 To by a respectable margin sooner than later.

If anything, I think the article proves the best value out there is probably a used 1080ti.

First, kudos to Michael for what is easily the best Radeon VII article and stats I've seen online for any platform. As someone else said, it makes me very happy and proud to be a paid subscriber. Second, I too am very impressed by how much stronger a competitor the Radeon VII is on Linux vs the meh Windows stats published today (or is this just because NVIDIA is less optimized on Linux than Windows?).

Kudos also go out to AMD's media staff who, with their countdown of sorts until the embargo's end, managed to really drum up enthusiasm and absolutely dominate the tech media cycle today and they probably will continue doing so for days. The only demerit is that, with everyone awaiting Navi, the universal Windows world impression was, "Not bad, but don't buy until we see Navi later on."

I agree with what everyone else says that if you have a $100 price drop, a desktop rig, and open source drivers on the kernel, this is a really compelling purchase (again, if you can't find that used 1080ti ).

[TazKhaelyor]

[...]
Now all hopes will be in Navi - just as they were in Polaris or Vega. They really have to step up their game if they want to make great GPUs.

Most of what I've read points to Navi being lower-end GPUs, to replace Polaris (who still in most cases has a better perf/price ratio to Nvidia's competition almost 3 years after release). But maybe that's just confirmation bias...