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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Guest]

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

[TheYoshiGuy]

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.

For the emulator-specific issues, they won't fix anything (see bridgman's comment here https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...mparison/page6).
I ditched my Vega64 for an RTX2080 a few days ago because of this, and all my problems have been solved. Would have been good to know last year and I would have bought a GTX1080 instead and saved hours of my life, and about $600.
Good thing for you, is Polaris cards have far fewer issues than Vega.

Anyway, it's worth installing AMDVLK regardless. You can have them both installed at the same time, RADV as default and AMDVLK activated via environment variables. There are some cases where it works better than RADV. One example is the rpcs3 emulator. If you try to render anything at >720p, you'll get artefacts with RADV, but switching to AMDVLK solves it

The lockup with an idle CPU on Ryzen1 issue has work-arounds. Make sure you're running the latest BIOS for your motherboard, and if that doesn't solve it for you, add this to your GRUB boot string "processor.max_cstate=1"
That should fix it for you.

[Brisse]

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

Yes. I do wonder where it went wrong though, because in my opinion it does mostly look well made judging from the tear-downs I've seen on YouTube. Would like to see Sapphire release a custom model of this card. They did well with the Fury and Vega.