AMD Radeon VII Review: Performance Benchmarks With 7nm Vega

Name: AMD Radeon VII With 16GB HBM2
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, February 07, 2019, 09:00 AM EDT

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a sequel to the 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, which takes protagonist Lara Croft back to her explorative “tomb raiding” roots in a deep origin story. The game, however, was updated and enhanced with new gameplay and combat mechanics. The engine was updated as well, and offers DirectX 12 support, along with some stunning visuals. The benchmark outputs results from a number of maps; we’re reporting numbers from the “Geothermal Valley” here, along with the average score of all the maps. The game’s maximum “Very High” graphics preset was used, and all graphics-related options were enabled as well.

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider

DirectX 12 Benchmarks

Shadow Of The Tomb Raider

The Radeon VII clearly outpaced the GeForce RTX 2070 in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, but couldn't quite catch the RTX 2080 at either resolution.

The 95th percentile framerates at both resolutions show the same trend, with the Radeon VII trailing the GeForce RTX 2080 but firmly ahead of a GeForce RTX 2070.

We also captured the actual frame time graphs from the game with the Radeon VII and GeForce RTX 2080, to give you a visual representation of the frame pacing. As you can see, the two cards behave similarly in this game.

Strange Brigade

Vulkan (Or DX12!) Benchmarks

Strange Brigade is a third-person action game set in Egypt in the 1930s that takes gamers on an various adventures to explore ruins, solve puzzles, and uncover valuable treasures, while also blasting through an array of un-dead enemies. This game has both DirectX and Vulcan code paths and makes use of Asynchronous Compute as well. We tested Strange Bridge with its Ultra graphics preset with A-Sync compute enabled using the Vulkan code path, at a couple of resolutions.

Strange Brigade

strange1

AMD's Radeon VII exhibited some lower than expected minimum framerates in Strange Brigade, but ultimately outran the GeForce RTX 2080 at both resolutions.

Render times in Strange Brigade show the big spikes in maximum frame time which resulted in the relatively low minimum framerate for the Radeon VII when tested at 4K.

Tags: AMD, graphics, GPU, vega, 7nm, (nasdaq:amd), radeon vii

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com