The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 1 (DX11)
Battlefield 1 returns from the 2017 benchmark suite, the 2017 benchmark suite with a bang as DICE brought gamers the long-awaited AAA World War 1 shooter a little over a year ago. With detailed maps, environmental effects, and pacy combat, Battlefield 1 provides a generally well-optimized yet demanding graphics workload. The next Battlefield game from DICE, Battlefield V, completes the nostalgia circuit with a return to World War 2, but more importantly for us, is one of the flagship titles for GeForce RTX real time ray tracing.
We use the Ultra preset is used with no alterations. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, our rule of thumb with multiplayer performance still applies: multiplayer framerates generally dip to half our single player framerates. Battlefield 1 also supports HDR (HDR10, Dolby Vision).
Our previous experience with Battlefield 1 shows that AMD hardware tend to do relatively well here, and the Radeon VII is no exception. Of the games in our suite, Battlefield 1 is actually only one of two games where the Radeon VII takes the lead over the RTX 2080, but nevertheless this is still a feather in its cap. The uplift over the Vega 64 is an impressive 34% at 4K, more than enough to solidly mark its position at the tier above. In turn, Battlefield 1 sees the Radeon VII meaningfully faster than the GTX 1080 Ti FE, something that the RTX 2080 needed the Founders Edition tweaks for.
99th percentiles reflect the same story, and at 1080p the CPU bottleneck plays more of a role than slight differences of the top three cards.
289 Comments
View All Comments
Manch - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
My bad on Wolf. I thought it was. It's on XB1 which is DX12 and DX12 supt was confirmed by a few places so I didn't check further.As for Vulkan Games, off the top of my head(whats in my library), TWS:ToB, TW: Warhammer II (should have been in my table..oops), Warhamer 40K DoW III, Serious SAM VR games, x-plane. I'm sure there are others. Easy to look up.
IMO FPS should not be the definitive test for all API's. Variety is always nice.
Cherry pick my mistakes but my point stands. I get the test bed needs to be locked down so consistent results can be achieved. Anandtech needs to be able to give specific measurable and repeatable results and they do that. I'm just merely expressed my desire to see a more balanced test suite in regards to APIs & games that are design for NVidia or AMD GPU's.
eddman - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Are you basing that on personal experience or simply getting the info from vulkan's wikipedia page, without checking the platform column?TWS:ToB, TW: Warhammer II and Warhamer 40K DoW III use vulkan only on linux.
Despite the vulkan addition, Serious sam games are old, non-demanding and not suitable for benchmarking.
X-plane does not support vulkan yet; it's a work-in-progress. Still, even if it does add it eventually, it too is not suitable for benchmarking.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
The benchmark suite gets updated on a roughly yearly basis. It was last updated for the Turing launch, so we're only about 5 months into it. As part of ensuring we cover a reasonable selection of genres, these were the best games available in the fall of 2018.The next time we update it will presumably be for AMD's Navi launch, assuming that still happens in 2019. Though it's never too early to suggest what games you'd like to see.
eva02langley - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Anthem, metro Exodus, The Division 2, Rage 2, Mortal Kombat 11krazyfrog - Sunday, February 10, 2019 - link
Half-Life 3SeannyB - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I would like to see a title from each of the general purpose engines, namely UE4 and Unity.Korguz - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
maybe i am the only one here.. but the games AT tests... i dont play ANY of them :-)Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Out of curiosity, what do you play?Korguz - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
WOW, Starcraft 2 Diablo 3 and some older games... games that dont really " need " a card like this.. my current asus strix 1060, plays these just fine at almost max eye candy... the only game i can think of that i have, and play that might need this card.. is Supreme commander, but im not sure if that game needs a strong cpu, or gpu, maybe a bit of both...Holliday75 - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Love me some Supreme Commander. Solid followup to Total Annihilation. As to its performance I think its more CPU based and quite frankly the engine is not optimized for modern hardware.