The widely anticipated (albeit currently not widely available) prosumer AMD Radeon VII is finally available. It features a next generation Vega 20 GPU which is based on a 7nm manufacturing process, compared to 14nm in the first generation flagship: the RX Vega 64. The Radeon VII has a massive 16GB of expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) which offers a decent degree of future proofing and also makes it a good choice for memory hungry applications, however most current games do not require more than the 8GB that comes with both NVIDIA's RTX 2080 and AMD’s RX Vega 64. The Radeon VII has fewer cores than the RX Vega 64 (3840 vs 4096) but clock speeds have been boosted up to 1800 MHz compared to 1546 MHz in the RX Vega 64, the net result is 13.8 TFLOPS single precision computations (versus 13.4 TFLOPS for the RX Vega 64). On the negative side, the Radeon VII is designed with three cooling fans which can get noisy and early software drivers are reported to be buggy. Whilst there is a modest 16% performance advantage over the RX Vega 64, initial benchmarks indicate that the Radeon VII has an effective speed which is 6% short of the similarly priced RTX 2080. [Feb '19GPUPro]
Out of the box the reference 5700 XT has high burst speeds but under load it overheats and therefore drops frames to the extent that it is more or less unusable for demanding games like PUBG. In order to settle the card it was under volted by 120 mV and the maximum clock was lowered to 1,980 MHz (the stock BIOS and 19.9.1 driver defaulted the card to 2,030 MHz). The fan curve also had to be turned up to around 50% power at 75 degrees (which is a lot noisier than stock). After making these changes the card delivered far more consistent performance albeit with a reduced top speed and unacceptable (hair dryer) levels of noise. There were also incompatibilities with GTAV: enabling reflection MSAA resulted in very poor, almost matt, reflection fidelity (the same bug appeared on several Navi and Vega cards). The reference 5700 XT is great for beating cherry picked benchmarks, but it is not so great for playing games. Thousands of people, duped by sponsored marketing material, purchased the reference card expecting flagship performance, instead they got a shopping trolley with a V6 engine. It appears that the same marketing tactics were employed for the reference Vega 56 and 64 series of graphics cards which we will purchase for our gaming lab and generate effective Fps gaming metrics as soon as possible (results here). AMD appear to have very short term marketing strategists at the helm, they seem more concerned with this years bonuses than the longevity of the brand. [Jul '19GPUPro]
We calculate effective 3D speed which estimates gaming performance for the top 12 games. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield value for money. Our figures are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top GPUs. [GPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.