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]
The Radeon RX Vega 56 is the weakest member of AMD's Vega GPU family. The Vega architecture is built on 14 nm silicon and contains next-generation compute units (nCUs). Each NCU houses 64 steam processors, of which the Vega 56 has 3584 vs. 4096 in the Vega 64. The new architecture employs 8GB of second generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM2). In terms of compatibility all of the games we tested were fine apart from GTAV where enabling reflection MSAA resulted in very poor, almost matt, reflection fidelity (the same bug appeared on several Navi and Vega cards). Although the Vega 56 has 12.5% less processing units, users have found that by flashing an RX 64 BIOS into an RX 56 card allows a 10% increase in OC headroom which effectively brings a BIOS flashed RX 56 onto par with a stock RX 64 and just 12.5% slower than a fully overclocked RX 64. All of this OC headroom is great on paper but in the real world the reference Vega 56 is far too noisy. Hair dryer levels of noise at stock clocks are unacceptable for most users. Provided you are partially deaf or happy to use noise canceling headphones the Vega 56 “can” deliver levels of performance that approach an RTX 2060 but prices need to drop below $200 before the Vega 56 is competitive. [Nov '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.