AMD Radeon VII review: a genuine high-end alternative to Nvidia’s RTX 2080. And maybe that’s enough

The AMD Radeon VII is the first high-end gaming GPU from the red team since the RX Vega 64 landed with a dull thud on my desk back in the middle of 2017, and it’s also the very first 7nm consumer card from any GPU manufacturer in the world. Think Nvidia has the monopoly on new graphical advances? Well, AMD still has a few tricks up its sleeve… There will definitely be some rather smug faces in AMD HQ right now - not least in the marketing department, where they’ll be rubbing their hands with glee at the multi-faceted name they’ve come up with for the Radeon VII graphics card. Those Roman numerals aren’t just there to look all classy, y’know. While the ‘Radeon 7’ translation does refer to the 7nm excitement surrounding the new GPU’s production lithography, the Radeon VII also represents the second generation of the Vega graphics architecture. Hence the VII - version 2, Vega 2, and all that. Subtext, eh? The first 7nm Vega GPUs, launched last year, were designed for the high-end professional market, not gamers. The pricey Radeon Instinct range of cards were aimed purely at the serious pro-sumer with very deep pockets and we were never sure whether AMD was ever going to bring the second-gen Vega chips down into the gamer market either… there were strong rumours that it wouldn’t.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2BzmUrR