AMD Has a New Very Fancy GPU [Updated]

unremarkably , the biggest announcements at CES are over with by the final stage of the first daytime , but during its 2nd - day keynote AMD CEO Lisa Su annunciate a raw GPU , the AMD Radeon VII . According to Su , it is the very first 7 nm graphics add-in available to consumer .

While Nvidia is leaning on theeye confect of beam trace , AMD is swear on the hoopla of a GPU with a smaller dice process . The last generation Vega GPU was based on a 14 Land of Enchantment process . This is half that sizing . A small-scale die almost always means an growth in execution — commonly while maintaing the same power efficiency or better .

AMD is bragging about its dice , because , notably , the dice sizes have been in the intelligence a flock lately with Intel promising a 10 nm CPU ( and repeatedly fail to deliver ) and Apple gloat about it ’s 7 nm mainframe for what felt like half o the iPhone XS keynote . Nvidia ’s modish GPUs , the RTX 2 - series , is based on a 12 nanometre procedure . So theoretically the AMD GPU could be quicker in games ( provided you may do without the ray trace ) , but GPU functioning is also heavily inform by the software program it operate with , and AMD ’s software has frequently lagged behind Nvidia ’s . Which is why Su took time to verbalize up AMD ’s investment in better software . She also mentioned the kind of memory board the AMD Radeon VII to presumably better strike off it aside from Nvidia . The Radeon VII will come with 16 GB of second - generation high - bandwidth memory ( HBM2 ) with a claimed bandwidth of 1 TB . Nvidia ’s 2080 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of approximately 448 GB per second and the previous propagation AMD GPU , the RX Vega 64 had 8 GB of HBM2 with a bandwidth of 483.8 GB a second . That ’s half the memory at half the potential speeding .

Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)

What does that all actually mean ?

It means , harmonize to Su , better performance at the same power draw poker as the previous top of the line Vega GPU ( she made no acknowledgment of the 2080 ) . She cited about 25 percentage improved performance on average . Su claimed that the Radeon VII saw 35 percent upright performance in Battlefield fivesome at 4 K and the highest options , and 25 per centum betterment in Fortnite . She claimed the performance extends to non - gaming program as well , with approximately 30 - percent improved functioning in apps like Photoshop and Blender , and a whopping 62 - percent improved performance across other OpenCL apps .

Notably absent from the Radeon VII announcement is any mention of ray trace , the sleek feature Nvidia is touting in its GPUs . But Radeon VII will cost $ 700 when it ’s uncommitted February 7 . That ’s at least $ 300 less than Nvidia ’s top GPU , though twice the terms of Nvidia ’s cheapest ray tracing card , the just announced RTX 2060 . Can it perhaps be worth it ? We ’ll hump more when we try our own Radeon VII visiting card for a review in the coming weeks .

Photo: Alex Cranz