AMD’s Radeon 7 GPU, the world’s first graphics card built on a seven nanometre (7nm) technology process, has just gone on sale.
The Radeon 7 − styled as ‘Radeon VII’ − represents a big step up in performance from the previous-gen Radeon Vega 64.
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AMD’s claiming double the memory and 2.1 times the memory bandwidth performance compared to the Radeon Vega 64, a 35% general performance boost in Battlefield 5, and 42% higher performance in Strange Brigade.
Key specs include a base clock speed of 1450MHz, a boost clock speed of up to 1750MHz, 60 compute units and 3840 stream processors – stream processors on AMD GPUs are roughly equivalent to Nvidia’s CUDA cores – which means, on paper, this compares well to the Nvidia RTX 2080, the Founders Edition of which has a base clock of 1515MHz, boost speed of 1800MHz and 2944 CUDA cores.
While AMD isn’t shaking things up with a headline-grabbing feature like ray tracing, what is interesting is the manufacturing process. Simply put, the 7nm node means that more transistors can be fitted onto the processor die, versus, say, a 12nm PC component.
AMD cards of the previous Radeon generation used a 12nm design, and Nvidia’s recent 20 Series GPUs are also 12nm components.
A higher transistor density means (in theory) better performance, or cheaper prices. The Radeon 7 costs $699 in the US, but UK pricing hasn’t yet been announced.
Read more: Best gaming PC
The US price currently converts to roughly £540, which is significantly cheaper than the £749 asking price for a Founders Edition RTX 2080.
To sweeten the deal, AMD is bunging in free copies of the recently released Resident Evil 2 remake, and, as and when they’re available to download, copies of Devil May Cry 5 and The Division 2.
What do you think about the new Radeon 7? Will AMD do to Nvidia with the Radeon 7 what it did to Intel with the Ryzen 7? Let us know how hot (or not) you are for Big Red on Twitter @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
