AMD Radeon 7 GPU unveiled with benchmarks, price and release date

AMD Radeon 7: What’s new?

During its AMD keynote, the hardware outfit has lifted the sheet off of its new graphics card, the Radeon VII (or Radeon 7), the world’s first 7 nanometer (7nm) graphics card.

For the uninitiated, a 7nm graphics card means that it’s a 7nm technology process. This means, ultimately, that more transistors can be fit on the die, so you’ll see an increase in the chips performance. Smaller numbers are better.

While it’s physically a small difference from the 12nm cards of the previous Radeon generation — and what Nvidia are shipping with their new RTX range — AMD reckon that this change will net them a 25 percent increase in performance.

There aren’t that many 7nm processors in the wild, with Apple’s A12 Bionic and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx breaking onto the scene over the last few months.

This new Radeon card could see it close the performance gap between itself and Nvidia’s new generation of cards. It’s interesting that the two company’s have taken different approaches with their newest generation. Radeon has the performance push from moving to a smaller process, while Nvidia invested in machine learning and mod cons like ray tracing and DDSL.

Radeon’s new card won’t have any of these, and instead it’s an iterative update based on AMD’s Vega architecture, not the rumoured forthcoming Navi card. If you’re waiting on AMD’s Navi reveal, you might have to wait until next year: the smart rumour right now is that a Navi card is going to form the backbone of the PlayStation 5, so there’s no surprise it’s not quite here yet.

AMD Radeon 7 benchmarks, price and release date

Not everything is in the open yet, but here’s what we know:

Built upon the AMD’s Vega 20 GPU, there’s a base clockspeed of 1450MHz, with 1750MHz targeted for the boost clock. During the keynote, they showed off a 1,800MHz figure, but supposedly that is the peak speed and won’t be possible for every card.

This is backed up with a chunky 16gb of HBM2 memory. Other than that, AMD are keeping quiet, but they’ve released a few benchmarks of their own, which obviously you should take with a pinch of salt until we can get a card into our labs and give it a good going over.

Price wise, this will be shipping for $699 with no word on UK price just yet. Buying the card will get you a copy of Devil May Cry V, The Division 2 and the Resident Evil 2 remake which sweetens the deal significantly.

We’ll know more on a UK price soon, as the card is due to become available on February 7th, just around the corner.

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