AMD's new 7nm Radeon VII GPU was a surprise announcement at CES 2019, where the specifications were revealed along with a few details about the device. Essentially, it's the world's first 7nm gaming GPU, and it's expected to launch on February 7th of this year! In fact, experts are speculating that it will replace the currently top-of-the-line Radeon RX Vega 64.
For gamers, the AMD Radeon VII is aimed at gamers who want smooth frame rates at 4K or ultra-wide 3440x1440 resolution or very high frame rates at full HD. It will also target audiences who want to stream gameplay videos online or people who want to create games and other creative content but don't need a pro workstation-grade GPU.
AMD claims that the new Radeon's performance will increase by 29% compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64. While no comparisons with Nvidia's performance numbers have been published, the Radeon VII can outperform the top-end GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce RTX 2080.
AMD has made few mentions of the specifications. Specifically, the Radeon VII GPU is codenamed Vega 20 and includes 3,840 stream processors and 240 texture units with 64 ROPs (render output units). Radeon VII graphics cards using AMD's reference design will have 16GB of HBM2 memory on a 4096-bit bus for up to 1TBps of memory bandwidth.
Perhaps the new model will remind us of the 7nm Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerator, as they are practically identical. However, the Radeon VII, as a gaming GPU, will not contain double-precision floating point functions to differentiate itself from the aforementioned professional accelerator. Regarding the TDP rating of the Radeon VII, it is at 300W, a feature that makes it provide higher numbers than those of Nvidia.
On the contrary, after the introduction of the new model at CES 2019, Nvidia spokesperson Jen-Hsun Huang stated that this is something that is not new while at the same time there is a lack of artificial intelligence and ray tracing capabilities. To this, AMD spokesperson Lisa Su immediately responded that so far they have not seen the capabilities of Radeo in practice and that it is still early to judge the field of ray tracing, because it is still under development by developers.
