 You know what AMD fans? I actually feel bad for you. For 10 years, you've had to give your hard-earned money to either Intel or Nvidia or both if you wanted to build a top-of-the-line gaming rig. AMD just hasn't been able to get both their CPU and GPU business units firing at the same time. RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR But perhaps that all changes today. AMD stunned the industry as a whole when they unveiled their GeForce RTX competitor, the Radeon 7 just one month ago and then they stunned me in particular when it arrived in our office on time for their target launch date of February 7th. Isn't it beautiful? It is and it's got RGB. But is it good enough to pressure Nvidia to lower their higher-than-ever prices for enthusiast gaming GPUs? Well, we'll find out soon. Thanks to War Thunder, the realistic free-to-play online game for sponsoring this video. Check out the link below to get either a premium tank or aircraft and three days of premium play for free. Let's begin with the bad news. For those of you who like living on the bleeding edge, AMD's 7nm Vega offering has no support for ray tracing, nor does it have any kind of equivalent to Nvidia's deep learning optimized tensor cores. Now AMD has said that they're looking into implementing something similar to DLSS supersampling in the long term using Microsoft's new DirectML API, but only time will tell if they get that done and what kind of performance hit we'd be looking at. What we've got here is, and actually if you look closely it's right in the name, basically a die-shrunk and optimized Vega sequel. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Let's take a closer look. Right out of the gate, it's clear that AMD considers cooling to be of the utmost importance. While the previous gen Vega 64 used a blower design, the Radeon 7 rocks three cooling fans on a large, not to mention heavy, vapor chamber cooler, just like its RTX competitors. Speaking of which, not only is the Radeon 7 a taller card than the RTX 2080 that AMD has positioned it against, it's also got twin eight pin PCI Express power connectors to allow it to suck up more juice. Come to think of it, that's kind of weird. Normally die-shrinks come with a power savings. Ah, right. So as far as we can tell, they basically put their entire power budget savings towards cranking the clock speeds up on this thing. Interesting. So okay then, an overclocked and evolved Vega. I can dig it. Did they do anything else to differentiate it from last gen? Oh right. Yeah, they did. How does double the HBM2 memory at double the bandwidth sound? To put that into perspective, the Radeon 7 has faster memory than any of the GTX Titans, or RTX Titans for that matter. But will that massive memory bandwidth and significant core clock increase make up for the loss of a handful of stream processors? And will its resulting overall performance make up for the lack of ray tracing or tensor cores at this price? To find out, we've brought out both our Intel and AMD gaming test benches to pit it head-to-head against not only the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, but also the Vega 64 to see just what impact those compromises had on the card's performance. So as is tradition by now, AMD seems to do worse in DirectX 11 titles than Nvidia, but maintains an edge or trades blows with Team Green whenever DirectX 12 is in play, which extends to Far Cry 5 and especially CS GO where our RTX 2080 gets beaten by a pretty significant margin. When we throw synthetics into the mix, we see a reversal of the DirectX 11 and 12 performance from earlier, which come to think of it is why we stopped using synthetic benchmarks years ago. I mean, this isn't even this isn't even representative of real-world performance. Anthony was the one who brought them back. I think I'm gonna have a word with them when we're done this video about just killing them again. Once and for all. Anyway, moving on to productivity, we've got more tradition with AMD's Radeon 7 pulling ahead of even the 2080 Ti in longer Blender renders, while falling far behind in V-Ray. In Luxmark, the 7 straight-up embarrasses Nvidia across the board, but then in Specview Perf, which gives us a broader look at its workstation chops, we've got a game of leapfrog going on. So workloads that are particularly memory hungry, like Katia, Energy, Medical, and Siemens NX, show pretty strong wins for AMD that in some cases, again, eclipse even the 2080 Ti, while Nvidia takes the crown in workloads that require raw compute strength, sometimes again by broad margins. When we look at thermals, things get a little interesting. Now traditionally, GPU temperatures are measured by a sensor at the edge of the die, and this is the temperature we're showing you guys right now. But AMD has actually doubled the number of sensors on the Radeon 7, and both the fan speed and boost controls are mated to what they're calling the junction temperature, with a target of 110 degrees Celsius. So the TLDR then is that the junction is the highest reading out of all 64 sensors, and they claim that by doing things this way, they can squeeze more efficiency out of the GPU. Unfortunately, that also means that the fans begin to ramp up much sooner than you might be used to, at a junction temperature of 95 degrees. AMD does say though that you can increase this to 105 in their Wattman software without any risk of damaging the card. Speaking of Wattman, we found that we couldn't really push the core clocks up at all, without running into issues with either early thermal throttling or general instability. So this supports our pre-overclocked hypothesis, but we will have to wait for more mature drivers, and for partner boards with more robust power delivery before we can say anything conclusively. So verdict time then. Given our results and the Radeon 7's $700 price tag, we're kind of inclined to agree with Nvidia CEO, and curiously, Dr. Lisa Su's uncle, Jensen Huang. It's a bit underwhelming. Yes, for the same price as a reference RTX 2080, you get similar performance in traditional games, but Nvidia's overall feature set is simply more robust. Maybe you don't care about real-time ray tracing, or maybe you don't care about GeForce experience, or maybe you don't care about Nvidia's superior hardware H.264 encoder, but taken all together, odds are you'll care about at least one of Nvidia's features. So in our minds then, the Radeon 7 needed to beat the RTX 2080's price, not match it. And the frustrating thing is that if it weren't for the massive HBM2 frame buffer, they probably could have. The word on the street is that just shy of half of the cost of this card is in that 16 gigs of memory that, depending on the game, might never be utilized more than 75%. Now if we had to guess, we'd say what probably happened here was that rather than re-engineering a gaming-tuned card with 8 or 12 gigs of memory and, I don't know, more stream processors or something, AMD recycled their enterprise compute card, the Radeon Instinct MI50, which would also explain the excellent productivity numbers. Whatever the reason though, that compromise means that while the Radeon 7 is an excellent, maybe even ideal card for content creators by day, gamers by night, or really anyone who uses OpenCL a fair bit, the value proposition against Team Green is merely... okay for pure gamers. Don't get me wrong, this gives us a choice in the market for sure, and I'm super glad that AMD released it today. It's just not quite the price or performance disruptor that we were all hoping for in the wake of Nvidia's stiff RTX tax, and as it stands, it looks like we're just gonna have to live with digging deeper into our pockets for our graphics cards from now on. Thanks to War Thunder for sponsoring this video. War Thunder is the realistic, free-to-play vehicle combat game, and you can fight with millions of players from all over the world in combined arms battles in the air, over land, and at sea. It includes 1200 historically accurate tanks, aircraft, helicopters, and ships from the 1930s all the way to the 1990s. It's available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and you can join the battle today by clicking on the link below to get a free premium tank or aircraft, and three days of premium time as a bonus for registering. 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