From the center stage of CES last month, AMD gave us the outlines of two major products. One was about Ryzen gen 2 and we expected as much; the other, however, caught many of us off-guard. Not to be out-done by peers from CPU division, RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) announced Radeon VII, world's first 7nm consumer graphics card with 16GB HBM2 video memory. Fast forward a month and the Radeon VII is here with a price tag of $700 (~₹60K).
Considering AMD's focus on the mainstream of late, not many anticipated it would be gunning for high-end with its next GPU. But that's exactly what Radeon VII is supposed to do - to take the fight to the likes of Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. And that's easier said than done as Nvidia has asserted its dominance over the high-end ever since the launch of its RTX 2000 series of graphics cards. Powered by Turing architecture, these GPUs not only routinely outperform AMD's Vega and Polaris based products but also features Real-time Ray Tracing. In our review of GeForce RTX 2060, we saw Nvidia's mid-range card to nibble at the heels of RX Vega64 indicating how desperately AMD needs to update its aging line-up.
 |
| AMD Radeon VII and its packaging, click to enlarge |
Considering AMD's focus on the mainstream of late, not many anticipated it would be gunning for high-end with its next GPU. But that's exactly what Radeon VII is supposed to do - to take the fight to the likes of Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. And that's easier said than done as Nvidia has asserted its dominance over the high-end ever since the launch of its RTX 2000 series of graphics cards. Powered by Turing architecture, these GPUs not only routinely outperform AMD's Vega and Polaris based products but also features Real-time Ray Tracing. In our review of GeForce RTX 2060, we saw Nvidia's mid-range card to nibble at the heels of RX Vega64 indicating how desperately AMD needs to update its aging line-up.
