AMD Radeon VII vs AMD Radeon HD 7970

The AMD Radeon VII is a desktop graphics card that launched in Q1 2019 with a MSRP of $699. It is built on the GCN 5.1 GPU microarchitecture (codename Vega 20) and is manufactured on a 7 nm process.

Memory

The VII has 16 GB of HBM2 memory, with a 1,000 MHz memory clock and a 4,096 bit interface. This gives it a memory bandwidth of 1.02 Tb/s, which affects how fast it can transfer data to and from memory. GPU memory stores temporary data that helps the GPU with complex math and graphics operations. More memory is generally better, as not having enough can cause performance bottlenecks.

Cores and Clock Speeds

The VII includes 3,840 stream processors (SPs), the processing units for handling parallel computing tasks. The GPU operates at a core clock speed of 1,400 MHz and can dynamically boost its clock speed up to 1,750 MHz. Complementing the processing units are 240 texture mapping units (TMUs) for efficient texture filtering and 64 render output units (ROPs) for pixel processing.

Compatibility & Power Consumption

The VII occupies 2 PCIe expansion slots. It supports HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.4a display connections. AMD recommends a power supply of at least 600 W to handle the GPU's thermal design power (TDP) of 295 W.

Benchmark Performance & Value

The VII has the 46th best 3DMark 11 Performance GPU score among the 543 benchmarked GPUs in our database. It achieves 36.22% of the performance of the best benchmarked GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. Its 37,881 score and $699 launch price (MSRP) gives it a performance per dollar of 54.19. This is the 60th best in value for the 3DMark 11 Performance GPU benchmark.