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AMD is edging closer to breaking NVIDIA's graphic dominance
After AMD released its seven-nanometer Radeon VII graphics card with impressive-looking performance, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang responded by essentially trashing it. "The performance is lousy and there's nothing new," he told PC World. "No ray tracing, no AI. It's 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with an [NVIDIA RTX] 2080." NVIDIA's CEO doth protest too much, perhaps, but he's right to be worried. According to a CES performance tease, the Radeon VII actually beat the RTX 2080 in several video-editing and 3D-animation tasks. It also bested the RTX 2080 when playing Strange Brigade and other titles, especially at 4K resolution. While NVIDIA just adopted 12-nanometer tech for the RTX series, AMD has moved on to seven-nanometer designs for the Radeon VII. Rather than criticizing its rival's performance, NVIDIA notably attacked AMD's lack of (NVIDIA-exclusive) features like ray tracing, G-SYNC and AI-powered DLSS anti-aliasing. However, that has yet to prove useful for gamers and doesn't help content creators at all. If ray tracing doesn't pan out and AMD keeps pushing the chip-design envelope, the next couple of years could get rough for NVIDIA.
AMD's CEO and CTO on Radeon VII, ray tracing and beyond
After lagging behind with Vega desktop GPUs for a few years, AMD announced a major upgrade today: the Radeon VII, the first 7nm GPU for gamers. It's a powerful card capable of serious 4K performance. Its new architecture means it won't use up too much power, leaving plenty of room for overclockers to take it even further. But there's no real-time ray tracing, a technology that NVIDIA has been pushing since last year, when it unveiled its RTX desktop GPUs. So where does this leave AMD?
Watch AMD's CES press event in under 9 minutes
AMD didn't just respond to introductions from Intel and NVIDIA at CES 2019 -- it came out swinging. The chipmaker had plenty to show at its press event, and frequently claimed a performance edge over its rivals. The centerpiece was undoubtedly the Radeon VII, the first 7-nanometer graphics processor aimed at gamers. However, AMD had a little something for everyone, whether it was third-generation Ryzen CPUs for desktops, Epyc chips for heavy-duty number crunching and a talk about the hardware behind Google's Project Stream. That's a lot to digest, but our recap should help catch you up in a hurry.
AMD's Radeon VII is the first 7nm GPU for gamers
AMD is making a big stab at 4K gaming with its new high-end video card, the Radeon VII. Announced during the company's CES keynote, it's notable for being the world's first consumer 7nm GPU. That architecture allows it to be around 25 percent faster than the company's last model, while using the same amount of power. The Radeon VII follows AMD's 7nm Instinct GPUs, which were built for computational professionals, not gamers. The new GPU looks like a significant bump beyond the Vega 64 and 56, which were powerful when they launched in 2017, but have since been blown away by NVIDIA's RTX GPUs.
