It could be game over for the Radon VII
IMAGINE BEING PARADED OUT by a company as a Billy Big-Boots only to be shot in the back of the head before you’ve really had your moment. Well, that’s what one publication in the know reckons AMD could be doing with the Radeon VII.
French website Cowcatland, via Tom’s Hardware, reports that AMD has apparently confirmed to it that the Radeon VII has reached end of life status, merely eight months after it was first announced at CES 2019 in January.
But we, like others, raised an eyebrow at this and dropped Team Red a line. The firm came back: “We expect Radeon VII availability will continue to meet demand, delivering exceptional, high-end 4K gaming and content creation experiences for the foreseeable future. You can find Radeon VII graphics cards on AMD.com.”
That doesn’t explicitly deny that the Radeon VII is reaching end of life, but it would suggest that AMD isn’t getting rid of it just yet.
As it stands, the Radeon VII is still AMD’s top-of-the-line graphics card. It uses the Vega 20 architecture, which isn’t as modern as the RDNA-based Navi architecture but still uses a 7-nanometre process.
In terms of performance, it’s somewhere up there with the higher-end Nvidia GeForce RTX GPUs, only it doesn’t offer ray-tracing and other fancy and not-widely-supported extras; rather, it’s more a non-performance card.
However, AMD recently took the covers off its Navi next-gen Radeons and touted gains it made with its underlying RDNA architecture, in the form of the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. These cards don’t quite chase the top-end GeForce GPUs, but they do offer plenty of competitive performance when pitted against the GeForce RTX 2060 and RTX 2070.
Given AMD has traditionally been about bang-for-the-buck in the graphics arena, as well as the performance and efficiency enhancements RDNA brings over the aged graphics Core Next architecture that underpins the Radeon VII, there’s an argument that the Navi cards have rendered the Radeon VII a tad moot.
Also, AMD confirmed a high-end Navi card in the works, which again would almost certainly superspeed the Radeon VII.
Of course, this is all speculation based on an uncorroborated article. And AMD hasn’t said it’s closing the curtains on the Radeon VII.
Nevertheless, we’re hopeful that Team Red will crank out a powerful Navi high-end GPU all the same, along with some powerful cards and mobile graphics aimed at the lower-end as well. µ