AMD Radeon VII 1440p, 4K & Ultrawide Gaming Performance

Forza Horizon 4

The VII continues to perform very closely to NVIDIA’s RTX 2080, which is good to see. Another take is that the VII continues to outperform last gen’s 1080 Ti, which RX Vega 64 desperately hoped to match. It might have taken another year and a half, but AMD’s accomplished it.

That said, FH4 is one title that gave us issues in testing. On occasion, the game would crash to desktop, with nary an error, or lock up, requiring a hard reboot. This is one of two games we had issues with, and AMD alleges that the issues will disappear with the post-launch driver release. We’ll be ready to test once that driver drops, to check up on that promise.

Monster Hunter World

The 2080 Ti does a good job here of separating itself from the rest of the pack, and in the usual matchup between the 2080 and VII, we again see NVIDIA take the lead. At 4K, this game is truly hard on the graphics processor. It might be worth noting that the “High” detail setting is used for testing, which isn’t the highest – so this game might prove to be a good benchmark for some time to come. Especially now that it has ultrawide support!

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

At both 1440p and ultrawide, the RTX 2080 outperformed the VII, but at 4K, the cards are about matched. Well, at the top-end; at minimum, the VII proved 5 FPS better. That’s not too bad, considering the fact that SotTR is an NVIDIA-sponsored title.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

At the top of the page, we mentioned that Forza Horizon 4 was one title that gave us issues in benchmarking (only on Radeon VII). Wildlands is the second game, but its reaction to VII was much more severe than FH4‘s.

Because we didn’t want to drop one of our eight games, we benchmarked the timedemo using Fraps instead of letting the game tell us the result, as the benchmark crashes at the end of its run, before it can show a result, every single time. Fortunately, the Fraps method of recording the framerate gives the exact same results, so we can see how the VII fares, even though Wildlands kind of hates it.

To be clear, this game is simply unplayable on Radeon VII as of the time of writing. Even sitting at the main menu, the game will eventually lock up, or the entire PC. As covered above, AMD says this issue will be fixed in the post-launch driver.

Looking beyond that rather severe issue, the VII delivered solid performance in Wildlands, not falling too far behind NVIDIA, which sponsors it as a The Way It’s Meant To Be Played title.