A Look At AMD’s Radeon VII Workstation & Compute Performance

Adobe Premiere Pro

With encoding that’s entirely CPU-bound, only the CPU matters, and as such, it’s easy to generate results that show great scaling. When the GPU is added into the mix, the CPU begins to matter a bit less, as the GPU can handle so much of the workload on its own. For 1080p encodes, the GPU is not going to be touched too much (in most cases), but if that 1080p is backed by a full project, such as one of our YouTube videos, the GPU can still help a lot.

Across these three different tests, there’s no winner to really speak of. The only result worth calling out may be the WX 8200, which fell a bit behind the others with our own project encode. Had these charts included lower-end GPUs, greater differences would be seen.

MAGIX Vegas Pro

With MAGIX’s Vegas, we have a few interesting results to pore over. It might be important to get the odd WX 8200 results out-of-the-way: yes, those wound up with identical times between AVC and HEVC, even between two completely different projects.

In this application, the Radeon VII doesn’t shine like we hoped it would, and in fact, we never expected both AMD cards to sit at the bottom here. It feels like the GPU driver itself could help with this. Especially since AMD used to perform quite well in Vegas.

Cryptography, Financial & Scientific Performance

AMD has been strong in cryptography on both the CPU and GPU side in recent years, and with Radeon VII, that strong performance continues to shine through. Interestingly, strengths on either side trade places, but NVIDIA’s 2080 Ti is hard to beat – especially on the SHA2-512 side. With SHA-256, the VII sits ahead of every GPU aside from the 2080 Ti, and it continues to deliver strong performance when the security is increased.

With the financial test, we once again see the 2080 Ti strutting its stuff in a rather noticeable fashion. The Radeon VII performs extremely well on its own, though, as the 2080 Ti is the only GPU it wasn’t able to overtake here. It’s important to note that double-precision wasn’t used in this particular test, else we’d see even greater differences.

We get to wrap up this page with some great performance out of the VII. In both the GEMM and FFT Sandra tests, the VII places ahead of every other GPU. Again, this was using FP32. Further tests will happen in the near-future. Time was the major issue here! More in-depth Sandra testing, including double-precision, can be found here.)