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

AMD Radeon VII GPU Die
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by Rob Williams on February 7, 2019 in Graphics & Displays

AMD’s Radeon VII might be the first 7nm gaming GPU, but the reality is, this Vega 20 chip is keen on tackling compute-intensive benchmarks, such as those from our workstation test suite. Having taken a look at gaming performance in another article, this one takes care of encoding, viewport, and rendering applications.

Page 2 – Adobe Premiere Pro, MAGIX Vegas & Sandra: Crypto, Financial & Scientific

Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2019 - Techgage Workstation GPU Test
Adobe Premiere Pro AVC Performance (AMD Radeon VII)
Adobe Premiere Pro HEVC Performance (AMD Radeon VII)

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

MAGIX Vegas Pro 16 - Techgage Workstation GPU Test
MAGIX Vegas Pro Light Scenes GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)
MAGIX Vegas Pro Dark Scenes GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)

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

SiSoftware Sandra - Techgage Workstation GPU Test
Sandra Cryptography (High) GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)
Sandra Cryptography (Higher) GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)

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.

Sandra Financial GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)

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.

Sandra Scientific GPU Performance (AMD Radeon VII)

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.)

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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