AMD Radeon VII is available and reviews the the web

Today is the availability date of AMD's Radeon VII. You can now buy this 7nm Vega GPU for $699 but you'll have to be quick as launch volume is said to be quite low. Lets take a look at three reviews to get a grip of how the new card performs.

First up we have TechPowerUp, which reports the card is quite pricey in comparison to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080. Average performance isn't even close to the RTX 2080 and the cooling solution is very noise.

At a better price, such as $599, the Radeon VII, despite its shortcomings, could have forced NVIDIA to trim pricing of the RTX 2080 and RTX 2070, which would have spurred the upgrade itch among everyone, benefiting the PC gaming market as a whole. AMD also needs to fill the vast price/performance gorge between the RX 590 and the Radeon VII, with a real successor for the RX Vega 56.

A similar story over at The Tech Report, they pick the RTX 2080 as the clear winner in this fight thanks to its faster and smoother gaming performance, as well as its whisper-quiet operation.

Perhaps because of its data-center DNA, the Radeon VII can't even move the stubbornly stationary performance-per-dollar bar. This card delivers the same bang for the buck that the GTX 1080 Ti did at launch, and aside from 16 GB of RAM that's of unclear value to gamers today, it lacks any forward-looking features like the nascent real-time ray tracing and DLSS functions of Nvidia's Turing architecture for curious folks to kick the tires on. With four stacks of costly HBM2 RAM and a cutting-edge lithography process at its heart, we doubt AMD could trim much fat from the Radeon VII's price tag without whittling bone. If $699 is the price the Radeon VII has to command, though, it makes the card a tough sell for what it delivers.

AnandTech comes to the same conclusion, it's very difficult to recommend the Radeon VII instead of NVIDIA's faster GeForce RTX 2080.

Overall then, the Radeon VII puts its best foot forward when it offers itself as a high-VRAM prosumer card for gaming content creators. And at its $699 price point, that's not a bad place to occupy. However for pure gamers, it's a little too difficult to suggest this card instead of NVIDIA's better performing GeForce RTX 2080.

So basically, we have the return of AMD in the high-end video card market, but it's not going to sell great volumes. We can imagine margins are already tight on this $699 card, leaving little room for price cuts, and NVIDIA's Turing beats it in terms of performance, price/performance, power consumption, and noise.