At what point did 4K gaming finally become viable without having to compromise too much on graphics settings? For my money, it would the arrival of the Titan X Pascal in August 2016, followed by its stablemates later on: GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp. Nvidia reached new heights in performance with its GP102 processor. AMD had no answer, and RTX duly followed. Two-and-a-half years on from GP102's debut, there is now a powerful Radeon that is indeed competitive - and while it lacks the latest innovations in graphics technology, it is fast, and it has its own unique selling point: 16GB of ultra-fast HBM2 memory.
Going into this one, I had my doubts that Radeon 7 could bring the necessary horsepower to justify its price-point. After all, the Vega 20 processor that beats at its heart is essentially using the same technology as the RX Vega 64. The architecture is mostly the same, and the chip itself still has the same 64 compute units, or 4096 shaders. In fact, Radeon 7 is actually using salvage parts - only 60 CUs are active, for 3840 shaders in total. Increasing performance comes from two approaches then: first of all, compute power is increased as the move to 7nm fabrication allows AMD to increase the chip's clock speeds. And secondly, the memory interface is twice as wide - a 4096-bit bus (!) delivers a vast amount of bandwidth.
The memory spec looks impressive then, but the increase in peak compute does seem somewhat underwhelming and claims over 30 point increases over Radeon RX Vega 64 seemed unduly optimistic when I first took a look at the spec. However, you can't argue with measured performance and there's no doubt that AMD has delivered exactly what it said it would. Across the next few pages you will see that by and large, Radeon 7 is competitive with RTX 2080 and the older Pascal GP102-based products, including the popular GTX 1080 Ti.
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