AMD reveals Radeon VII: high-end 7nm Vega video card

Speaking of AMD, the company is on a roll as it also announced a new high-end consumer graphics card, which it says can take on Nvidia's RTX 2080 graphics card. As it turns out, the video card wars are going to charge into 2019 quite a bit hotter than any of us were expecting. Moments ago, as part of AMD's CES 2019 keynote, CEO Dr. Lisa Su announced that AMD will be releasing a new high-end, high-performance Radeon graphics card. Dubbed the Radeon VII (Seven), AMD has their eyes set on countering NVIDIA's previously untouchable GeForce RTX 2080. And, if the card lives up to AMD's expectations, then come February 7th it may just as well do that. At a high level then, the Radeon VII employs a slightly cut down version of AMD's Vega 20 GPU. With 60 of 64 CUs enabled, it actually has a few less CUs than AMD's previous flagship, the Radeon RX Vega 64, but it makes up for the loss with much higher clockspeeds and a much more powerful memory and pixel throughput backend. As a result, AMD says that the Radeon VII should beat their former flagship by anywhere between 20% and 42% depending on the game (with an overall average of 29%), which on paper would be just enough to put the card in spitting distance of NVIDIA's RTX 2080, and making it a viable and competitive 4K gaming card. AMD has managed to shake up the processor market with their Zen architectures, and it's high time the same happens to the video card market. Nvidia has basically had this market all to itself for several years now, so hopefully this new Radeon card can shake things up a bit and hold us over until 2020, when Intel will be entering the dedicated graphics card market as well.