RTX 2080 or Radeon VII

[Momosour]

Im thinking of upgrading my PC, my first build has a GTX 1070. I mainly will be doing game development, rendering, animation, simulations, and gaming on the side. I like to give each brand a chance to see which one I really think fits my needs. Since the Radeon 7 has 16 gigs of memory it would be awesome for working with. However I read horror stories of drivers not working, or black screens, and since the card is or not in production, if something would go wrong, i'm out of luck. On the other hand, more software, uses cuda and seems to work better with Nvidia. So I don't know where to go from here, any help or opinions would be greatly appreciated.

[Streetguru]

3 minutes ago, Momosour said:

Im thinking of upgrading my PC, my first build has a GTX 1070. I mainly will be doing game development, rendering, animation, simulations, and gaming on the side. I like to

Vega FE cards can be found for around $400, just buy one of those? Not really an upgrade performance wise, should go for a 1080ti otherwise. Or get 2 workstations eventually.

Radeon VII is fine if you really need the 16GBs of VRAM, but it's not too much faster than the Vega FE card.

 

There aren't too many big upgrades for a decent price over a 1070 though since it already has 8GBs of VRAM.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-Radeon-Vega-FE-Frontier-Edition-16GB-HBM2-Graphics-Card/113980068278?hash=item1a89bdd1b6:g:DfUAAOSwvCpdx4eu

[TempestCatto]

I've never had any issues my VII. That said, I would only recommend it if you really need the 16gbs of VRAM. If you can get away with less VRAM, I'd go with a 2080S.

[Princess Luna]

10 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Vega FE cards can be found for around $400, just buy one of those?

The "Founders Edition" Vega cards are awful at everything, no don't buy an overpriced V64 in a terrible reference cooler that throttles doing anything.

 

OP, what applications will you use exactly? it really matters what you're going to do since nVidia has CUDA which is used as the main hardware acceleration in stuff like Premiere, while OpenCL based acceleration AMD cards perform vastly better, in these situations the Radeon 7 can even buy a fight with the RTX TITAN / TITAN V.

 

So figure out what card your system likes best but I'd pretty safely go with the Radeon 7 here, it's GPU comes from 8000$ or even more Instinct GPUs that failed the validation, they weren't meant for gaming but sure as hell were born to do some great hardware acceleration and compute.

 

About drivers being good or bad, I mean you might not have the best experience ever but nothing a DDU in safe mode can't solve if it gets to the worse of it.

[Xkillerpn]

So the Vega 7 and Vega frontier have 16g of vram, VR7 is faster , on Vegas you have HBCC and you can add more vram to your gpu using your system ram. 

 

I use it on my V64 and it works very well. 

 

If you need more vram its the way to go but be aware that you will need at least 32g of ram to help HBCC 16g of ram is a bit short. 

[Jrasero]

14 hours ago, Momosour said:

Im thinking of upgrading my PC, my first build has a GTX 1070. I mainly will be doing game development, rendering, animation, simulations, and gaming on the side. I like to give each brand a chance to see which one I really think fits my needs. Since the Radeon 7 has 16 gigs of memory it would be awesome for working with. However I read horror stories of drivers not working, or black screens, and since the card is or not in production, if something would go wrong, i'm out of luck. On the other hand, more software, uses cuda and seems to work better with Nvidia. So I don't know where to go from here, any help or opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Historically AMD are slower in delivering working drivers, take that as you will 

[Midnitewolf]

1 hour ago, Jrasero said:

Historically AMD are slower in delivering working drivers, take that as you will 

But the Radeon VII has been out long enough that the drivers for it should be pretty mature by now.  I could be wrong but I doubt there are many major issues with the Radeon VII at the moment.  Still I think the overwhelming opinion on the Radeon VII is that it is a pretty lackluster card overall.

[Zando_]

16 hours ago, Princess Luna said:

The "Founders Edition" Vega cards are awful at everything, no don't buy an overpriced V64 in a terrible reference cooler that throttles doing anything.

FE is the Frontier Edition. Bone stock, yes it slaps the 85C limit and begins throttling. Ramp the fans a bit and even with stock voltage (which is max, Vega cards ship running near max voltage) it'll stay under 75C even for 24-36 hour render sessions in Blender. Vega FEs also have the option of signed drivers if you use applications that need that, I don't think the RVII does. 

 

OP, does your software use CUDA? If so you're probably better off with the 2080. Gaming wise the 2080 would be slightly ahead at stock, though games that like AMD cards will favor the RVII. They can OC pretty far too, but since you'd be doing pro work on the card I doubt you'd want to push much of an OC.