2080 or radeon VII?

[Squibbies18]

So, I've been looking for a new GPU to replace my R9 fury and I was really considering radeon VII however, the only one I was willing to buy was the sapphire branded card as it's the cheapest version of the card here in the UK at £650. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like that version of the card is gonna be back for at least the next month at this point. So I started looking at the RTX 2080 instead. On Amazon they have EVGAs RTX 2080 Black edition doing for £694 and a basic gigabyte windforce card for £689. I've got a £50 amazon voucher to use so I could get either of these cards for less that any radeon VII currently being sold. I was just wondering if getting the 2080 over radeon VII is worth it at the moment. Thanks in advance.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Squibbies18 said:

I was just wondering if getting the 2080 over radeon VII is worth it at the moment.

thats a question you answer not us

we dont know if you can wait a month or not

[BobVonBob]

Both have nearly identical performance, it's up to you if you think Nvidia's value add features like raytracing and DLSS are worth the extra $50.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Squibbies18 said:

So, I've been looking for a new GPU to replace my R9 fury and I was really considering radeon VII however, the only one I was willing to buy was the sapphire branded card as it's the cheapest version of the card here in the UK at £650. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like that version of the card is gonna be back for at least the next month at this point. So I started looking at the RTX 2080 instead. On Amazon they have EVGAs RTX 2080 Black edition doing for £694 and a basic gigabyte windforce card for £689. I've got a £50 amazon voucher to use so I could get either of these cards for less that any radeon VII currently being sold. I was just wondering if getting the 2080 over radeon VII is worth it at the moment. Thanks in advance.

If you have tasks that could put the Radeon VII to work, then that would be it. If you're mostly gaming, then I'd argue GeForce card is better.

[Nocte]

I would wait because 16GB HBM2 and better drivers (and better compute), but up to you really. They are both good cards.

RTX and DLSS are useless/joke features anyway (on these cards at least, we will see in the future...).

[Turtle Rig]

Yes and also no game needs 16GB of VRAM,  I saw a chart, and Quake Champions uses the most VRAM 7.8GB  the rest of the games are lower like GTA 5 is 4 or 5GB VRAM and the list goes lower and lower, and battle field 5 doesnt use as much as Q ,, so,, ya,,,,,,,, The only reason to go over 8GB of VRAM is if you plan on gaming at 4k resolution which the Ti can do at 60fps.   Can the new Radeon do it welll, no body knows.  Go with the for sure thing,, grab 2080 unless you can wait for benchmarks.

[Stefan Payne]

34 minutes ago, Turtle Rig said:

Yes and also no game needs 16GB of VRAM,

Not true. 
There are some games that can use more than 8GiB VRAM right now.

Geothermal Valley (Tomb Raider) is one of those cases for example.

 

And also look at the Video from Level1techs (Wendel) from today (the Adobe), where the 8GiB G-Forces crashes because lack of Memory.

 

And there is also the "HBCC" stuff, wich also lessens the load on the Memory and offloads it to the main memory.

 

So yeah, for "the future" the Radeon 7 might be a better choice because of that.

 

and to be blunt:
A High End Card for 700€ that has the same Amount of Money as a 150€ one is just rediculous.

Why do we accept this bullshit?!

A high end Card for 700€ should have at least 12GiB VRAM!
 

Why are we even discussing this?!

[Turtle Rig]

57 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

Not true. 
There are some games that can use more than 8GiB VRAM right now.

Geothermal Valley (Tomb Raider) is one of those cases for example.

 

And also look at the Video from Level1techs (Wendel) from today (the Adobe), where the 8GiB G-Forces crashes because lack of Memory.

 

And there is also the "HBCC" stuff, wich also lessens the load on the Memory and offloads it to the main memory.

 

So yeah, for "the future" the Radeon 7 might be a better choice because of that.

 

and to be blunt:
A High End Card for 700€ that has the same Amount of Money as a 150€ one is just rediculous.

Why do we accept this bullshit?!

A high end Card for 700€ should have at least 12GiB VRAM!
 

Why are we even discussing this?!

I totally don't know where I saw the charts, I wish I did so I could show you.  Some review site.  Yes games will use 8GB or more depending on textures and resolution.. so that is where the Ti shines,,,,,, tomb raider will def use 10GB 4VRAM on a Ti card at 4k resolution possibly a bit more but it wont choke the card out,,,,,, this is where the 3GB more of vram kicks in.  But if someone is playing at 1440p or 1080p then honestly even 6GB is fine.

[Stefan Payne]

On 3/1/2019 at 2:24 AM, Turtle Rig said:

I totally don't know where I saw the charts, I wish I did so I could show you.  Some review site.  Yes games will use 8GB or more depending on textures and resolution.. so that is where the Ti shines,,,,,, tomb raider will def use 10GB 4VRAM on a Ti card at 4k resolution possibly a bit more but it wont choke the card out,,,,,, this is where the 3GB more of vram kicks in.  But if someone is playing at 1440p or 1080p then honestly even 6GB is fine.

Yes or look at the Review of the Radeon 7 from Adored (Youtube), where the 2080 totally crapped out - because of lack of VRAM.
And VEGA did not because of the HBCC Stuff..

[ch3w2oy]

The Radeon VII is available on AMDs website right now in the US. If I literally didn't just buy a 1080 ti I would have picked one over the 2080 as well. I didn't think they would be back in stock that quickly.

[hollyh88]

want to game? 100% 2080. want to do workloads and so on? radeon 7. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I think the VRAM thing is more complicated than "[Game] uses X amount of VRAM, therefore, you need more than X amount of VRAM these days" for performance. I've been reading on the interwebs from people that games will request more VRAM than they actually need and they may never use it, much like how apps may overshoot how much memory they need (yes this is actually a thing: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091002-00/?p=16513). Though in a lot of cases where I've seen VRAM usage, the game tends to use the same amount regardless of VRAM. e.g., a game uses around 4.5GB of VRAM regardless if there's 6GB, 8GB, or 16GB.

 

So what about the case where a game uses roughly the same amount of VRAM regardless and there isn't enough? I'm not convinced there's a huge issue here. So here's an example (from https://www.techspot.com/article/1600-far-cry-5-benchmarks/

 

 

Given that Far Cry 5 uses around 3GB of VRAM at 1080p, this may not be much of an interesting result to look at but for the record:

Spoiler

 

Now the 1440p and 4K benchmarks should be more interesting. Clearly Far Cry 5 will use more VRAM than the GTX 1060 3GB has

Spoiler

 

Yet strangely enough, performance, even the min FPS results, aren't tanking hard and is remaining in line with the expected performance delta from the GTX 1060 6GB. In fact, even the GT 1030 is only seeing a linear drop-off in performance despite having 2GB of VRAM (1440p is basically 2x 1080p, and 2160p is 4x 1080p)

 

And for all the research I'm willing to do, I came across a PcPer article interviewing one of NVIDIA's VPs of engineering, with the most interesting bit being:

Quote

If a game has allocated 3GB of graphics memory it might be using only 500MB on a regular basis with much of the rest only there for periodic, on-demand use. Things like compressed textures that are not as time sensitive as other material require much less bandwidth and can be moved around to other memory locations with less performance penalty. Not all allocated graphics memory is the same and innevitably there are large sections of this storage that is reserved but rarely used at any given point in time.

 

tl;dr, VRAM usage may not actually be indicative of any actual requirement of what's needed.

Edited March 2, 2019 by Mira Yurizaki

[BetterThanLife]

2080 by a land slide, VII is a cash grab.