Our Topics of Interest
Today’s review is simple; we want to find out if performance has changed since the launch of the AMD Radeon VII video card in games. We want to see if new drivers have provided maturity in terms of performance improvements. Then we want to evaluate its current performance today and see how this video card performs in modern games at each popular resolution, 1080p, 1440p and 4K. This will provide an up-to-date look at the AMD Radeon VII video card in 2019. This article today is focused on game performance and is game oriented.
Radeon VII Driver Versions
To do this we are first going to test with the original launch driver back on February 7th, 2019. This is driver version 19.1.2 which was released to press and is dated January 22nd. The executable was named: “Win10-64Bit-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-2019-Edition-Press-Jan22.exe.”
We will compare that driver version to the most current driver version today which is Adrenalin 19.5.2 which is dated May 22nd. The executable reads: “win10-64bit-radeon-software-adrenalin-2019-edition-19.5.2-may22.exe.” Here is a comparison of the driver versions, left picture is the original launch driver and right picture is the latest driver.
There have been exactly nine driver releases since the AMD Radeon VII was launched. Even though only four months have passed, there have indeed been nine driver updates since then. This means there has been a lot of opportunity for driver performance improvements and optimizations in those past four months.
BIOS
A week after the launch of the Radeon VII, and after all the initial hardware reviews of it, AMD released a new BIOS for the video card. This BIOS is V106 and introduces UEFI GOP features. We have updated our video card to this latest BIOS. Therefore, if there are any hidden changes these will now be realized.
Test Setup
Please read our testing methodologies and benchmarks and review format for an explanation on our procedures.
Our AMD Radeon VII video card is a reference design video card direct from AMD. The video card was originally commissioned for [H]ardOCP review purposes and has been graciously provided to us by Kyle Bennett for use in future reviews in our new ventures.
