AMD releases Radeon 7 benchmarks for 25 games

[Hossam Taibi]

After announcing the Radeon 7 a few days ago, AMD has stealth-released a more comprehensive set of benchmark results that show how the upcoming card performs in 25 recent games compared to the current top Team Red GPU, the RX Vega 64, benched at 4K resolution on maximum settings. The benchmarks were contained in footnotes to AMD's press materials, and first came to light courtesy of HardOCP.

Broadly, the results bear out AMD's claim of around a 25 per cent leap in performance from one generation to the next, although increases as low as 7.5 per cent in Hitman 2 and as high as 68.3 per cent in Fallout 76 are included in the results.

If we compare AMD's provided results to our existing benchmarks, we can see that our Vega 64 scores for Ghost Recon Wildlands and Assassin's Creed Odyssey are practically identical, suggesting that AMD's definition of '4K Max' is the same as ours in these titles. That means we can suggest how the Radeon 7 would compare against a wider range of cards in these titles, particularly as any differences in CPU performance are likely to be negligible when running these games at 4K and max settings (AMD benched using an i7 7700K, while we've moved on to the i7 8700K).

First up is 2017 title Ghost Recon Wildlands, where the Radeon 7 sits ahead of the Vega 64, GTX 1080, RTX 2060 and RTX 2070. However, it falls behind the GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. The new AMD card is definitely closer to the GTX 1080 Ti than the GTX 1080, but it's disappointing that a new high-end card from AMD can't surpass Nvidia's last-generation flagship given its much more advanced 7nm process. However, on the plus side, the fact that our RX Vega 64 benchmark matches AMD's to within margin of error at least demonstrates that the tests are on the level - something we don't always see with manufacturer-supplied benchmarks.

Our Vega 64 results for Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider diverge a little from those provided from AMD, but it's still interesting to see how the RTX 2080 compares to the new Radeon card in these titles. We recorded scores of 45.5fps for the Vega 64 in Far Cry 5, for instance, where AMD's number is a flat 49fps. The Radeon 7's average frame-rate is given as 62fps, which would put it ahead of the 59.5fps result we recorded for the RTX 2080.

Meanwhile, our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark result provided us with an average frame-rate of 34.7fps for the Vega 64, where AMD got a slightly higher 36.3fps. The Radeon 7 result is shown as 47.5fps, which would again put the new AMD card just ahead of the RTX 2080's 46.1fps. This should be an interesting contest, as Shadow of the Tomb Raider has shown performance advantages on Nvidia RTX cards up against their 10-series GTX equivalents.