AMD announces Radeon VII, its next-generation 7nm graphics card

AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it’s primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that’s competitive with Nvidia’s RTX 2080. It’s called the Radeon VII (“Seven”), and it uses the company’s first 7nm graphics chip that we’d seen teased previously.

It’ll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the company. That’s the same price as a standard Nvidia RTX 2080.

Here’s the large, shiny graphics card that AMD CEO Lisa Su held up onstage:

AMD says the second-gen Vega architecture offers 25 percent more performance at the same power as previous Vega graphics, and the company showed it running Devil May Cry 5 here at 4K resolution, ultra settings, and frame rates “way above 60 fps.” AMD says it has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth.

As for existing games, AMD didn’t break out loads of examples, but it says you’ll see a 25 percent performance boost in Fortnite and a 35 percent boost in Battlefield V, as well as assorted 27 percent-plus boosts in various kinds of content creation, compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64.

The company says it’ll throw in free copies of the Resident Evil 2 remake Devil May Cry 5 and The Division 2 with each new AMD Radeon VII graphics card or gaming PC that comes with one installed. AMD says the Alienware Area-51 Threadripper gaming desktop will be one of the first.

If you’re curious about other tech specs, here are the ones we have so far from AMD’s press release:

The real question is whether AMD will be able to ship enough of this GPU at a competitive enough price — since GPU prices go up and down at retail, according to supply and demand — so that gamers can actually buy one. The first-gen Radeon RX Vega GPUs were technically competitive with Nvidia on speed, but they were harder to actually find and buy.