AMD surprised us by announcing the Radeon VII at CES. Sure, it isn't Navi, but it is the world's first 7nm consumer graphics card, and AMD has positioned it to compete directly with Nvidia's RTX 2080. The Radeon VII release is launching on February 7. That's right around the corner, so some of my readers have a burning question: will there be Day 1 Linux support?
The answer is an emphatic "yes" according to an AMD PR representative I spoke to over the weekend. We can expect the Radeon VII to be gaming ready on Day 1 right out of the box.
That wasn't the case with the Radeon RX 590 due to some last-minute vBIOS changes, which Michael at Phoronix covered extensively.
It took AMD a couple weeks to get the RX 590 Polaris refresh in game-ready condition for Linux, which only reinforced a widely held negative belief that Linux is a second-class citizen when it comes to gaming. Sure, that perception has been changing dramatically thanks to Valve, but day one support should happen with every launch.
Let's look forward, though. AMD says the Radeon VII will deliver roughly 25-percent more performance than the Vega 64 while using the same amount of power. The new card will pack 16GB of HBM video memory and 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and may support a supersampling feature similar to Nvidia's DLSS which was co-developed by Microsoft.
It's also priced directly against Nvidia's RTX 2080 at $699.
During CES, AMD CEO Lisa Su showed slides indicating the Radeon VII is capable of 60+ FPS running games like Battlefield V and Far Cry 5 at 4K resolution with maxed out settings, but it remains to be seen what final driver performance looks like. And of course, how Linux gaming performance fares.
Fortunately, I have a Radeon VII review sample on the way and will do my best to give you some exhaustive benchmarks and analysis so stay tuned!
