Radeon Pro VII review

An excellent option for creatives

The race for supremacy in the graphics card market is one that never ends and can often be as much about feelings or brand loyalty as it is about spec lists and benchmarking.

I often review tech items using benchmarking, but I think that can fall short of helping potential users understand what a piece of gear is like to live with. As I look at AMD’S Radeon Pro VII I’m taking a more holistic overview.

Let’s start with the physicality of the card, which is understated in a simple, blue, double width housing. It’s weighty, lending confidence in the build quality. It outputs via six Displayport 1.4 sockets and supports PCIE 4.0. I find the lack of HDMI port only a slight issue and there are many adapters, so that even a Rift S is compatible.

The Radeon Pro VII is based on the Vega 20 architecture, which has been around for a little while but still performs

very well indeed, perhaps due to the 60 CUS, 3,840 processors and 16GB of onboard ECC protected memory.

In daily use the card excels, no matter what the task. Live 3D viewports are responsive and fluid with large object and polygon counts (the two can often react very differently) even with multiple effects active, so you can see blurry reflections, normal maps and displacements as you work. Game engines run equally smoothly and even in VR you can work efficiently, using things like Unreal’s map layout tools to rapidly build levels, or real-time experiences.

If you work on high-end projects you may want to deck out your workstation with as much system resources as you can fit. With this in mind the Radeon Pro VII comes with support for multiple cards, via AMD’S Infinity Fabric Link, which pools resources to avoid bottlenecks and keeps the experience fluid, even for

intensive tasks like complex film finishing and editing.

Apart from the hardware spec, which goes a long way to making this an excellent graphics card, I think the key to the success is possibly in AMD’S pro drivers. It’s always difficult to qualify this kind of statement, but the software doesn’t feel like it imposes itself on daily computing tasks.

All in all the Radeon Pro VII is a very fast card that doesn’t baulk at heavy lifting and this all lets the user stay focused on the task at hand, without the worry of having to pull back on scene management. At the end of the day the technology is there to support the creative endeavours of the user, and this graphics card and associated software does just that.

If you are on the hunt for a new graphics card for any kind of CAD or 3D work, then the Radeon Pro VII should be on your shortlist.

VERDICT