AMD Radeon VII (Seven) - Available February 7th $699  

Super disappointing. 

 Next level blowing it. What happened to the rumoured Navi cards?

Navi will come later in the year. 16GB HBM2 GPUs were never this affordable.

7nm GPUs should typically be better than NVIDIA's 12nm parts. And no 2080 Ti bracket equivalent. Not impressive (besides the mem. config I guess). Good reference design update IMO. The 2080 consumes less power vs. Vega 64, so the 12nm chip is actually more efficient than this 7nm boy, assuming V64 consumption on this. Let's see what Navi brings later this year.

I bet it takes massive amount of time and money to design high end GPUs.
The engineering that goes into it is probably well beyond the understanding of most of here.

I am just happy to see that AMD is once again trying to be a competitor. 
I don’t think it was a coincidence that nVidia brought out the RTXs shortly after the Vega.

Maybe the AMD cards aren’t as fast as nVidia yet, but as long as they keep trying, we will see a better GPUs overall.
Not to mention, I would think the Mojave will support this card sooner than nVidia. 

J

The most important question it: Will it consume less power than the Vega 64, so that most enclosures can power it (that's up to 300W). If yes, it will have a buyer.

AMD failed to deliver as usual.

At least a year is needed before it will be able to deliver what advertised!

Edit: Vega II is simply a rebranded 7nm dieshrink of Vega gpu core , the ROP or raster unit have been bumped from 64 to 128 [Took 4 years]. 
          But the CU unit have been lowered from 64 to 60, with 16GB of HBM2 quad channel for better bandwidth.
          It's the consumer version of the MI50/60 already released by AMD for compute, nothing have changed since Vega.
          Power consumption wise, the usual 300w power figure is expected.
         

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13832/amd-radeon-vii-high-end-7nm-february-7th-for-699

@wimpzilla Thank you for the link.

It is likely then this GPU will function as expected on existing AMD drivers in macOS. At least if the power consumption was lower (I would expect so, given 7nm) it would have been nicer.

Biggest boost is by far to memory performance, which is the big plus for this update.

Did they show port layout? Because the unlikely inclusion of tb3 would change things drastically. 99.9% sure tb3 isn’t an included port.

There’s no USB-C/VirtutalLink port on the Radeon VII. Thunderbolt 3 port on a standard GPU is not an option just yet. I think AMD was under pressure to release something to compete with RTX series. This new Radeon card seems like a temporary solution until new generation Radeon cards are ready.

Lets hope NAVI are decent when they finally arrive, this should, shoullllddd, be a good year for GPU's and Macs (Navi, Mac Pro) but lets see.
Would be nice to have a nice premium eGPU enclosure too, I've only been banging on about it for 2 years now.

My rtx card died...again last night thinking about new amd 7 but I’ll stick to Nvidia yes AMD is too rushed, like Nvidia. Great news in Germany now is big RTX sales despite 2080ti, some 2080 priced under €600, 2070 under €500! Only tonight.
https://www.mindfactory.de/Highlights/MindStar
Cheers
zum Wohl 

It seems AMD reps themselves reported wrong Vega II core specs initially, making believe the press that the ROP count would have been bumped to 128.
You can find here the final report with some gaming benchmarks.
If one believe the benchs, it should go head to head with a GTX2080.

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/283649-the-amd-radeon-viis-core-configuration-has-been-misreported

Sadly the GTX2060 is a far better buy for basic gaming.
If looking for compute, one can still get 2x Vega56 for the same price of a Vega II.
Once again not impressed by AMD at all, the investors and consumers are it seems lol!

Edit: Vega II lack of FP64 compute like the normal Vega.
https://techgage.com/news/radeon-vii-caps-fp64-performance/

I installed 10.14.4 Beta [18E174f] tonight on a Mac Pro 6,1 to make sure current workarounds by @mac_editor and @goalque are still working. All is well. There’s also new PCI ID in this build that seems to support the upcoming Radeon VII graphics card.

pci device: 69af - Vega 12 [Radeon Pro Vega 20]

@itsage So far so good. Let's see what they pull (if anything) with the subsequent betas. On another note, eGPU working rather weirdly for me in some cases on .4 beta. Quite a few bugs - clamshell not working sometimes, screens not sleeping, and more. Hopefully all is dealt with.

An AMD vendor tested Radeon VII on this latest 10.14.4 beta build. Unfortunately it’s not working yet.

GCN support have been added directly to the GCC compiler, not so long ago.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-GCN-GCC-Merged

This is also quite interesting.

Public Beta of 10.14.4 [18E174f] has slightly newer drivers than developer beta. There’s a new PCI ID 66af that identifies as Radeon VII in AMD10000Controller.kext and AMDRadeonX5000HWServices.kext.

You can find here the Techpowerup review: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII/

And here the Phoronix linux review: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-vii-linux&num=1

Sadly AMD failed to deliver this quarter as said above, the availability seems to resolve to a paper launch!

66AF1002 has been in 

AMD10000Controller.kext and 

AMDRadeonX5000HWServices.kext for a while.  10.14.2 has it too.

Are we sure that is the same PCI ID as the retail Radeon VII vs an Apple version from an upcoming iMac Pro/Mac Pro replacement?  When I googled PCI ID additions to the Linux Kernel (Where Radeon VII works), I came up with this:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-New-Vega-10-20-PCI-IDs

They listed the new Vega 20 addition as being 0x66A4, not 0X66AF

We’re certain the PCI ID for Radeon VII is 66AF. Here are some pictures I received. The GPU showed up in System Information » PCI tree but does not show up in Graphics/Displays.

I guess that bodes well for macos egpu support for Radeon VII soon.  The outstanding questions are, which enclosures can power it (consumption seems to be down slightly vs vega 64 but not by much, did they fix the transient power draw issues that vega 64 had or not), and whether or not it will be functional in boot camp or not?

And whether or not Apple has released 10.14.4 that supports Radeon VII.

Hopefully AMD did not allowed customers to buy too much of a "paper launch product".
Lucky are the customers that bought a non working gpu for 700$ at launch!
But it seems that the PR and Marketing Team nightmare is still on going.

It seems now Vega II will support Pro drivers, we are seeing the same nightmare as the Vega FE got through, that was supposed to be a gaming and/or a Pro card.
I don't have experiences of the FE with MacOS, but the windows support for the Vega FE was awful, dictated by the huge number of drivers issues!
It seems we are reviving the Vega FE launch, i hope tho that the driver issues will be fixed, on both the Adrenalin and the Pro driver.

So Vega II will support the Q19 Pro drivers, with the same broken feature, switching on the fly to the Adrenalin/Pro drivers without rebooting.
Still i'm wondering if the PR, Marketing nightmare will go down so much to force AMD to enable some of FP64 capabilities, locked at the moment like in the Vega series.

I would not recommend to get this gpu, unless you already know what to do with and be already an experienced user.
I would also wait a bit and see how the launch evolve, this is an unfinished product, remember that!

If this card follow the Vega FE path, only two words: "Oh Boy!"

https://www.hardocp.com/news/2019/02/11/radeon_vii_gets_pro_driver_support/
https://www.techpowerup.com/252475/amd-to-unlock-professional-features-for-radeon-vii-to-blunt-rtx-2080s-ray-tracing-edge

Edit: hot bonus from AMD: https://www.techpowerup.com/252476/amd-radeon-vii-has-no-uefi-support

@wimpzilla I agree with your assessment. This Radeon VII launch reminds me of Vega FE launch. AMD RTG is having a hard time establishing its value proposition. They should quit playing marketing and focus on building solid products.

I believe there’s plenty of Radeon VII built yet they are releasing inventory in waves to drum up demand. The timing of this launch couldn’t be worse. They worked on the launch drivers a couple of weeks prior to the Lunar New Year and shipped these cards during the New Year.

I leveraged this kind of product launch behavior.
I advised multiples times to AMD that is not the way to go, this almost a year ago now.
I'm not surprised to see the same behavior again and again with the Vega II launch.

And we all know the good AMD behavior when it is launching a decent product and when instead it is only a "paper launch".
It never ended well with "paper launch", hope this time will be different, but as it is now it is quite bad!

Also you are very right, customers are willing to buy AMD product, unfortunately customers were never listened and got instead this kind of pity product launch!

Would the lack of UEFI vbios explain the missing xconnect/macos egpu functionality?

Posted by: wimpzilla

Edit: hot bonus from AMD: https://www.techpowerup.com/252476/amd-radeon-vii-has-no-uefi-support

Wow. Good lord.

People: AMD please release more efficient GPUs (don't want to invest in monster PSUs).

AMD: releases a 7nm GPU that performs almost equivalently to a 16nm GPU and consumes equivalent/more power than the latter.

And now no UEFI support. Wonderful /s.

Posted by: mac_editor

And now no UEFI support. Wonderful /s.

In all fairness, this can be repaired. What cannot be repaired is this huge power drain... again.

"...and what we found out startled us."

That is shocking.

@oliverb True enough, I believe ASRock already released a BIOS update for the card. But still. That's not how one launches one's flagship product.

Posted by: mac_editor

@oliverb True enough, I believe ASRock already released a BIOS update for the card. But still. That's not how one launches one's flagship product.

So I presume Apple [eGPU] users would be at the whim of Apple implementing these updates via macOS, yeah?

Posted by: Ningauble77

Would the lack of UEFI vbios explain the missing xconnect/macos egpu functionality?

Hello to everyone...
I'm also interested in that question. I luckily got my hands on a Radeon VII but - as we know - not working at the moment in 10.14 (missing drivers) and in BootCamp (lack of XConnect support in existing drivers). The question is - am I able to update GPU BIOS via the eGPU enclosure without having the card "working" already? Would be a big problem for me when the UEFI update is necessary in order to get the card working at all (in BootCamp.... and even in macOS).  😯
Thank you!

Greetings,
roedi78

Edit: Thanks for all the great tips and tools in the past from this awesome community!

One question: Two posts in row of mine are being merged to together. Happened a couple of times. Is this automatic or does somebody do it?

Posted by: Ningauble77

I guess that bodes well for macos egpu support for Radeon VII soon.  The outstanding questions are, which enclosures can power it (consumption seems to be down slightly vs vega 64 but not by much, did they fix the transient power draw issues that vega 64 had or not), and whether or not it will be functional in boot camp or not?

My modded Mantiz Venus with 650W and improved cooling is ready

Posted by: OliverB

One question: Two posts in row of mine are being merged to together. Happened a couple of times. Is this automatic or does somebody do it?

Well you got pretty bad posting habits, often forgetting that the EDIT button is available to edit your posts if you need to add something.
Instead double posting, quite annoying if took as bad habit.
So i suppose a mod merged both consecutive posts as it should be, as you would had edited and posted once.

Follow up from the AMD PR and Marketing team: https://www.techpowerup.com/252495/amd-clarifies-radeon-vii-pro-driver-support-no-ws-certifications

Concerning MacOs, at least the drivers are managed by an Apple team that have much much more resources and time to deliver decent drivers.
Quite a paradox but for sure one would get better support for MacOS for professional needs.
Last time i checked the Pro driver section on the AMD forum, customers had even trouble just to register to the free form to get the driver support, quite funny.