AMD Radeon 7 performance analysis

Let's get straight into some performance testing with a range of titles, incorporating a range of game engines old and new. Our test system consists of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. To ensure that the hot and toasty 8700K doesn't overheat, a Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used - just the sort of thing you need to tame the temperatures on the highest-end i7 parts.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

It's a system designed to give you as much in-depth data as you want - or indeed as little, for at-a-glance viewing - all derived from video captures of each respective GPU. No internal frame-rate measurements are used in our tests, it all comes from the video output of the card, the best way to ensure accuracy.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is one of the most demanding titles released in recent times, stress-testing both CPU and GPU at lower resolutions and really challenging graphics hardware at native 4K on its ultra high setting. The volumetric cloud system alone has a huge impact on game performance! At 4K resolution, the Radeon 7 keeps pace with GTX 1080 Ti, while the RTX 2080 inches ahead. The new card does have the advantage, but a few points of that lead will be down to the Founder's Edition factory overclock.

Assassin's Creed Unity

Despite being released close to five years ago, Assassin's Creed Unity remains a difficult challenge for modern graphics card - and particularly, it has to be said, for AMD hardware. Depth of field and volumetric lighting used in our test scene really challenges the Radeon 7's performance, cutting performance drastically whenever it occurs. However, when these effects aren't used, Radeon 7 is competitive with GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080.

Battlefield 1

Battlefield 1 absolutely loves AMD hardware and while the Nvidia Turing cards saw architectural improvements translate into frame-rate boosts, Radeon 7 turns up the heat with the card's one big win over RTX 2080, handing in an eight per cent boost at 4K resolution, but the big news here is how the new AMD card crushes GTX 1080 Ti - it's almost 21 per cent faster. The differentials close up only a touch when moving to 1440p.

Crysis 3

Vega architecture has previously struggled to reach its full potential in Crysis 3, and the title lags behind a little too here - some areas of the bench play out just as well as its Nvidia competitor, though other areas do lag behind - particularly at 1440p resolution, where AMD's DX11 driver seems to cause some bottlenecks throughout the bench. Radeon 7 is more of a mid-point between RTX 2070 and RTX 2080.