It wouldn’t be a long-running rivalry without them taking jabs at each other from time to time. NVIDIA’s CEO had some pretty hard remarks for AMD’s new Radeon VII.
Announced at CES 2019, Radeon VII is AMD’s latest flagship device primed to take on the GeForce RTX 2080. It’s the world’s first 7nm GPU boasting 60 Compute Units and 16GB of High-Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) enabling 1TB/s memory bandwidth. AMD is confident that it will be competitive.
However, for Jen Hsun Huang, it’s “underwhelming”. The CEO didn’t hold back in sharing his sentiments in an interview with PC World. Huang made the argument that AMD’s latest simply lacks all the important stuff that makes RTX 2080 cutting-edge.
“There’s no ray tracing, no AI. It’s 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we’ll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we’ll crush it.”
The remarks aren’t far from truth. As much as AMD wants to target this as an alternative to RTX 2080, it’s not a fair comparison. Under the hood, it’s still the same Vega architecture that led to the disappointing reception of RX Vega 64 and Vega 56. It’s hard not to look at this as AMD’s attempt to keep the Radeon name fresh.
The 16GB HBM2 is very attractive for content creators, but perhaps not so much for gamers. There’s no denying that the Tensor Cores and RT Cores make for forward-looking technologies in comparison.
In response to Huang’s remarks, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said that the company is very excited and she would “suggest that he hasn’t seen it yet”.
Huang continued by talking about FreeSync, more specifically about the narrative that NVIDIA finally admitted defeat to the open-source technology. But Huang tells that’s not the case, saying that the two technologies “never competed”.
“FreeSync was never proven to work. As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync. The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD’s graphics cards.”
Radeon VII goes on sale next month and we’ll have reviews to go along with it. We’ll see exactly how the two GPUs compare.
