AMD Radeon VII versus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
May 17th, 2019 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist
May 20th - Corrected the 1080 Ti results on the DaVinci graphs
By popular demand, here is a shootout between the Radeon VII and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
GRAPH LEGEND
GTX 1080 Ti MacOS = GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU (MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6)
VII MacOS = AMD Radeon VII GPU (MacOS Mojave 10.14.5)
GTX 1080 Ti Windows 7 = GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU (Windows 7 Ultimate)
VII Windows 7 = AMD Radeon VII GPU (Windows 7 Ultimate)
RTX 2070 Windows 7 = GeForce RTX 2070 GPU (Windows 7 Ultimate)
TEST MULE: 2010 Mac Pro 3.33GHz 12-core with Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K (UP2715K) display.
TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER II
The built-in "Skaven" benchmark was used with the Metal based game. (HIGHER frames per second = FASTER.)
RISE OF TOMB RAIDER
The built-in three phase benchmark was used with this Metal based game. (HIGHER frames per second = FASTER.)
DAVINCI RESOLVE 16 (METAL)
Noise Reduction was applied to the Candle Project "Parrot" clip. The effect is rendered on the fly during looping playback. (HIGHER frames per second = FASTER.)
BLENDER 2.8 Beta
The BMW sample scene was rendered using GPU only. NVIDIA GPUs used CUDA. AMD GPU used OpenCL. (LOWER time in seconds = FASTER.)
WHAT WE LEARNED
This page is an homage to readers who prefer NVIDIA GPUs and predicted that the GTX 1080 Ti should 'blow away' the Radeon VII. GPU.UserBenchmark rates the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti's "effective speed" as 6% faster than the Radeon VII.
The 1080 Ti only runs under macOS High Sierra and the Radeon VII only runs under macOS Mojave 10.14.5. So since they both run under Windows, we included results for Windows 7 Ultimate. As you can see from our limited testing, their performance varies depending on the application and operating system.
We tossed in the GeForce RTX 2070 because we had one. The RTX 2080 is rated closer in performance to the GTX 1080 Ti according to GPU.UserBenchmark, but the RTX 2070 tested as fast or faster than the GTX 1080 Ti (and Radeon VII) in the DaVinci Resolve and Blender benchmarks.
The other advantage of the RTX 2070 is that it can run off of the 2010 Mac Pro's factory PCIe bay power feeds. The GTX 1080 Ti and Radeon VII require aux power.
CORRECTION: It would be nice to have the option of using the NVIDIA RTX series of GPUs under Mojave and Catalina. However, it seems the ball is in NVIDIA's court since those GPUs will need to be modified (or special versions created) to support Metal.
For an extensive comparison of the AMD Radeon VII to competing NVIDIA GPUs under Windows 10, we recommend "The AMD Radeon VII Review" by Anandtech.
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