In some recently leaked benchmarks, AMD’s new powerhouse the 7nm Radeon VII is shown as beating Nvidia’s RTX 2080 in certain scenarios… And losing to the RTX 2070 (and lesser cards) in others. Let’s take a look!

According to leaked synthetic benchmarks pulled from 3DMark’s Fire Strike 1.1, a “Generic VGA(x1)” paired with an AMD R7 2700x was able to achieve a score of 19,210. That puts it above 93% of every other result posted on 3DMark, and 2000 pts above an “average” 4K gaming PC.

Hints to this card being a Radeon VII are few; but, seeing 16GB of memory on an AMD GPU is fairly telling. The only 16GB card that AMD has right now is the Radeon VII, so that’s what it must be. Unfortunately, both core and memory clocks show 0 MHz.

In Fire Strike Ultra, the same “Generic VGA(x1) + R7 2700X” setup returned a score of 6707 when paired with an R7 2700X and 6688 when paired with an i9 9900K. A comparable setup with an RTX 2080 + R7 2700X will often score between 22000-24500 in Fire Strike, and often from 6500-7400 in Fire Strike Ultra. This tells us the Radeon VII could be a better 4K card than the RTX 2080. But, it’s hard to say considering the next batch of results.

In results pulled from the ever-popular Final Fantasy XV benchmark, the Radeon VII doesn’t perform like you might be expecting. Although it’s not featured in the 1080p results, it can be found under all of the 1440p and 4k results.

In 1440p on high quality, the AMD Radeon VII falls behind the GTX 1070 Ti by a meager 300 pts. It’s able to outscore a GTX 980 Ti by about the same margin, 300 pts. But, it’s behind the RTX 2080 by a much more significant 3000 pts – almost 50%. However, it’s worth noting that these figures might change based on future driver updates.

In 4K on high quality, the difference is a little smaller. The Radeon VII managed a score of 3410 which only puts it 36% behind the RTX 2080’s score of 4660. With that in mind, I should mention that the GTX 1070 Ti scored 3141 on the same benchmark, that makes it just 8.5% slower than the Radeon VII. With the MSRP set for $699, this might be a hard buy for pure gamers. However, as we’ve seen, it’s very capable at handling heavy workloads and might have more use on that end of the desktop spectrum.

As with most new tech releases, we’ll just have to wait until release which happens February 9th.