AMD unveils 7nm Radeon VII graphics card at CES 2019

CEO Lisa Su uses CES 2019 keynote to reveal details on second generation Vega architecture GPUs

AMD has revealed details of its forthcoming 7nm Radeon VII graphics cards, which will be available from 7 February.

The Radeon VII will cost $699 in the US, which will equate to about £649 in the UK, including VAT.

AMD CEO Lisa Su used her keynote at CES 2019 to launch the new graphics card - just days after Nvidia launched its mainstream RTX 2060 - and to provide an update on the next generation Ryzen CPUs, which are now set for a mid-2019 release.

The forthcoming Radeon VII is based on the second-generation Vega architecture optimised for TSMC's 7nm process node. The company claims that the Radeon VII graphics card will provide twice the memory, 2.1 times the memory bandwidth and up to 29 per cent better gaming performance compared to AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64, the company's current top-of-the-range graphics card.

The company also claims that it will be capable of gaming at ultrawide 1440p (2K) and ultraHD 4k resolutions.

The card will be equipped with 60 compute units or 3,840 stream processors running at up to 1.8GHz, and will be packed with 16GB of HBM2 memory. "Ground-breaking 1 TB/s memory bandwidth and a 4,096-bit memory interface paves the way for ultra-high resolution textures, hyper-realistic settings and life-like characters," claimed the company in a statement.

Outside of gaming, the graphics card should also improve the performance of ‘content creators' and other people involved in demanding graphics work.

Compared to the first-generation Vega 64, the Radeon VII will provide up to 27 per cent better performance in the popular 3D graphics application Blender, a similar boost in performance for professional video editing using DaVinci Resolve 15 and an up to 62 per cent performance improvement in the OpenCL Lux Mark benchmark.