AMD Radeon 7 performance analysis

Our tests conclude with a final trio of games - Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3. Our test system for all benches across this entire review 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. A Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used to keep the power-hungry 8700K in check.

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.

We use FCAT for analysing GPU performance. A coloured border is overlaid in each rendered frame, the video feed from the GPU is captured and the files are then scanned with our own proprietary software. The captures are distilled down into text 'cache' files which are used to dynamically generate the data presented on this page.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Although based on the same engine, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider challenge GPU hardware in different ways. Rise actually benches best on the GTX 1080 Ti (factoring out the all-powerful 2080 Ti) and it's the one title we have where the old Pascal card offers a convincing win over Radeon 7. Interestingly, the uptick in performance offered by the new AMD card over Vega 64 is somewhat lower than in many other titles.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

The latest Lara Croft offering features a brand new DX12 implementation - and one of the best on the market, with excellent scalability. It's very friendly to the Turing architecture, and Radeon 7 also seems to benefit nicely too. Performance differentials against Vega 64 are back on track, while overall scores are essentially on par with RTX 2080. Yes, our benchmarks show the 2080 a couple of points ahead, but remember that these are Founder's Edition benches, with a small factory overclock in place.

The Witcher 3

Our gallop through Novigrad has been used to punish everything from CPUs to DRAM - and of course graphics hardware too. Radeon 7 inches ahead by three points against GTX 1080 Ti on both 1440p and 4K resolutions, while lagging behind the RTX 2080 Founder's Edition by a similar margin (but yes, remember the factory overclock situation there). It's a game where AMD's fortunes have been mixed in the past, but Radeon 7 acquits itself well here - and delivers some impressive gen-on-gen boosts over Vega 64 too - +36 per cent at 4K? That's excellent.

AMD Radeon 7 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• Assassin's Creed Odyssey/Unity, Battlefield 1, Crysis 3 - Performance Analysis Part 1
• Far Cry 5, Far Cry Primal, Ghost Recon Wildlands - Performance Analysis Part 2
• Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3 - Performance Analysis Part 3 [This Page]
• AMD Radeon 7 - the Digital Foundry verdict