AMD's Radeon VII has reached end of life, probably

[onetheycallEric]

In brief: With the arrival of AMD's well-received RX 5700-series, there's little reason for gamers to purchase the Radeon VII. While the card never took off entirely with gamers, it was well suited for professional users and prosumers. Given how much the Radeon VII costs to produce, its poor price to performance ratio, and the popularity of the RX 5700 cards, retiring the card makes sense.

French website Cowcatland claims to have confirmed that AMD's Radeon VII graphics card has officially reached end of life status. Now, that in itself wouldn't normally warrant much consideration, as the publication has been proven wrong before.

However, when Tom's Hardware reached out to AMD for comment, the chip maker would neither confirm or deny the reports. "We expect Radeon VII availability will continue to meet demand for the foreseeable future, delivering exceptional high-end 4K gaming and content creation experiences. You can find Radeon VII graphics cards on AMD.com," said AMD to Tom's.

Separately, Matt Bach with Puget Systems claims to have confirmed the EOL status with an AMD representative. In an article detailing results from recent DaVinci Resolve benchmarking, Bach replied to a comment regarding the absence of the Radeon VII from testing. "Radeon VII is 100% EOL, we confirmed that directly with AMD before we started this round of GPU testing. Leftover supply does not mean it is still being manufactured," says Bach.

Take the information above for what it's worth, although it wouldn't be surprising for AMD to discontinue the Radeon VII. For the most part, the Radeon VII was a stopgap measure while Navi was still in the oven, while also allowing AMD to claim a first with a 7nm GPU. In TechSpot's review, the card never lived up to the gaming hype, and fared better for content creation and GPU accelerated workloads.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/81594-amd-radeon-vii-has-reached-end-life-probably.html

 

[neeyik]

Thing is, EOL with computer hardware usually means end of official support and I can't see AMD doing this for a product that still essentially exists in the form of the Radeon Pro Vega II and the Instinct M150/160. Admittedly, these are prosumer products, rather gaming-focused graphics cards, but it's still a competent device (albeit power hungry and expensive, especially compared to the RX 5700 XT) and the architecture is still widely used in the mobile sector. I suspect that it will just slide off AMD's website without fanfare and AIB vendors will reduce stock until a suitable Navi replacement comes to light.

 

[Adi6293]

Thing is, EOL with computer hardware usually means end of official support and I can't see AMD doing this for a product that still essentially exists in the form of the Radeon Pro Vega II and the Instinct M150/160. Admittedly, these are prosumer products, rather gaming-focused graphics cards, but it's still a competent device (albeit power hungry and expensive, especially compared to the RX 5700 XT) and the architecture is still widely used in the mobile sector. I suspect that it will just slide off AMD's website without fanfare and AIB vendors will reduce stock until a suitable Navi replacement comes to light.

I'm running this card overclocked at 4K and it isn't that power hungry, usually sits around 240 watts, they will stop selling it but it will get driver support for another few years, I doubt they would want to piss off people like me who dropped £680 on the card

 

[Kutum]

Have Radeon VII undervoltage to 0.962 power usage drop to 185 w at any load.
Radeon VII is great GPU but only need some tweaks.

 

[neeyik]

185W is impressive - nice bit of tweaking and a win on the silicon lottery there!

 

[grumblguts]

AMD push the silicon to its maximum without a care for their rep.
Nvidia on the other hand step it back allowing them to cut costs on quality components.
That's why the founder card was more expensive to get the better quality components like you wasnt paying enough.

 

[Uncle Al]

AMD is better than this! Doesn't matter the age, support should always be there for their die-hard fans. That's just good business sense, especially when there is very little invested in continued support but it does a WORLD of good for their reputation!

 

[godrilla]

All these high end freesync 2 monitors and no AMD graphics to push it. The consumer is forced to use Nvidia hardware to take advantage of it all until summer 2020 rumored.
Crossfire scaling is also almost eol sadly.

 

[malatmals]

I bought one after they end of lifed it. I run a Macbook Pro with eGPU and its got more and faster RAM than the new lineup AND they don't even have drivers ready. This one was plug and play. Any time a manufacturer quits doing something they usually have profit in mind.

 

[krizby]

So the rumor that AMD only produced 5000 Radeon VII was probably true lol, but still that is 5000 too many, the card shouldn't have been released at all.

 

[McMurdeR]

I reckon the whole point of that card was to keep distribution channels open.

 

[Bronxboi]

AMD is better than this! Doesn't matter the age, support should always be there for their die-hard fans. That's just good business sense, especially when there is very little invested in continued support but it does a WORLD of good for their reputation!

EOL does not mean EOSupport. I am sure they will support, as the do their other products, for years to come.

 

[toooooot]

Alright, send me one for 50.99, as someone who likes to play with hardware I will test it for this humble offering.

 

[treetops]

I wouldn't doubt a replacement coming out soon focused on nothing but compute. Not a hybrid.

 

[Twizted]

I said from the start, this card made no sense. Advertised as competition to the 2080Ti, but couldn't even keep up with the 2080 in most titles while costing more. Fanbois will be fanbois though, and AMD banked on it. You got bamboozled.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

AMD is better than this! Doesn't matter the age, support should always be there for their die-hard fans. That's just good business sense, especially when there is very little invested in continued support but it does a WORLD of good for their reputation!

EOL does not mean EOSupport. I am sure they will support, as the do their other products, for years to come.

Dont be so sure. Remember, this is the same AMD that cut support for the evergreen GPUs YEARS before their competitors from nvidia were left in the cold. Nvidia dropped support in march of 2018, while AMD dropped support for the HD6000 series in July of 2015, with a single beta driver in march 2016. Previous generations of AMD cards were dropped like bathwater when the next gen came out, and that poor support was a major negative point for AMD for years. This "supporting GPUs for years" thing is new for AMD, and there is a good chance that, along with vega frontier edition, the driver support for VII will slow dramatically if not dry up completely, especially as VII is GCN and AMD is focusing on RDNA now.