On Radeon VII
“It’s underwhelming,” Huang said when asked by PCWorld what he thought of AMD’s new Radeon VII, which features 16GB of HBM2 memory, 1TB of bandwidth, 60 graphics cores and is built on a new 7nm process.
“The performance is lousy and there’s nothing new,” Huang said. “[There’s] no ray tracing, no AI. It’s 7nm with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we’ll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we’ll crush it.”
Indeed, Huang went on to boast that the GeForce GTX 2080 is sold by every add-in card vendor while the Radeon VII is an unknown.
“It’s a weird launch, maybe they thought of it this morning,” Huang quipped before laughing halfheartedly at his own dig and mentioning how he likes to riff on the competition sometimes. Still, it’s clear what Huang thinks as he again reiterated: “It’s underwhelming.”
On Supporting Vesa Adaptive Sync and Freesync
“We never competed,” Huang said of upcoming FreeSync support. “(FreeSync) was never proven to work. As you know, we invented the area of adaptive sync. The truth is most of the FreeSync monitors do not work. They do not even work with AMD’s graphics cards.”
“We will test every singe card against every single monitor against every single game and if it doesn’t work, we will say it doesn’t work. And if it does, we will let it work.”
“We believe that you have to test it to promise that it works,” Huang said. “And unsurprisingly most of them don’t work.”
On RTX Launch
When asked about the negative reaction that the company’s GeForce RTX cards have received from more budget conscious customers, Huang was contrite.
“They were right,” Huang said. “[We] were anxious to get RTX in the mainstream market... We just weren’t ready.”
“Now we’re ready, and it’s called 2060,” Huang said. “[It has] twice the performance of a PlayStation 4 and it’s only $350.” (See our full review of the GTX 2060 Founders Edition.)