I do not think Radeon VII is a failure at all. It is a direct competitor to the RTX2080 (without ray tracing/tensor cores). It is a much better card computationally than the NVIDIA card and it has to be taken advantage of by applications because it has a lot of raw potential especially with it's insane amount of HBM2 VRAM and the 1TB/sec memory bandwidth.
Yes, AMD is behind NVIDIA in terms of raw gaming/3d performance, especially when you put it up against a RTX2080Ti, but that is a card that costs twice as much as the Radeon VII. Yes AMD is behind NVIDIA in terms of power efficiency.
People need to realize that AMD has maybe 1/10th of the budget for R&D vs NVIDIA. And yes it's sad that Apple has kicked NVIDIA to the curb and won't allow the RTX cards to be available for macOS (or whoever is fully at fault, we don't know 100%).
But realize that the Radeon VII is a beast of a card and I am personally (as many others are) very happy with it because it is what the Vega (last gen) should have been imo. The GCN architecture is aging and we are not going to see a better card from AMD than the Radeon VII in 2019...maybe in 2020. And we will find out what Apple does with the Mac Pro and if they are truly expandable and if they will allow NVIDIA back in the game.
I have posted about my Radeon VII experiences in
this and
this post.
I spent today testing performance in real world applications such as Premiere Pro CC2019, FCPX, Davinci Resolve 16 Beta and various other Adobe apps and benchmarks, and it is a fantastic card so far. Would have I loved to get the RTX2080Ti with CUDA support in macOS? Sure. It's a card that costs twice as much, but I would definitely get one. But it is what it is and we should be happy with the expedited Radeon VII support from Apple. My main concern is stability and performance because I use this specific Hackintosh for day to day work, everything from design, to motion graphics to heavy color grading and editorial (I work in film). So I do get to put these things through it's paces and I'm not really an enthusiast or a "fan" of Hackintoshing or fiddling with computers, I just want good performance and control
I got the Radeon VII for $699+Tax in USA, it came with 3 AAA games and I sold those and final cost for me was $520. And I am selling my Vega FE so only for maybe $200-$250 I get a new card. I don't know the prices in EU so can't comment.
Here are some quick performance updates on Radeon VII
View attachment 398416
View attachment 398417
View attachment 398418
It will only get better.