is AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX a high-performance graphics card ?

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a high-performance graphics card that is designed for demanding gaming and graphic design applications. It features a powerful AMD Radeon GPU, fast memory, and advanced graphics technologies to deliver smooth, detailed visuals and improved performance. With its advanced power management features and high-quality components, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is able to deliver reliable, long-lasting performance even under heavy workloads.

For a long time, AMD’s graphics cards were not as popular as Nvidia’s. While they were competitive in terms of value, they were not as successful at higher price points.

However, with the release of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, AMD has finally created a graphics card that is not only comparable to Nvidia’s offerings, but also delivers a surprising level of performance that nobody expected. When compared to the Nvidia RTX 4090 (as mentioned in issue 339) and the Nvidia RTX 4080 (as mentioned in issue 340), the RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4090 make the RTX 4080 seem unnecessary.

Many gamers who have been unable to upgrade their systems due to the high demand and limited availability of graphics cards will now be able to upgrade to a high-end GPU like the RX 7900 XTX or the RTX 4090, leaving behind their older GTX 1060s.

The reference card from AMD costs $1066, and it is likely that overclocked cards from partners such as Gigabyte and XFX will be more expensive. However, they will still be cheaper (by around $213) than the Nvidia RTX 4080 that it competes against.

It is worth noting that there is also the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, which is slightly less expensive at $1199, has 5,376 stream processors compared to the 6,144 of the 7900 XTX, and has a base frequency of 2 GHz which is 300 MHz slower than the 7900 XTX.

However, until it drops in price, it may not be worth considering. Both the 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT use AMD’s 5nm Navi 31 GPU, but rather than having one single chip, they are made up of several “chiplets,” which is a way for AMD to control costs by reserving the more expensive 5nm node for the compute units that will benefit the most from it.

AMD has implemented GDDR6 RAM in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX instead of the GDDR6X video memory used in the Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080. However, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is able to offer higher memory bandwidth than its Nvidia counterparts due to its faster interconnects on the die and interfaces with the memory chiplets, as well as approximately 22MB more cache than the RTX 4080.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX features second-generation ray accelerators which significantly enhance its ray-tracing capabilities, making it even better than the GeForce RTX 3090. This makes it an excellent choice for gamers who want to experience 4K gaming with ray tracing at an affordable price.

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) is capable of delivering high-quality graphics that are on par with the performance of the GeForce RTX 3090. In addition to ray accelerators, the RX 7900 XTX also has AI accelerator cores, similar to Nvidia’s tensor cores, which are used for tasks such as ray tracing and machine learning. While these cores are a good start for AMD, they still have a long way to go to match the performance of Nvidia’s fourth-generation tensor cores, especially for creative and research workloads that rely heavily on tensor cores.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX performs slightly lower than the Nvidia RTX 4080 in synthetic workloads using 3DMark, particularly in ray-tracing heavy tests such as Speedway and Port Royal, where it scores about 15% lower. However, it does outperform the RTX 3090 in these tests.

One area where the RX 7900 XTX falls behind is in creative performance, specifically in apps like Blender that are optimized for Nvidia’s CUDA graphics programming language.

AMD is working on rewriting the Blender Cycles workloads in a more open-source language to better leverage AMD hardware, and these updates are expected to roll out with Blender 3.50. In terms of gaming performance, the RX 7900 XTX generally averages about 15% fewer fps than the RTX 4080 at 4K resolution with maxed-out graphics and ray tracing settings. However, when ray tracing is turned off, it is about 3% faster.