RDNA 3 Is Here, The Radeon RX 7900 XTX And RX 7900 XT

Feliz Navi 31

Just in time for the holiday season AMD have revived an old naming scheme and released the new RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX.  The two cards are both RDNA 3, aka Navi 31 and are fabbed on 5nm for the graphics and 6nm for the memory and are rated at 355W for the RX 7900 XTX, 315W for the 7900XT.  If you pay the (theoretical) $999 MSRP for the 7900 XTX you will get 12 more compute units and ray accelerators, 24 more AI accelerators, and 768 more stream processors.  In addition your GPU will have a boost clock 100 MHz faster, or 300MHz on the game clock while your VRAM will be 4GB larger and offer 160GB/s more bandwidth.  Last, but not least your Infinity cache is increased by 16MB.

All those numbers are great, but the real question is price to performance and if the extra $100 resolves into and 11% performance boost.  For games such as Far Cry six you will go from an average 105FPS on the RX 7900XT to 121FPS on the RX 7900 XTX, which puts the RX 7900 XT just above the RTX 4080 FE and has the RX 7900 XTX a handful of frames behind the RTX 4090 FE at 4K.   For a more demanding game like Cyberpunk the 7900 XTX is over a dozen frames behind NVIDIA’s flagship card and the RX 7900 XT is 7 frames behind the RTX 4080 FE.

When you enable ray tracing the story changes a bit more, as you might expect.  AMD’s new flagship falls 13 frames behind the RTX 4090 FE but still outperforms the RTX 4080.  The RX 7900 XT doesn’t keep it’s lead, falling 7 frames behind in Far Cry 6.  For Cyberpunk the results are more significant, at 4K the RTX 4090 manages 44FPS while the RX 7900 XTX gives you 20FPS whereas the RX 4080 can manage 31FPS compared to the unplayable 17FPS from the RX 7900 XT.  That shows significant improvement from AMD when it comes to ray tracing, but they still have a ways to go.

Those are just some of the results from The FPS Reviews’ two reviews which also compare the cards with DLSS and FSR enabled, and those two technologies make a big difference at 4K.

If you do find an RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX for sale and want to pick it up you can get The Callisto Protocol and Dead Island 2 for free; same with any flavour of  RX 6800, RX 6750 XT, RX 6700 , RX 6650 or RX 6600.  If you opt for an RX 6500 XT or RX 6400 then this Raise The Game bundle will only include Dead Island 2.