With the arrival of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, the battle between the next generation of graphics cards has truly begun. Competitor Nvidia recently came out with its GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, and in this review we took a look at what the first mover of the Radeon camp looks like.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX vs RTX 4080
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages a few percent faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 in the traditional rasterization rendering technique. At 4k ultra, the card averages 108 fps, which is almost 40% faster than the RX 6950 XT of the previous generation. RDNA3 cards are relatively better at higher resolutions than RDNA2. On the other hand, the lower resolution advantage over the competition is less pronounced with this generation than with the RX 6000 series.
Ray tracing performance also takes a big leap with RDNA3. On average, the RX 7900 XTX is 60% faster in games with ray tracing enabled than the RX 6950 XT. Since Nvidia hasn’t stood still either, AMD’s relationship with its competitor will change very little. With the RX 6000 series, we could conclude that the ray tracing performance is roughly equal to that of Nvidia’s previous generation, the RTX 20 series. With the new RX 7000 series we can now say the same; they perform roughly on par with the faster RTX 30-series video cards.
Without ray tracing, the RX 7900 XTX is on average a few percentage points faster than the RTX 4080 and has a suggested retail price of 240 euros less. It’s best for you to determine if the improved ray tracing performance is worth the extra price. With the current state of ray tracing in PC gaming and the development of hardware acceleration for it, we see that preferences vary greatly from person to person.
Radeon RX 7900 XT vs RTX 3090 Ti
The RX 7900 XT currently has no direct competitor in Nvidia’s RTX 40 series. AMD’s card is a few percentage points faster at 4k ultra than the RTX 3090 Ti and sits right between this flagship model and the RTX 4080 at 1440p. This also means that the performance difference between the RX 7900 XT and the XTX is quite small, usually only 10 to 15 percent. Not entirely coincidentally, the RX 7900 XT is also 10% cheaper than the XTX. This gives the RX 7900 XT roughly the same price-performance ratio as its bigger brother. We saw the same with Nvidia, where the prices of the RTX 4080 and 4090 seem to draw gamers mostly towards the faster models due to the relatively small extra cost.
Chiplets are the game changer
With the arrival of AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, Nvidia now has a direct competitor for its RTX 4080. GeForce’s flagship model, the RTX 4090, remains unrivaled for the time being. At 4k ultra, this card is 25% faster than AMD’s new flagship. Nvidia has nothing to worry about then? Surely.
The performance level of RDNA3 is just one of the aspects that AMD has focused on in the development of the RX 7000 series. The use of chiplets is a huge step forward in the video card market. It allows AMD to produce the most performance-critical parts of a GPU on the newer and therefore more expensive process, while other things can be made on an older, cheaper and more available process. Connecting these chiplets together is not an easy task, but due to scaling, this technique will be further optimized and become cheaper and cheaper. One source was able to confirm that the margins for RDNA3 cards are significantly higher than Nvidia’s RTX 40 series; AMD’s slides therefore don’t appear to have been plucked out of thin air. It’s unclear whether AMD will want to compete with the RTX 4090 anytime soon, but as far as manufacturing techniques are concerned, there’s certainly plenty of room for a the graphical calculation dies larger than the RX 7900 XTX’s 300mm². Not the lower prices, but above all the higher margins should at least worry Nvidia.
