Once again, AMD is ready to take on NVIDIA's latest video cards with powerful alternatives at a lower price. And once again, AMD still lags behind when it comes to ray tracing. That's pretty much the story behind the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, two confusingly-named GPUs meant to be the pinnacle of AMD's new RDNA 3 graphics architecture. At $899 and $999, respectively, these cards are certainly easier to stomach than NVIDIA's $1,199 RTX 4080 and the monstrously expensive $1,599 RTX 4090 (both of which actually sell for far more at most stores).
Gallery: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT | 7 Photos
Gallery: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT | 7 Photos
For the most part, AMD’s new cards deliver solid 4K gaming performance, especially with the help of the company’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. It's just a shame that you'll have to live with slower ray tracing performance than the competition. (On the bright side, they offer a major ray tracing upgrade over AMD's last batch of Radeon GPUs.)
AMD Radeon 7900 XTX
Pros
- Excellent 4K performance with FSR
- Cool under load
- Cheaper than comparable NVIDIA card
Cons
- Ray tracing isn’t as fast as NVIDIA
- Driver issues at launch
AMD Radeon 7900 XT
Pros
- Solid 4k and excellent 1
- 440p speeds
- Cool under load
- FSR is a huge help
- Much cheaper than NVIDIA
Cons
- Ray tracing isn’t as fast as NVIDIA
- Driver issues at launch
- Could be cheaper
So what makes these cards so special? They're the first GPU's built on a chiplet-based design, similar to AMD's latest CPUs. That should allow AMD to tweak its designs easily down the line, making it simpler to scale RDNA 3 down to laptops and lower-end GPUs. The 7900 XTX and XT feature a 5nm compute die and a 6nm memory die connected by a 5.3 TB/s interconnect. Together, that means they can reach up to 61 teraflops of computing power and utilize up to 24GB of GDDR6 RAM.
AMD also claims it beefed up ray tracing performance by 50 percent per compute unit, compared to its previous RDNA 2 architecture. Its video engine has been upgraded with support for AV1 encoding and decoding at up to 8K/60fps. That format isn't widely adopted yet, but it aims to deliver better video compression for 4K and 8K footage compared to existing codecs like H.264.
True to their names, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT aren't very different. The top-end XTX sports 96 compute units, the same amount of ray accelerators and clock speeds between 2.3Ghz and 2.5GHz. The XT, meanwhile, offers 84 compute and ray tracing units and clocks between 2GHz and 2.4GHz. The higher end card comes equipped with 24GB of GDDR6 RAM, compared to 20GB on the XT. (Notably, they both offer more memory than the 16GB RTX 4080.)
Given their similarities though, it's unclear why anyone would opt to save $100 for the 7900 XT. If you're willing to spend close to $1,000 on a video card, you might as well go full-tilt and grab as much memory and power as you can. It would have been nice to see something slightly cheaper from AMD, even if it meant delivering a card that's a bit slower than the 7900 XT.
The reference GPUs we're reviewing look and feel like premium components, as we've come to expect from AMD's flagship cards. Most importantly, though, they only take up two slots on your motherboard, whereas the enormous RTX 4080 and 4090 take up three. The 7900 XT and XTX also rely on two 8-pin power connections, so you won't need to string any new PSU cables or cram in a dongle like with NVIDIA's cards. The 7900 XTX requires an 850-watt power supply, thanks to its starting power draw of 355W, while the XT model can work with a 750W PSU. Both cards hovered around 66C under load, which was right between what we saw on the RTX 4080 and 4090.
