News AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Deep Dive

colossusrage

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The ray tracing performance is about what I expected, which is about 3090 performance for AMD's flagship. This isn't necessarily a bad thing since FSR gets you over the 60fps mark. Unless Nvidia lowers the price of the 4080 by the time the 7900XTX launches, I think this will be my upgrade from a 3080.
 

RichardtST

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44fps at 4K with ray tracing? That would be the first thing to get turned off. 40fps is playable, but very painful. At 24 fps you just stop the game and go play with your baby sister instead. I'd say neither one gets a passing score here.
 
44fps at 4K with ray tracing? That would be the first thing to get turned off. 40fps is playable, but very painful. At 24 fps you just stop the game and go play with your baby sister instead. I'd say neither one gets a passing score here.
Or enable DLSS or FSR2.1. We're very much getting to the point where upscaling of some form will be required for higher FPS. The point of the DXR tests is to show worst-case scenarios in some sense, because I can pretty much guarantee that whatever "way too complex and heavy" graphics scenario we can come up with right now will at some point in the future become the norm, and then it will become "easy" for even budget hardware. All the extra DXR effects in CP77 might not be worth the performance loss, but a different game and engine might do something with DXR that actually warrants the hit.
 
No mention of the potential NAVI 31 PCB respin due to a hardware fault (or hardware limitation specifically put in place by AMD)?
Basically, these cards can't get far above 2.8GHz due to a hardware limitation.
 
The 7900XT is still too darn expensive. The 7900XTX can be 1K, because it has the priviledge of being a "halo" product, but the 7900XT should be the "reasonable top tier" contender and at $900 it is not. At least, not with the projected difference in performance between the two.

Come on AMD, stop playing stupid games and get reasonable with the 7900XT.

Regards.
 

hannibal

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The 7900XT is still too darn expensive. The 7900XTX can be 1K, because it has the priviledge of being a "halo" product, but the 7900XT should be the "reasonable top tier" contender and at $900 it is not. At least, not with the projected difference in performance between the two.

Come on AMD, stop playing stupid games and get reasonable with the 7900XT.

Regards.

When the nearest competition that may even be slower is 4080 and costing only $1199 and has no need to reduce the cost of 7900XT at all...
Nvidia has to make the move first, because AMD has no reason at all reduce prices at the current situation!
 
When the nearest competition that may even be slower is 4080 and costing only $1199 and has no need to reduce the cost of 7900XT at all...
Nvidia has to make the move first, because AMD has no reason at all reduce prices at the current situation!
You're not wrong and I hate that, LOL.

We could also blame Intel while we're at it, yes?

Regards xD
 
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RichardtST

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Or enable DLSS or FSR2.1. We're very much getting to the point where upscaling of some form will be required for higher FPS. The point of the DXR tests is to show worst-case scenarios in some sense, because I can pretty much guarantee that whatever "way too complex and heavy" graphics scenario we can come up with right now will at some point in the future become the norm, and then it will become "easy" for even budget hardware. All the extra DXR effects in CP77 might not be worth the performance loss, but a different game and engine might do something with DXR that actually warrants the hit.

Except that those techs don't help the lag. It is the lag that kills the game. Visually it is terrible at low frame rates, but the killer is the lag. Very frustrating to move the mouse and then watch it move later on when it feels like getting around to it. 60fps (real frames, not imaginary ones) is minimum for acceptable gameplay. I'm perfectly happy with whatever tech comes along.... that does not add to the lag.
 
Except that those techs don't help the lag. It is the lag that kills the game. Visually it is terrible at low frame rates, but the killer is the lag. Very frustrating to move the mouse and then watch it move later on when it feels like getting around to it. 60fps (real frames, not imaginary ones) is minimum for acceptable gameplay. I'm perfectly happy with whatever tech comes along.... that does not add to the lag.
DLSS2 and FSR2 absolutely help reduce latency. DLSS 3 Frame Generation and presumably the future FSR 3 are a different matter. Don't confuse the two! Higher real framerates (not "generated" or "interpolated" or "imaginary") mean lower latency. I showed latency for one game with the RTX 4090 review. Here's Native vs. Quality vs. Performance upscaling latencies compared in a single chart:

156

It's interesting that the 4090 with DLSS2 Quality did better than 4090 with DLSS2 Performance. Is that because it took longer at 4x upscaling versus 2x upscaling, or perhaps just variation in measured latency? I don't know for certain.
 

RichardtST

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DLSS2 and FSR2 absolutely help reduce latency. DLSS 3 Frame Generation and presumably the future FSR 3 are a different matter. Don't confuse the two! Higher real framerates (not "generated" or "interpolated" or "imaginary") mean lower latency. I showed latency for one game with the RTX 4090 review. Here's Native vs. Quality vs. Performance upscaling latencies compared in a single chart:

View attachment 156

It's interesting that the 4090 with DLSS2 Quality did better than 4090 with DLSS2 Performance. Is that because it took longer at 4x upscaling versus 2x upscaling, or perhaps just variation in measured latency? I don't know for certain.

Beautiful graphic. Thank you for this!
 

husker

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The 7900XT is still too darn expensive. The 7900XTX can be 1K, because it has the priviledge of being a "halo" product, but the 7900XT should be the "reasonable top tier" contender and at $900 it is not. At least, not with the projected difference in performance between the two.

Come on AMD, stop playing stupid games and get reasonable with the 7900XT.

Regards.

It's the popcorn at the movie theatre snack bar all over again. Sell the medium close to the price of the large and make the large seem like a great deal. Psychologists refer to this as a classic decoy item play – assuming there will be a third lower cost card. The perception of value is pegged to the middle price (which is the decoy), creating the illusion of a smaller upgrade to large.

But NVidia seems to use a variation of this principle of psychology which is often used with expensive tech items. In this case, it is designed to drive more sales from the smaller item to the middle item by making the top tier so outrageously expensive that the middle option seems like the best deal.

It's interesting to me that although they are each using a different twist on this old trick, AMD and NVidia are both driving for customers to buy their $1000 item.
 
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salgado18

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I still think the lower-than-Geforce raytracing performance will hurt sales, even for those who don't quite need it. In the meeting to decide this gen's feature, they should have aimed at 4x increase instead of x2, because Nvidia would obviously double what was already doubled over Radeons. And that will make them look weaker, even if rasterization perf is good.
 

bit_user

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When the smaller RX 7xxx ?
Early next year, I think. AMD needs to sell their existing RX 6000 inventory, first. The lower-end RX 7000 cards would just compete the 6000-series cards, forcing 6000-series prices even lower. Basically, they have nothing to gain by launching it before the 6000-series cards are mostly sold out.
 
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bit_user

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It's the popcorn at the movie theatre snack bar all over again. Sell the medium close to the price of the large and make the large seem like a great deal.
No, that doesn't quite apply here. At least, not if they can't sell enough of the XT cards. Depends on what yields are like, but I think they're not going to sell all of their dies @ $900 that have too many defects to be sold as XTX.

What's really going on is that pricing the RX 7900XT too low would cannibalize sales & cause price erosion of the RX 69x0 cards. Once those are gone, I definitely expect the RX 7900XT to get re-priced.
 

bit_user

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In the meeting to decide this gen's feature, they should have aimed at 4x increase instead of x2, because Nvidia would obviously double what was already doubled over Radeons. And that will make them look weaker, even if rasterization perf is good.
Maybe they doubted their ability to beat Nvidia at ray tracing, and feared that attempting to do so would eat up too much of their silicon budget and come either at the cost of too much raster performance or just push die sizes (and thus prices) too high.

I actually agree with you that the ray tracing & deep learning performance of the Nvidia cards makes them more desirable. But, if you think about it from AMD's perspective, it would've been disastrous for them to have a card that cost as much or more and didn't outperform Nvidia on basically all fronts. I think they played it smart, since underestimating Nvidia is a very costly mistake.
 
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prtskg

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Maybe they doubted their ability to beat Nvidia at ray tracing, and feared that attempting to do so would eat up too much of their silicon budget and come either at the cost of too much raster performance or just push die sizes (and thus prices) too high.

I actually agree with you that the ray tracing & deep learning performance of the Nvidia cards makes them more desirable. But, if you think about it from AMD's perspective, it would've been disastrous for them to have a card that cost as much or more and didn't outperform Nvidia on basically all fronts. I think they played it smart, since underestimating Nvidia is a very costly mistake.
Doing too much in first generation chiplet design for consumer graphics could have backfired. So being conservative at 300mm² die size is understandable, including what you wrote.
 
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