Review AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT Review: Shooting for the Top

[Admin]

Our Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT testing shows a big improvement over AMD's previous generation cards, with the XTX at least managing to trade blows with the RTX 4080 while costing $200 less. Even so, at $999 and $899, the fastest AMD cards for the RDNA 3 series don't come cheap.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT Review: Shooting for the Top : Read more

 

[-Fran-]

Thanks for the review!

I'm reading it now, but I've watched numbers in other places. My initial reaction is lukewarm* TBH. I expected a bit more, but they're not terrible either. They did fall short of AMD's promise though. They indeed oversell the capabilities on raster, but were pretty on point for RT increases.

Still, this card better have a "fine wine" effect down the line and the MSRP may just be well justified. This being said, it is still too expensive. for what it is.

Regards.

 

[spongiemaster]

That's probably because this is the most competitive AMD has been in the consumer graphics market in quite some time.

Not sure how this was determined, but I would argue this is a step backwards in almost every situation from the 6000 series. Also, it should be pointed out that there is something going on with the power consumption of the 7000 series in non-gaming situations that will affect many users. Looks like the memory isn't down clocking or something.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Not sure how this was determined, but I would argue this is a step backwards in almost every situation from the 6000 series. Also, it should be pointed out that there is something going on with the power consumption of the 7000 series in non-gaming situations that will affect many users. Looks like the memory isn't down clocking or something.

I don't do a ton of power testing scenarios, so I'd have to look into that more... and I really need to go sleep. As for the "being competitive," AMD is pretty much on par with Nvidia's best in rasterization (similar to 6000-series), and it's at least narrowed the gap in ray tracing. Or maybe that's just my perception? Anyway, since basically Pascal, it's felt like AMD GPUs have been very behind Nvidia. Nvidia offers more performance and more features, at an admittedly higher price.

 

[Colif]

Steve appears to have recorded a 750watt transient on the xtx which makes me sit back and wonder what PSU you need. though I am not sure if that is peak system power or just the gpu itself.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

A bit of a cynical Pros/Cons section, no mention of XTX being a much better value over 4080 which is its direct competition?
Performance falls within expected margins (reasonable expectations, not that of crazed fanboys). Beating 4080 in rasterization and falling short in RT and professional uses. I don't quite care for RT but the performance gap in Blender e.g. is still eyepopping. I have heard of Blender 3.5 offering big improvements, yet that's not the current reality of things. I also doubt this will be a better story for RNDA 3 in Maya (Arnold) either.

 

[shADy81]

I assume the 750 W transient GN recorded is for the full system? TPU are showing 455W spike for the XTX and 412 for the XT, lower than 6900 and 6800 by quite some way on their charts.

They also downgraded their PSU recommendation to 650 W for both cards. Was 1000W on the 6900. I think I'd feel a bit close on 650 W even allowing for a good quality unit being able to supply more than rated for short times. 650 would surely be way to close for a 13900K system, what do they know that I dont?

 

[zecoeco]

Not sure how this was determined, but I would argue this is a step backwards in almost every situation from the 6000 series. Also, it should be pointed out that there is something going on with the power consumption of the 7000 series in non-gaming situations that will affect many users. Looks like the memory isn't down clocking or something.

This is actually a bug that was already reported to AMD and they're already working on a fix.

 

[zecoeco]

"Chiplets don't actually improve performance (and may hurt it)"
How on earth is this even a con? who said chiplets are for performance? chiplets are for cost saving.
But what did y'all expect ? You just can't complain for this price point.. there you go, chiplets saved you $200 bucks + gave you 24GB of VRAM as bonus (versus 16GB on 4080)
It is meant for GAMING so don't expect productivity performance, for many reasons including nvidia's cuda cores that has every major software optimized for it.
RDNA is going the right direction with chiplets.. in an industry of increasing costs year after year.
Chiplet design is a solution, and not a new groundbreaking feature that's meant to boost performance.
Sadly, instead of working on the problem, nvidia decided to give excuses such as "Moore's law is dead".

 

[salgado18]

But for under a grand, right now the RX 7900 XTX delivers plenty to like and at least keeps pace with the more expensive RTX 4080. All you have to do is lose a good sized chunk of ray tracing performance, and hope that FSR2 can continue catching up to DLSS.

That, I believe, is the reason AMD won't increase too much their market share in this generation. Yes, rasterization is comparable, so are power, memory, price and even upscaling performance/quality. But it is a bad card for raytracing, or at least that's the message, and between a full card and a crippled card, people will prefer the fully featured one. I know designing GPUs is a monstrously complex task, but they really needed to up their RT performance by at least 3x to be competitive. Now they will keep being "bang-for-buck", which is nice, but never "the best".

Edit: by some rough calcs, if the XTX is ~40% faster without RT than the 6950, and ~50% faster with RT, then the generational improvement is ~7%? If so, then that's hardly any improvement at all. Great cards and all that, but I'm very disappointed with the lack of focus on RT.

 

[btmedic04]

That, I believe, is the reason AMD won't increase too much their market share in this generation. Yes, rasterization is comparable, so are power, memory, price and even upscaling performance/quality. But it is a bad card for raytracing, or at least that's the message, and between a full card and a crippled card, people will prefer the fully featured one. I know designing GPUs is a monstrously complex task, but they really needed to up their RT performance by at least 3x to be competitive. Now they will keep being "bang-for-buck", which is nice, but never "the best".

Edit: by some rough calcs, if the XTX is ~40% faster without RT than the 6950, and ~50% faster with RT, then the generational improvement is ~7%? If so, then that's hardly any improvement at all. Great cards and all that, but I'm very disappointed with the lack of focus on RT.

AMD has a definite physical size advantage though which is something thats applicable to quite a few folks (myself included.) I hear what you are saying, but as a 3090 owner, 3090-like RT performance from the 7900xtx is still quite good for most people.

 

[JamesJones44]

A bit of a cynical Pros/Cons section, no mention of XTX being a much better value over 4080 which is its direct competition?
Performance falls within expected margins (reasonable expectations, not that of crazed fanboys). Beating 4080 in rasterization and falling short in RT and professional uses. I don't quite care for RT but the performance gap in Blender e.g. is still eyepopping. I have heard of Blender 3.5 offering big improvements, yet that's not the current reality of things. I also doubt this will be a better story for RNDA 3 in Maya (Arnold) either.

I would argue only a better relative value. I think both are overvalued for their performance segment.

 

[spongiemaster]

This is actually a bug that was already reported to AMD and they're already working on a fix.

Based on AMD's history of driver fixes, don't hold your breath waiting on a quick fix for this. People are also reporting that the video playback issue isn't likely to be fixed completely, as can be seen by the 6000 results. For some reason, down clocking the memory led to video corruption, so AMD can't drop the memory speeds all the way down.

 

[spongiemaster]

I don't do a ton of power testing scenarios, so I'd have to look into that more... and I really need to go sleep. As for the "being competitive," AMD is pretty much on par with Nvidia's best in rasterization (similar to 6000-series), and it's at least narrowed the gap in ray tracing. Or maybe that's just my perception? Anyway, since basically Pascal, it's felt like AMD GPUs have been very behind Nvidia. Nvidia offers more performance and more features, at an admittedly higher price.

The 6900 XT was roughly on par with the 3090 in rasterized performance. The 7900XTX is a clear step below the 4090. AMD went from efficiency leader with the 6000 series to trailing Ada with 7000. It's obvious now why AMD removed the efficiency slide from their RDNA3 announcement. Raytracing performance isn't any better vs Nvidia than it was last generation. Where has AMD picked up ground vs Nvidia compared to 6000 vs Ampere?

 

[salgado18]

AMD has a definite physical size advantage though which is something thats applicable to quite a few folks (myself included.) I hear what you are saying, but as a 3090 owner, 3090-like RT performance from the 7900xtx is still quite good for most people.

The problem here is 3090-like RT performance for 4080-like price. So their argument is basically "want to save some bucks by sacrificing raytracing? Buy AMD", which is a pretty bad, even if true, marketing strategy.

 

[husker]

A bit of a cynical Pros/Cons section, no mention of XTX being a much better value over 4080 which is its direct competition?
Performance falls within expected margins (reasonable expectations, not that of crazed fanboys). Beating 4080 in rasterization and falling short in RT and professional uses. I don't quite care for RT but the performance gap in Blender e.g. is still eyepopping. I have heard of Blender 3.5 offering big improvements, yet that's not the current reality of things. I also doubt this will be a better story for RNDA 3 in Maya (Arnold) either.

Possibly because "value" is a subjective term and the reviewer didn't want to venture into anything other than pure factual numbers at this time. What do you value in a card over what I value in a card? Pure performance? Energy efficiency? Ray Tracing? Sure you can come up with a formula to derive a number for "card value" that appears strictly mathematical and non-subjective; but there is still some subjectivity in that formula that hides behind the number.

 

[Makaveli]

I'm going to be looking at a 7900XTX sometime next year as the drivers improve it will be quite an upgrade in performance from a 6800XT at 3440x1440 at 144hz

And my steam library doesn't have many RT titles so thats a non factor for me.

Not sure how this was determined, but I would argue this is a step backwards in almost every situation from the 6000 series. Also, it should be pointed out that there is something going on with the power consumption of the 7000 series in non-gaming situations that will affect many users. Looks like the memory isn't down clocking or something.

Most likely driver issue.

 

[jaquith]

Trifecta of problems here .. RX 7900 XTX

1. Reference: Horrific Coil Whine and Poor power management
2. Often unplayable ray-tracing frame rates
3. Blender and other 3D and video processing software rendering times are often painfully slow

The reference AMD hopefully is not carried over and some of the AIBs, but nothing is going to fix ray-tracing and slow production rendering.

 

[-Fran-]

I've read it and I have to agree with most things, except that weird "con" of saying that chiplets is, well, a "con". Well, not necessarily disagreeing, but find it weird to read. It is technically true compared to a monolithic design if it doesn't perform on par, but it is a "pro" as it does cheapen the BOM cost of the cards (no idea to what degree though; also not counting R&D).

Anyway, good review.

Definitely a decent raster card (great for VR; my niche) and good VRAM amount for whatever needs it. Power leaves a bit to be desired, but it's not terrible either. It's still "there" with nVidia, but barely. Bugs at IDLE power consumption not withstanding.

I hope AMD manages to squash all the weird variances in games and they let reviewers know so they can re-bench a few games that were outliers or flat out bad.

Regards.

 

[zecoeco]

I've read it and I have to agree with most things, except that weird "con" of saying that chiplets is, well, a "con". Well, not necessarily disagreeing, but find it weird to read. It is technically true compared to a monolithic design if it doesn't perform on par, but it is a "pro" as it does cheapen the BOM cost of the cards (no idea to what degree though; also not counting R&D).

Anyway, good review.

Definitely a decent raster card (great for VR; my niche) and good VRAM amount for whatever needs it. Power leaves a bit to be desired, but it's not terrible either. It's still "there" with nVidia, but barely. Bugs at IDLE power consumption not withstanding.

I hope AMD manages to squash all the weird variances in games and they let reviewers know so they can re-bench a few games that were outliers or flat out bad.

Regards.

The performance hit as a consequence of using chiplets is negligible.
I see it as a smart way to reduce costs and improve production.
Simply put, AMD can't cope financially with the increasing costs, so, it is a smart choice for sustainability.
I don't really understand what people think AMD is as a company. Financially they're no way near intel or nvidia, and they just survived a bankruptcy years ago.
When you look at the bigger picture, they are doing tremendously good as a company that came out of the dead.

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

Thanks for the review!

I'm reading it now, but I've watched numbers in other places. My initial reaction is lukewarm* TBH. I expected a bit more, but they're not terrible either. They did fall short of AMD's promise though. They indeed oversell the capabilities on raster, but were pretty on point for RT increases.

Still, this card better have a "fine wine" effect down the line and the MSRP may just be well justified. This being said, it is still too expensive. for what it is.

Regards.

Agree with lukewarm. Certainly didn't live up to the hype and expectation. It a better price to performance in raster compared to the 4080, but thats a really low bar to clear. Even then, when there are 4080's at MRSP and 7900xtxs slightly above MRSP at least right now, makes the 100-200$ difference for similar raster but much better raytracing/production workloads makes it seem just like an okay launch.

Another thought is that if you're already spending 1000$ for a GPU, it seems likely you have the cash to stretch for a 4080 with the extra goodies (raytracing, dlss, CUDA). I'm really more interested in how the more mainstream cards (200-500$) are gonna perform. Probably gonna have to wait until Q2 or Q3 next year at this rate though.

 

[ConfusedCounsel]

It seems in Direct x12 the RX 7900 series loses performance and doesn't deliver as it should. This seems reminiscent of when Zen first hit the scene. It took AMD a few iterations to get the infinity fabric and IPC clicking. Eventually, Zen 3 emerged. History may be repeating itself. The infinity fabric of the RDNA 3 may be creating latency issues with DirectX 12 titles. Given AMD knowledge gains with Zen, they will probably correct with driver updates, a RDNA 3 refresh, or RDNA 4.

Overall, an impressive showing for a new way of building a GPU.

@JarredWaltonGPU chiplets are the future absent a technology change enabling using two processes on the same die or something else. Otherwise, the industry will be plagued with prohibitive manufacturing costs. (Hey kids, go to school, study science, and find better solution so I can have cool games to play in my retirement.)

 

[blppt]

Was hoping for more of a jump with RT performance now that AMD had time to put together a GPU with that feature in mind, unlike the 69xx series. Disappointing.

 

[ConfusedCounsel]

Was hoping for more of a jump with RT performance now that AMD had time to put together a GPU with that feature in mind, unlike the 69xx series. Disappointing.

I wouldn't be disappointed. Look how Zen evolved over the years. With this chiplet architecture and some good scheduling instructions, AMD could refresh with a second GPU in the package just to handle RT.

As for now, it seems AMD still needs to get the infinity fabric together. At least, that is what the performance in DirectX12 seems to indicate. As for ray tracing, DirectX Raytracing is an extension of DirectX12. So, getting the infinity fabric working better with DirectX 12 should improve Ray Tracing performance. I would expect better performance with driver updates.

 

[Colif]

Given its the 13th here, I wonder what cards will be on sale once the shops actually open. Nothing on web yet.
I wonder how many there are for sale in Australia, all talk was about other countries. Nothing about here.
I also wonder about price as unlike UK/USA it won't be 999 here.
Relative performance to cards I can't afford doesn't matter to me. When you coming from a 2070 Super, both look good to me.