AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card
AMD
In a battle that seems as old as time, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has released new gaming GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) based on its latest RDNA 3 microarchitecture, to take on arch-rival NVIDIA and its latest cards of the GeForce RTX 40 series that launched in October of this year. The new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT are AMD’s newest flagship cards, and the company has managed to deliver a competitive offering for PC gamers at more attractive prices that offer a solid value proposition. But before we dive into the details of performance and retail pricing, let’s take a high-level look at what makes AMD’s Navi 31 GPU, which powers these new gaming beasts, tick.
For decades, shrinking arrays in ever-smaller semiconductor manufacturing process geometries has provided gains through faster clock speeds and the ability to pack more transistors on a chip with better energy efficiency characteristics. However, these benefits have begun to diminish with the continuously shrinking chip process lithography. As such, chipmakers have turned to new “chiplet”-based design architectures that allow them to manufacture multiple smaller, more efficient chip arrays and then assemble them into a single multichip package for greater efficiency, performance, and cost It used to be that MCM (multichip module) packaging was cost prohibitive. However, as packaging technologies have advanced more recently, the net net is that chiplets are the way of the future for more complex processor designs, and AMD’s new Navi 31 is the first consumer GPU based in market chiplets.
Enter AMD Navi 31 and the first chip-based consumer GPU
AMD’s Navi 31 GPU that powers its Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics cards
AMD
Without getting too into the weeds, AMD’s RDNA 3 (Radeon DNA 3)-based Navi 31 GPU powering the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT is made up of two separate die types, a 300 GCD mm2 or Graphics Compute Die and a 6 x 37 mm2 (about 222 mm2 total) MCD or cache dies. The first is manufactured with a 5nm (nanometer) chip process and the second with 6nm. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX employs 6 MCDs with a 384-bit memory interface (64 bits per die), along with 24GB of GDDR6 memory and 96MB of AMD Infinity Cache, delivering 3500GB/s of ‘effective memory bandwidth. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT uses only 5 MCDs to create a 320-bit memory interface with 20GB of GDDR6 memory and 80MB of onboard Infinity Cache, for a total of up to 2900GB/s ‘effective memory bandwidth. The more powerful Radeon RX 7900 XTX also has 96 Radeon Compute Units (CU) and 96 ray accelerators, compared to the Radeon RX 7900 XT’s 84 CU and 84 ray complements. All told, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a board power of 355 watts, while a 7900 XT is a 315-watt design, versus the previous generation Radeon RX 6950 XT’s 335-watt, which only uses 80 CUs, 80 accelerators of rays and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory.
So, as we can see, AMD was able to pack more resources into a similar or lower power envelope, although the Radeon RX 7900 series also has a myriad of other architectural advancements that add refinement and performance margin additional beyond what these advances in physics have. handed over. The good news for PC gamers is that performance-per-dollar metrics have also scaled nicely.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 Scrap with GeForce RTX 4080 at better prices
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Graphics Card – MSRP $999
AMD
What’s perhaps most compelling about AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 series is that all these extra resources and claimed performance gains come at essentially the same prices as the company’s previous Radeon RX 6900 series. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT 20GB reference design card will retail for $899, while the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with its higher boost clocks, 24GB of GDDR6 memory, and the Navi 31 GPU fully enabled, it will retail for $999. And while AMD targeted GeForce RTX 4080 16GB class performance with these cards, they cost $300 and $200 less, respectively. So with that in mind, let’s take a quick look at how the benchmark numbers stack up, from Marco Chiappetta’s Radeon RX 7900 series review at HotHardware.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT Performance – FarCry 6
HotHardware.com
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT Performance – Forza 5 Horizon
HotHardware.com
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT Performance – F1 2022 Raytraced
HotHardware.com
These gaming benchmarks do a good job of quickly summarizing the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 series as played so far. While AMD is likely still squeezing extra FPS out of its drivers, in general the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT slot in just above and just below the performance of the GeForce RTX 4080, depending on the game title and the graphics settings. The charts above show all high-resolution 4K maximum quality gaming settings, and we see both Radeons sandwiching the GeForce RTX 4080 fairly consistently. It’s only with some ray-tracing enabled titles like F1 2022 that we see the new Radeon RX 7900 series trailing an RTX 4080 a bit, as NVIDIA’s third-gen RT engines are generally more powerful. However, if we look at the case of FarCry 6, which also has ray tracing enabled here, the performance falls in AMD’s favor for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus the GeForce RTX 4080.
The Bottom Line: AMD’s latest blowout puts the heat on NVIDIA
AMD Radeon RX 7900 Graphics Card – MSRP $899
AMD
All in all, while AMD can’t claim the top performance crown here with the new Radeon RX 7900 series, that distinction being firmly established by NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090, the company has delivered a compelling value proposition with metrics of generally better performance per dollar. , as long as retail prices drop below MSRP for reference cards, with similar prices for custom cards from OEM partners like XFX, MSI, ASUS and others. Also, since the Radeon RX 7900 series cards are roughly the same size as previous-generation Radeons, they’re easier upgrades for gamers, compared to NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 and 4090, which will require more space in the chassis and may not fit inside some media. -tower and smaller PC cases.
What surprised me a bit was that the power consumption of the new Radeon RX 7900 series is generally a bit higher than NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series under load. Although, I’m not sure this will matter much to most desktop gamers, especially with standard 8-pin PCIe power connectors on the new Radeons, versus the 12-pin dongles of the RTX 40 series from NVIDIA that require 3-4 patched PCIe power cables. in
It will be interesting to see how these two powerful PC graphics fare in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime it looks like AMD has a very attractive offering in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, and at very competitive prices. to boot this nvidia undercut.