A number of foreign resources have received the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT video cards and have already managed to prepare their reviews of these devices. Let’s consider the conclusions made by the browsers of the PCWorld site.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT specifications

The new video cards are based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, and the graphics processors are based on chiplets. The Radeon RX 7900 XT model includes 84 computing units and 5376 stream processors. The base gaming frequency is 2.0 GHz, the increased frequency is 2.4 GHz. The device carries on board 80 MB of Infinity Cache memory of the 2nd generation and 20 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 320-bit access bus. Power consumption reaches 315 W.

In the case of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, there are 96 compute units, 6144 stream processors, 96 MB of Infinity Cache and 24 GB of video memory with a 384-bit access bus. In this case, the base frequency is increased to 2.3 GHz, the increased frequency is increased to 2.5 GHz. Power consumption is 355 W.

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The price of the Radeon RX 7900 XT is $899, while the older Radeon RX 7900 XTX model costs $999.

Gaming performance

Gaming tests show that in most cases, the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT video cards compete equally with the GeForce RTX 4080, sometimes ahead of it. In some games, the older version outperforms not only the RTX 4080, but also the flagship model GeForce RTX 4090 FE.

The advantage of AMD’s new products is especially noticeable at 1440p resolution, but at 4K resolution, NVIDIA devices are more often (but not in every case) the leaders.

The RDNA 3 architecture was supposed to increase ray tracing performance by 50% compared to its predecessor. Indeed, compared to the Radeon RX 6900 XT video card, the new products show a noticeable increase in ray tracing activation performance. But this performance is still noticeably lower when compared to the current RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 FE models. Activating scaling technologies allows you to significantly increase the performance of ray tracing – up to a 2-fold increase.

Energy consumption and heat release

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT graphics cards are standard sizes and do not require the use of the new 12VHPWR power connector. AMD mentioned the improved power efficiency of its new RDNA 3 architecture. According to system power measurements, both 7900 XT models consume more power than the RTX 4080 (although the XT is only marginally better). The 7900 XTX consumes almost as much power as the voracious RTX 3090, although noticeably less than the RTX 4090. However, in many cases, the AMD devices provide higher performance, so the power efficiency has really improved.

GPU temperatures under load are roughly comparable for the RX 7900 XT and RTX 4080 pairs, as well as the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4090 FE. In all cases, the temperature did not exceed 70 degrees. But the cooling system of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT video cards works noticeably louder than the new NVIDIA models. Additionally, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX test sample exhibited coil whistling on several occasions.

Conclusions

In general, the new RDNA 3 architecture made it possible to create video cards with good performance and energy efficiency. The advantages of the new products include higher performance compared to the RTX 4080, and in some cases compared to the RTX 4090 (especially at 1440p resolution). At the same time, the new products turned out to be significantly cheaper than competing NVIDIA products: $200 compared to the RTX 4080 and $600 compared to the RTX 4090. Performance in ray tracing is now at an acceptable level, although it is inferior to the new NVIDIA video cards. And the advantages include the use of two 8-pin power connectors and a cooling system of standard sizes, which facilitates the installation of video cards in the system.

The disadvantages are the lag in ray tracing from the NVIDIA RTX 40 series video cards, the audible (but not too loud) noise of the cooling system and high power consumption. There are also some sporadic errors sometimes.

We also suggest reading reviews of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT from other resources.