AMD has just lifted the veil on a new generation of high-end graphics cards. Two references have been unveiled: the Radeon RX 7900 XT, and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which promises to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4090.
Just a few weeks after the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 launched at Nvidia, it’s now AMD’s turn to counter with its own next-generation graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture. The launch begins at the top of range, with the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX.
The latter promise to be more interesting than Nvidia’s solutions, because AMD has positioned them at much more competitive prices. The Radeon RX 7900 XT starts at $899, while the XTX version costs $999. These prices are therefore significantly lower than those of Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, which starts at $1,599 for the GeForce RTX 4090 and $1,199 for the RTX 4080. As expected, the two new graphics cards do not will not be available before December 13.
The RX 7900 XTX wants to do almost as well as the RTX 4090, but at $600 less
The new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX belong to the AMD’s latest RDNA 3 rangewhich was built on une engraving in 5 nm signed TSMC, and houses a Navi 31 XT GPU array. AMD took an interesting new approach, similar to that used in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and used a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD) as well as a 6nm memory cache die (MCD) in the same GPU , stacking them on top of each other. This allows GPUs to be faster, and GPUs can also rely on 96MB Infinity Cache.
However, that doesn’t exactly allow the RX 7900 XTX to fully compete with the RTX 4090. AMD never brought Nvidia’s card up on stage, and just compared the new benchmark to the current Radeon RX 6950 XT. The 7900 XTX is supposed to be “ up to 1.7 times » faster than the 6950 XT when gaming in 4K. Based on these assertions, AMD’s graphics card won’t match the performance of the RTX 4090, but will come in just below. A difference of only a few FPS should be noticed in game, which could make it much more attractive given its price set below 1000 dollars.
Moreover, in terms of raw computing performance, AMD claims the 7900 XTX is capable of 61 teraflops, while Nvidia claims the RTX 4090 is capable of 83 teraflops and the RTX 4080 49 teraflops.
What technical characteristics for RDNA 3 graphics cards?
For starters, the new Compute Unit (CU) includes a second-generation ray tracing accelerator, which AMD says hasimproves ray tracing performance by up to 50% over the previous generation. The new design also includes two AI accelerators per CPU, which AMD says delivers up to 2.7x better AI performance.
The Radeon 7900 XTX is a massive GPU with 96 compute units, running at a frequency of 2.3 GHz, and backed by 24 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit memory bus. For its part, the Radeon RX 7900 XT is entitled to 84 processing units instead of 96, and 20 GB of GDDR6 on a 320-bit bus. Frequencies are also reduced to 2.0 GHz.
In terms of connectors, the company has also focused on the inclusion of DisplayPort 2.1 ports, an area where AMD now has an edge over Nvidia. As a reminder, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 must make do with obsolete DisplayPort 1.4 ports. The new graphics cards also avoid the RTX 4090’s controversial 12VHPWR connector, which has already faded on some cards. AMD has shown that the 7900 XTX can be connected to a desktop PC using two standard 8-pin connectors.
This is made possible thanks to very well controlled energy consumption. The total card power is only 355W on the 7900 XTX and 300W on the 7900 XT. This is much less than the RTX 4090 and its 450 W. AMD’s new cards will therefore probably allow you to conserve your power supply, but above all reduce the electricity bill.
