As part of their "together we advance_gaming" event, AMD announced their new RDNA 3 desktop GPUs. After only a handful of rumors and even fewer leaks, AMD announced the first two GPUs in the Radeon RX 7000 series: Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.
Here is a quick rundown of the major specs and pricing for these cards. The current release date for both of these cards is December 13, 2022.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
- Price: $999 (USD)
- VRAM: 24GB 384-bit GDDR6
- 96 Compute Units
- 2.3 GHz Game Clock (Base: 1.9GHz, Boost: 2.5GHz)
- DisplayPort 2.1
- AV1 Encode & Decode
- Total board power: 355W
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
- Price: $899
- VRAM: 20GB 320-bit GDDR6
- 84 Computer Units
- 2GHz Game Clock (Base: 1.5GHz, Boost: 2.4GHz)
- DisplayPort 2.1
- AV1 Encode & Decode
- Total board power: 300W
During the presentation, AMD said that their own benchmarks show a 1.5x to 1.7x performance improvement of the 7900 XTX over their 6950 XT at native 4K resolution. For example, they cite a 1.5x performance increase in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, 1.7x in Cyberpunk 2077, and a 1.5x improvement in games like Metro Exodus and Resident Evil Village with raytracing enabled in both.
AMD also indicates that the 7900 XTX is maybe 10% slower, or even equal to the performance in some cases, of the Nvidia RTX 4090. However, AMD's card uses 95 fewer watts of power and costs a whopping $600 less than Nvidia's top of the line card. It was not made clear if this 10-15% disparity between the cards was based on pure rasterization or if it also included raytracing performance.
Naturally, as these were figures provided by AMD, it would be wise to make any sort of judgment call until after third-parties can do their own benchmarks.
Even if you ignore the above performance comparisons, there is one thing that AMD definitely has going for it over Nvidia with these new cards: The Radeon 7000 series will not require the use the power adapter that Nvidia's RTX 4090 requires. You know, the same adapter that is cracking, melting, and has the very real potential of becoming a fire hazard if you so much as look at the cable the wrong way.
AMD's cards will make use of the familiar 8-pin PCI Express power connectors you've made use of for years now.
AMD also briefly mentioned that they plan to roll out FSR 3 at some point in 2023. Literally any additional details about FSR 3 were not shared.
