The war for the next generation of graphics supremacy is finally on. AMD’s new RDNA 3–powered $999 Radeon RX 7900 XTX and $899 Radeon 7900 XT finally hit the streets on Tuesday, December 13, primed for battle with Nvidia’s monstrous GeForce RTX 4090. To cut right to the chase: In many ways, this launch is very reminiscent of the battle between the last generation of the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RTX 3090.
Despite costing hundreds less, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX comes within spitting distance of the $1,600 RTX 4090 in many games, meeting or even beating it in some titles—just like last generation. Ray tracing is also no longer a weakness, with the 7900 XTX on par with the 3090’s formerly best-in-class performance but trailing behind Nvidia’s latest ferocious capabilities—just like last generation. New capabilities unlock specialized experiences when you pair AMD’s latest Radeon GPUs with its latest Ryzen processors—just like last generation.
But this time around, there’s a big difference. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX isn’t in competition with the RX 4090, despite its ability to go toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s juggernaut. The ludicrously priced $1,200 GeForce RTX 4080 (see page 31) is. Nvidia slapped the card with a mammoth $500 price increase gen over gen, while AMD stuck to the same $999 for its flagship card. And both members of the 7900 duo meet or beat the RTX 4080’s performance at those cheaper MSRPs.
Let’s dig into the details.
SPECS, PRICE, AND FEATURES
AMD radically reconfigured its underlying GPU architecture with RDNA 3. The most striking change? This is the first Ryzen-like chiplet-based GPU ever created.
Previously, GPUs were built using huge “monolithic” dies that crammed all necessary bits inside. But with RDNA 3 the main 5nm core graphics die is flanked by up to six complementary memory dies. Built using the more mature and cost-efficient 6nm process, these house the GPU’s on-chip Infinity Cache and memory controllers. The design helps AMD keep costs down on both nodes, and no doubt helps the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT achieve their more palatable prices. The central RDNA 3 GPU die measures just 300mm squared, while Nvidia’s RTX 4090 die is over twice as large. All of the 4090 die is made using TSMC’s expensive cutting-edge node, too.
AMD also overhauled RDNA 3’s ray-tracing capabilities to offer up to 50 percent more performance in those cutting-edge lighting effects; added a pair of AI accelerators in each compute unit (which will likely come into play when FSR 3.0 lands in 2023);
