Radeon RX 7900 Series Benchmarks Show AMD Bringing The Fight To NVIDIA

In a battle that seems as old as time, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has launched new gaming GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) based on its latest RDNA 3 microarchitecture, to do battle with chief rival NVIDIA and its latest GeForce RTX 40 series cards that launched back 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 price points that deliver a solid value proposition. But before we dig into the particulars on performance and retail pricing, let’s have a high-level look at what makes AMD’s Navi 31 GPU, that powers these new gaming beasts, tick.

For decades now, die shrinks on smaller and smaller semiconductor fab process geometries have delivered gains via faster clock speeds, and the ability to pack more transistors into a chip with better power efficiency characteristics. However, these benefits have started to wane with continually shrinking chip process lithography. As such, chip manufacturers have turned to new “chiplet” based design architectures that allow them to manufacturer multiple more efficient smaller chip dies, and then assemble them in a single multi-chip package for greater efficiency, performance and cost. It used to be that MCM (multi-chip 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 new AMD’s Navi 31 is the first chiplet-base consumer GPU on the market.

Enter AMD Navi 31 And The First Chiplet-Based Consumer GPU

Without wading too far into the weeds, AMD’s RDNA 3-based (Radeon DNA 3) Navi 31 GPU that powers the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT, is comprised of two separate die types, a 300mm² GCD or Graphics Compute Die and a 6 x 37mm² (about 222mm² in total) MCD or Memory Cache Dies. The former is manufactured on a 5nm (nanometer) chip process and the latter on 6nm. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX employs 6 MCDs with a 384-bit memory interface (64-bit per die), along with 24GB of GDDR6 memory and 96MB of on-board AMD Infinity Cache, offering 3500GB/s of effective memory bandwidth. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT only utilizes 5 MCDs to create a 320-bit memory interface to 20GB of GDDR6 memory and 80MB of on-board Infinity Cache, for a total of up to 2900 GB/s of effective memory bandwidth. The more powerful Radeon RX 7900 XTX also has 96 Radeon Compute Units (CUs) and 96 Ray Accelerators, versus the Radeon RX 7900 XT’s 84 CU and 84 Ray Accelerator complement. All in, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a 355 Watt board power while a 7900 XT is a 315 Watt design, versus the previous gen 335 Watt Radeon RX 6950 XT, that employs just 80 CUs, 80 ray accelerators and 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

So, as we can see, AMD was able to pack more resources into a similar or lower power envelope, though the Radeon RX 7900 series also has a myriad of other architecture advancements that bring refinement and additional performance headroom beyond just what these physics advancements have delivered. The good news for PC gamers is that the performance-per-dollar metrics have scaled nicely as well.

Radeon RX 7900 XTX And RX 7900 Scrap With GeForce RTX 4080 At Better Price Points

What’s perhaps most compelling about AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 series, is that all of these additional resources and claimed performance gains come at essentially the same price points as the company’s previous gen Radeon RX 6900 series. AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT 20GB reference design card will retail for $899, while the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with its higher boost clocks, 24GB GDDR6 memory and fully-enabled Navi 31 GPU will retail for $999. And though AMD targeted GeForce RTX 4080 16GB class performance with these cards, they’re priced at $300 and $200 less, respectively. So with that in mind, let’s look quickly at how the benchmark numbers shake out, from Marco Chiappetta’s Radeon RX 7900 series review at HotHardware.

These game benchmarks do a nice job of quickly summarizing AMD Radeon RX 7900 series performance as it has played out so far. Though AMD likely is still wringing additional FPS out of its drivers, generally speaking, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT slot in just above and just below GeForce RTX 4080 performance, depending on game title and graphics settings. The above graphs show all high resolution 4K max quality game settings, and we see the two Radeons sandwich 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 trail an RTX 4080 somewhat, as NVIDIA’s 3rd gen RT engines are more powerful on the whole. However, if we look at the case of FarCry 6, which also has ray tracing enabled here, performance scales back in AMD’s favor for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus the GeForce RTX 4080.

The Wrap-Up – AMD’s Latest Volley Puts The Heat On NVIDIA

All told, though AMD can’t claim the top performance crown here with the new Radeon RX 7900 series — that distinction is firmly set by NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 — the company has delivered a compelling value proposition with generally better performance-per-dollar metrics, as long as retail pricing drops in at MSRP for reference cards, with similar price points for custom cards from OEM partners like XFX, MSI, ASUS and others. In addition, since Radeon RX 7900 series cards are roughly the same size as previous gen Radeons, they’re easier drop-in upgrades for gamers, versus NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 and 4090, which will require more chassis room and may not fit inside some mid-tower and smaller PC cases.

What did surprise me a little bit, was that power consumption for the new Radeon RX 7900 series is generally a little higher than NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series under load. Although, I’m not sure that will matter much to most desktop PC gamers, especially with standard dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors on the new Radeons, versus NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series 12-pin dongles that require 3 – 4 PCIe power leads patched in.

It will be interesting to watch how these two PC graphics powerhouse duke it out in the weeks and months ahead, but in the meantime it appears AMD has a very compelling offering in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, and at very competitive price points to boot that undercut NVIDIA.

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