AMD unveils Radeon RX 7900XTX & 7900XT

As announced for a long time, AMD presented the graphics cards of the new “RDNA 3” generation in the live stream yesterday evening. The Radeon RX 7900XTX (24GB storage) and RX 7900XT (20GB storage) will go on sale December 13, priced at $999 and $899, respectively.

The announcement was long awaited with great excitement, especially since competitor Nvidia had presented powerful but expensive products.

Slower than the Nvidia RTX4090?

To the disappointment of many, however, there was little information on the performance of the new graphics cards. The live stream only compared the card with the record-breaking number of Xs to its predecessor, the RX 6950XT. According to AMD, you can expect a 50 to 70 percent increase in performance in games. With ray tracing, the gain is closer to the lower end of that range.

The RX 7900XTX will probably compete with the Nvidia RTX4080 16GB – the RTX4090 should be unattainable. When it comes to ray tracing in particular, AMD is most likely generally behind, because the previous generation already weakened on this point. A 50 percent improvement is by far not enough to pose a threat to Nvidia.

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Technology catches up

AMD plans to catch up with the competition in all other aspects – or even overtake them: the intelligent image upscaler FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) will soon receive the improvements of version 2.2. FSR 3.0 was also announced for 2023.

Similar to Nvidia’s DLSS 3 (Deep Learning Super Sampling), FSR 3 seems to rely on interframe calculations. According to Nvidia, DLSS 3 only works on the new cards of the 4000 generation, AMD’s FSR has so far run on all cards from every manufacturer. It remains to be seen whether this will also apply to FSR 3.

Appropriately, there was also the announcement of the somewhat exaggeratedly named “HYPR-RX” in the AMD live stream. Like Nvidia’s “Reflex”, it’s supposed to reduce latency, which otherwise becomes a problem, especially with interframe calculations.

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Interesting externals

Unlike Nvidia, the AMD cards have hardly “grown” compared to the previous generation: They need a maximum of 355 or 350 watts and are supplied with power via conventional 8-pin connectors. AMD thus circumvents many of the currently hotly debated points of criticism from the competition.

AMD proudly presented the unique selling points of the “RDNA 3” generation: In addition to an HDMI and a USB-C output, the cards also offer two DisplayPort 2.1 connections – two more than all current Nvidia cards. But you don’t really need this new standard yet. The first monitors that use it will come at the beginning of 2023 at the earliest.

Also new and so far unique is the structure of the GPU of the new AMD graphics cards: They consist of several “chiplets”. While this could cause problems with the drivers, it keeps costs down. AMD has had great success with this design philosophy in the past with its own Ryzen CPUs – and it should explain the comparatively low prices (under $1,000). That’s very competitive even against the Nvidia RTX 3080 16GB.

There is no information on euro prices so far. You must at least reckon with a surcharge for VAT. But there is probably more to come. We’ll know by December 13th when the cards come out.

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