Overall and Final Verdict
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX launch is an exciting one, not just because of the pricing that AMD announced the card with. But also because with the new RDNA 3 architecture we see big improvements in ray tracing performance, the inclusion of AI processing cores, two AV1 encoders, and DisplayPort 2.1 support. The result of all of that is impressive performance when it comes to raster performance, the 7900 XTX even at its stock speeds was consistently faster than the RTX 4080 in game. It does fall behind in tests that include ray tracing even with the performance improvements there and while FidelityFX Super Resolution is great Nvidia does have some significant advantages there on their 4000 series cards with DLSS 3 having frame generation, I can’t wait for AMD to bring that to FidelityFX as well. The 7900 XTX also struggled in our Blender benchmark but it didn’t do too badly in the other compute test.
AMD's triple fan reference card design impressed me. I missed out on seeing their design of the 6000 series cards and as someone who is a big fan of the Founders Edition designs due to their higher quality and less “gammery” designs, AMD hit the nail on the head perfectly with their design of the 7900 XTX which looks amazing in its blacked-out styling and has impressive build quality. Not only that but I feel like they kept people in mind by not just going with a huge cooler design, while this isn’t small it is far from the size of a 4080 or 4090 Founders Edition or any of the aftermarket cards out. They did the same by sticking with the PCIe power connections, not moving to the new 12VHPWR cable. I do like the more compact plug, but with some people having issues with them melting it is nice to not have to have that concern in the back of your head.
AMD's cooler design ran surprisingly quiet in our noise tests, especially for a three-fan design. They managed this by having lower than average max fan speeds. Of course when it came to thermals the smaller size of the cooler and the limited fan speeds did put the card higher up in the charts, but still not terrible for cooling performance. The 109c GPU hotspot results on the other hand were higher than I would want to see. Beyond that in our power testing, the 7900 XTX averaged 100 watts higher than the RTX 4080 showing that AMD did have to crank things up to edge out the 4080 in performance, putting its power usage up close to the RTX 4090 FE.
Of course, it all comes down to pricing which is exactly what people have been saying about Nvidia's RTX 4080 and AMD came out swinging here with the 7900 XTX prices starting at $999 which is $200 less than where the RTX 4080 starts. It isn’t at all what I would consider to be cheap, but when compared to its direct competition it is priced right. You give up some ray tracing performance and DLSS 3 and save $200 and also get a more compact card and sidestep the 12VHPWR issues altogether. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.
Live Pricing: HERE
