Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. This time around I want to see how the Radeon RX 7900 XT compares with the 7900 XTX that we just covered as well as see where it lands compared to the RTX 4080 as well.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The 7900 XT does drop down in performance compared to its bigger brother the 7900 XTX but even with that drop here in Fire Strike, it holds its own running past the overclocked RTX 4080 in all three detail settings. In the Extreme and Ultra detail settings, it is just a few points ahead of the overclocked RTX 4080.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. For Time Spy the Nvidia card's performance improved compared to Fire Strike which was enough for the RTX 4080 to pass the 7900 XT at both detail settings. There is a noticeable gap between them as well but as of right now Nvidia doesn’t have anything sitting in the gap between the 3090 Ti and the 4080 where the 7900 XT is sitting.
For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the 7900 XT comes in between the RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 Ti. In Port Royal, it did a little better sitting above the 3080 Ti but it's clear that while the ray tracing performance has improved, Nvidia still has the advantage here.
The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the 7900 XT outperforms the 3090 Ti but has a gap between it and the RTX 4080. In the 4K test the result was similar but the 7900 XT is sitting closer to the 4080.
