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 because this is our second RX 7900 XT I’m excited to see how the XFX MERC 310 7900 XT compares with the stock-clocked 7900 XT from AMD given the significant overclock that it has.
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 MERC 310 7900 XT shows a noticeable improvement in all three tests over the stock clocked card. With the base Fire Strike benchmark, the MERC 310 7900 XT improved on the stock card by 2% and the same on the Fire Strike Extreme test. The Ultra test saw a little more at a 2.5% improvement.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. The MERC 310 7900 XT is sitting right above the stock 7900 XT with a 1.6% improvement in the base Time Spy test. In Time Spy Extreme the gap was higher at 2.4% with the MERC 310 7900 XT scoring 1872 over the stock 7900 XT at 12566.
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 MERC 310 7900 XT had a smaller improvement at just .7% and 1.6% on Port Royal. Overall this still kept it behind the 3090 Ti in Port Royal and behind the 3080 Ti in Speed Way. Overall AMD improved on the ray tracing performance but Nvidia is still out ahead.
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 MERC 310 7900 XT is sitting just ahead of the stock 7900 XT in both the 1080p extreme test and at 4k. This keeps the 4080 out in front.
