AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX review: Team Red has arrived

Note: This review was first published on 13 December 2022.

Time for Team Red to play

Ladies and gentlemen, Team Red, has entered the match.

With the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics cards officially launching today, AMD has joined NVIDIA in a two-way battle for the hearts and minds (and wallets) of PC gamers.

We have already covered the technology behind both card and the RDNA 3 microarchitecture powering it, so be sure to read it here first if you have not.

While both RX 7900 cards are claimed to be powerful enough to provide 4K maxed-out gaming, AMD says it is offering this capability at a much lower price. Broadly speaking, AMD is not touting its latest RDNA 3-based cards as the fastest or most powerful options that compete with NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce RTX 4090. The company literally wants you to know that it may not have the most expensive and most powerful graphics card for you, but it might have a powerful graphics card that won’t cost an arm and leg and still gives you the kind of performance befitting a next-gen GPU.

You see, while Team Green’s top-of-the-line RTX 4090 is priced north of US$1,599, AMD feels that the bulk of the serious gamers are really going to shell their money for top-tier cards within the US$1,000 budget threshold. That’s why they have priced the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT at US$999 and US$899, respectively. Incredulously, this also means that unlike NVIDIA, which has raised the prices of its cards over the last three generations, AMD has kept the pricing of its 7900 series in line with the 6900 counterparts.

The key question is, at US$999, does the Radeon RX 7900 XTX offer better performance and value over the more expensive US$1,199 RTX 4080? In this review, we intend to find out exactly that.

Meanwhile, let’s have a look at the card’s specifications.

But first, let’s talk about the Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference card.

An evolved reference design

Unlike NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series Founders Edition, which looks very overly engineered with its supersized build to house an equally supersized cooling system, AMD has a more traditional approach to its reference-design graphics cards. To be clear, NVIDIA’s founders edition cards are not reference-design cards but rather a first-party custom design that the company sells to gamers under the NVIDIA brand.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference design is an evolution of the Radeon RX 6900 series. The two-tone silver and black on the older 6900 makes way for a mostly-black scheme with some gunmetal accents. The cooler shroud and backplate are made entirely of a die-cast aluminium alloy and have a solid premium feel. While the looks and aesthetics may be subjective, the build quality of these cards is right in the league of NVIDIA's Founders Edition cards, in my opinion.

Unlike NVIDIA’s commitment to a single-cable 16-pin 12VHPWR connector, AMD has stuck with the standard dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors (see above image) on the card. No adapters are required. But like NVIDIA, AMD has also stuck with a PCIe 4.0 interface on its RDNA 3 cards as AMD engineers acknowledged that the interface has plenty of bandwidth and isn't necessary to move on to PCIe 5.0.

That said, it's not all “old” tech that AMD has stuck with. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX gets two full-size DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, beside an HDMI 2.1b, and a USB-C with DP 2.1 passthrough. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are still on the older DisplayPort 1.4a standard, which, while it's not outdated and is still sufficient to pair with displays that are on the market now, AMD's updated display connectivity options are designed to pair with the industry's latest and speedier screens that will come out in 2023.

Now that you have had a good overview of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, let’s check out the card’s performance on the next page.

Performance benchmarks

Our graphics card test rig comes with the following specifications:

• Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K CPU
• ROG Maximus Z690 Hero
• Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
• Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5
• Windows 11 Home 64-bit
• ASUS ROG Swift PG43UQ 4K Gaming Monitor

The GeForce RTX 4080 is obviously the main card that the 7900 XTX is going up against, but I have also included last-gen flagships – the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6900 XT – from NVIDIA and AMD to compare the gen-to-gen performance improvement in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX too. The RTX 4090 also has to be in the mix, since it is right now, as we know it, the card at the top of the food chain.

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 FE
• Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme RTX 3090 Ti
• AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

The following synthetic benchmark and games were run, with the games chosen from a wide range of genres to give a better indication of performance across different segments:

• 3DMark
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Metro: Exodus
• Horizon Zero Dawn
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Total War: Three Kingdoms

1080p benchmarks (Max settings)

The results here are not surprising, with all cards performing well at 1080p resolution – which is par for the course. These are not "value cards" by any means, and paying US$999 for any of the above cards to only play games at 1080p seems like an awful waste of power. But we do see the 7900 XTX matching the RTX 4080 pretty close in all of the games above.

1440p benchmarks (Max setting)

The results start to get interesting at 1440p. Not only is the 7900 XTX outperforming the RTX 3090 Ti, which costs twice as much, but again it is matching the card that it was built to compete directly with: The RTX 4080. And at US$200 less.

4K gaming (Max settings)

4K is still the pinnacle of gaming by modern standards, and the 7900 XTX still matches closely with the RTX 4080 in rasterisation performance. It is only when ray tracing is switched on that we see the 7900 XTX losing ground to the RTX 4080 even though it has almost twice the performance improvements over the last-gen 6900 XT.

Just based on 4K gaming with ray tracing performance alone, we can see how powerful the RTX 4090 really is and the performance gap between flagship GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD. From an optics point of view, it really shows how far ahead NVIDIA is when it comes to high-performance gaming.

Temperature and Power

I tested the power draw by looping Time Spy Extreme Test in 3DMark 20 times and recorded the peak temperature and board power draw of each card. The results are, well, a little surprising.

AMD has been touting the efficiency gains in RDNA 3 and putting down NVIDIA's RTX 40 series cards as power guzzlers. Well, they are. But AMD's 7900 XTX is actually drawing more power than the RTX 4080 and also running hotter. Even the RTX 4090 seems to be better at performance efficiency when you consider how much faster the card runs games.

Conclusion

Comparing gen-to-gen, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX offers a significant boost over its RDNA 2 predecessor for the same price (at launch), and that's a remarkable pricing strategy from AMD. The increase in memory capacity from 16GB to 24GB with the RX 7900 XTX is also a bonus, and the ray tracing performance on RDNA 3 is a lot more convincing for Team Red now.

Yet the golden question remains: Should you choose the 7900 XTX or an RTX 4080? The answer really depends on, of course, your budget, and if ray tracing and all the other superior wizardry that comes with an RTX 40 series card (e.g., DLSS 3.0) matters to you. In gaming performance across 1080p to 4K resolutions, both cards are pretty much on par even if the RTX 4080 edges it just by slightly. But if you want ray tracing, then the RTX 4080 is a no-brainer choice. NVIDIA's DLSS 3.0 is also currently the superior and better-supported upscaling technology than AMD's FSR, which is still maturing.

As an RTX 4080 competitor, the 7900 XTX isn't a compelling choice. But as a US$999 card, it has a value proposition to gamers who simply want the "most affordable" graphics card for high-end 4K gaming sans ray tracing - possibly plugging a hole in the market segment that NVIDIA and its higher-priced (but higher performing) cards didn't fill up. It's hard to see how NVIDIA will offer a US$999 option below the RTX 4080 now. I suspect the next tier (the much-rumoured RTX 4070 Ti, perhaps?) below the RTX 4080 simply has to be cheaper.

As it is, AMD has pretty much shown its hands this generation with RDNA 3's performance here. NVIDIA now has a free rule of the ultra high-end PC gaming segment, but the silver lining for AMD is that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and, by extension, its future lower-tier siblings, offer gamers a genuinely great alternative GPU for the first time in a long while. And that is a big win for us gamers.

Meanwhile, stay tuned to how local pricing and stocks help shape the graphics card market; it's certainly going to be a roller coaster ride for all of us.

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