A Nightmare for NVIDIA - RX 7900 XTX & RX 7900XT Specs, Benchmarks & Prices

AMD's Radeon Team Sets a High Water Mark with Their New Cards, But Can They Compete with Nvidia?

The Radeon team has set a high water mark for themselves with their new cards, and it still is but they actually didn't talk all that much about game performance and a lot of the titles that were shown had FSR enabled that neatly gets around competitive analysis doesn't it so no RTX 3000 Series and certainly no 4000 series were compared here. But since we've benchmarked some of the games that AMD is showing at the same resolutions and the same settings, and we technically know the uplift between the 7900 XTX and the 6950 XT, I guess we can do some creative math and see if we can figure out where these cars are going to land when they actually launch.

I want to mention right away that these are lose calculations and aren't meant to represent actual performance in any way shape or form. I was just having a bit of fun with the numbers, but decided to add them to this video. Nvidia might be in a spot of trouble here, at least in raster performance, since the 6950 XT was already super competitive relative to its price and now AMD's boosting its performance by a pretty big amount, so the XTX could conceivably match or beat the 40,000-series card depending on the game while costing less.

I mean as we go through these numbers it's not hard to see why Nvidia decided to Nuke the 12-gigabyte 4080 but there's one point that keeps on getting brought up over and over again and that's nvidia's feature set outside of regular game performance. But the red team they've been making some pretty significant improvements on that front too because for DLSS, there's FSR in the new FSR3 for Shadowplay, they've got Radeon Reliving not only that you don't have to sign in to a service in order to access that then there's Nvidia Broadcast. Well, there's a bunch of OBS add-ins that are AMD specific that really bring it up to the level of Nvidia Broadcast as well but there's one area that Nvidia does have a significant advantage in still that's GPU compute so many Key Programs support Cuda these days that making any inroads for AMD has been tough they still don't support a lot of apps and the ones they claim to support like Pro render for Maya are a year behind despite the community asking for them.

Luckily though we're seeing some amazing advancements from them in programs like Resolve and Premiere there's also a positive side here, like Nvidia these cards are gonna have dual media engines for encode and decode that operate at a much higher frequency too plus their support for av1. What you didn't hear talked about all that much was guess what Ray tracing and look AMD is going to be making some advances in that area which is definitely good news but overall it just feels like AMD is looking at the slow uptake of RT Technologies and games and the performance impact that they actually impart in those games and just basically shrugging their shoulders.

Based on the performance we saw with the RX6000 series well, they're basically starting at almost nothing and going to something I guess because let's be honest 50 here is a step in the right direction but there's just no way this will be enough to compete with Nvidia and yet does that really matter to you guys? I'd love to know to Ray trace or not the ray Trace let me know in the comments below.

So, pretty much wraps things up for my coverage of this thing and I guess I have to say that what AMD did is exactly what people were asking them to other than competing with the RTX 4090 competing with that Halo card from Nvidia that is not happening at least not yet. What they have done is increased performance they didn't go nuclear with their power consumption they added features and they kept the price under a thousand bucks.

And I mean in this kind of environment, I guess that's the best we can ask for but I do have a little asterisk, side note to all of this the one thing that I was really hoping for personally was those cards under the 7900 series maybe just announce them let us know that they're coming because right now there's a big blank in both AMD's and Nvidia's lineup that yes it is taken care of by the older series of cards but I just want to see what is on the horizon for people who don't have this kind of money to spend.

But anyways, maybe that is going to be a 2023 conversation actually, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a 2023 and maybe CES conversation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell hello everybody Mike here with hard Canucks and amd's presentation for the rdna3 architecture just wrapped up and what is the major takeaway from it though do a pins no I I'm I'm just kidding but those dual eight pins serve as a microcosm I think to represent everything that AMD is doing with the rdna3 architecture and that's because they're basically sticking to what works they're not trying any fancy new technologies like I don't know hbm that are going to add to cost and kill availability what they're doing is laser focusing on things that they know work and that can put the screws to Nvidia especially when it comes to price because after what we saw this could be nvidia's worst nightmare when the 7900 XTX and XT launch on December the 13th so starting with rdne3 the underlying architecture here these cards are built using a new chiplet style approach on a five nanometer manufacturing process for the main Graphics compute die or gcd there are also memory cache dies or mcds here using a six nanometer process oh and it's still on pcie Gen 4 due to costs amd's goal here was to push performance per watt as far as humanly possible so some of the biggest changes are a completely revised compute unit and Graphics pipeline that have been optimized to save dye space and lower cost while also increasing overall performance there's some pretty significant Infinity cash and memory controller updates too going on behind the scenes that push theoretical bandwidth way way higher than the 6000 series I've always wanted to be inside one of these seven inches of pure Dimitri pixels you can kind of see into my soul oh what's this behind me just a 576 mini LED zone for gorgeous exposure and HDR performance with the 1200 nit Peak brightness feel the immersion in reality with the new 4k 160 Hertz mini LED monitor The Cooler Master gp27u bringing everything to life but what I'm sure you're all here for is of course the specifications and think about it this way cheaper faster better and less expensive to produce than the previous generation what we're looking at here is pretty incredible in my opinion amd's been able to increase the amount of cores on their gpus versus the previous generation while still also boosting overall frequencies versus the original 6900 XT just take note that while Shader or core count looks like it only got a minor boost each of those units can now issue two commands at the same time so there might be some confusion when it comes to reporting how many shaders these cards actually have some might say the higher one gets 61.44 While others will maybe say 12 288. neither is right neither is wrong right now unless AMD says something different one thing that does need to be pointed out is infinity cash which has been cut down from the original 128 megabytes on the RX 6900 series to 96 and 80 megabytes here supposedly though the updates to this cache allow to perform just as good if not better than the larger amount on previous generation cards memory on the other hand that gets a pretty big overhaul too instead of 256 bit we're looking at a 384-bit bus and 24 gigabytes of gddr6 memory on the xdx while the XT gets a 320 20 gigabyte layout I'm guessing this was done to partially offset the smaller amount of infinity cash the most interesting thing here though is amd's claimed power consumption is just 355 Watts on the XTX and 300 watts on the 7900 XT and look I'm saying just here because when compared to what Nvidia is pushing out it's a lot more efficient and that means less heat smaller coolers and a hell of a lot less stress for gamers plus and then this this is the good thing is the fact that you are not going to need any of these ridiculous dongles that Nvidia has right now in order for your power supply to properly support your new GPU these things cause a nightmare for cable routing and not only that they are also sort of melting gpus but the biggest thing about this whole presentation is that Nvidia has been put on notice that maybe just maybe they've reached a little bit too far with their pricing for their current generation of gpus so what we're looking at is 999 MSRP for the XTX and 8.99 for the XD there it is that's what you need to know amd's focus on cutting manufacturing costs mean that they can undercut the RTX 4080 16 gigabyte in the high end by a lot too plus this makes it even more interesting when you consider the rx6900 series originally launched for more than this too actually this is a big deal since it bodes well for the rest of the rx7000 series lineup whenever that launches and that's good news considering Nvidia seems to want to bump their cards a bit higher every year but it also means the XTX is going to be competing price wise under the RTX 4080 16 gigabyte rather than against the 4090 meanwhile the XT would technically be competing against well I guess the 30 90 year 3090 TI these days the most important thing that AMD told us when we asked is simply the fact here that they are not competing with the 4090. why and that's simply because they can't they don't have the necessary tools to do that at this point in time that's not to say it isn't going to happen sometime in the future but from a pricing standpoint and from a performance standpoint they're basically going to leave the 4090 alone for the time being and while the XTX technically can either match or beat the 4090 in very very select apps especially in AMD sponsored titles right now that card just was not in their crosshairs whatsoever so right now now the 7900 series is being launched into an area that's pretty much open other than a couple of previous gen cards that have received some massive price Cuts lately and speaking of those GPU prices are falling like stones lately because of excess inventory so if you're lucky you can find an RTX 3090 TI for a cool yes it's still Ultra expensive especially now twelve hundred dollars and the RX 6950 XT for significantly less than it was launched for I'd expect those to fall even more as Black Friday approaches but I also need to go on a small rant here what I don't really like seeing is AMD following nvidia's bad habits by only launching their ultra high end and frankly unaffordable gpus first with the rx6000 series we saw two under 700 cards launch right out of the gate while the flagship 6900 XT launched a few weeks later but now we have new gpus from both companies and not a single one that costs less than 900 bucks sure I understand the under underlying market and inventory conditions that have led to why this is happening but I don't have to like it hell no let's talk about design too because basically these cards look a lot like the older generation 6000 series is just basically an evolution of this design and personally I think this is one of the best looking reference designs that has ever been created except except I've got a special place in my heart for this thing oh man I wish cards would still look like this minus the blower style fan of course so that evolutionary approach makes it look still great in my opinion I prefer this personally to the founders Edition design but look you can tell me I'm crazy in the comments below anyways what we're talking about here is a pretty basic simple triple fan design that's about 2.5 slots high and yes even a pair of regular bog standard eight pin power connectors hey if it just works why fix it right I'm just really hoping that board Partners see the light and release smaller cards than they did with the Ridiculousness that was the the RTX 4090 because all things considered the reference cards here have grown only a bit when compared to the 6900 series another good bit of news is that unlike nvidia's RTX 4000 series AMD is going with DisplayPort 2.1 for all their cards which is so important for Next Generation monitors I mean you want to basically pair up a high-end GPU with a Next Generation monitor right it supports up to 8K 165 or get this 480 Hertz at 4K resolution and 900 Hertz at 1440p oh and there's also an HDMI 2.1 Port another thing you might have missed is a USBC connector something that ever has been asking for back on Nvidia cards forever now and guess what here it is and of course the performance that AMD is claiming here too is well impressive it's a new generation of gpus but look they set themselves a goal like they always do a 50 performance per watt increase and they actually surpass that by a little bit too at least in amd's hand-picked benchmarks these things are Leaps and Bounds better than the 6900 tiers which was already a high water mark for the Radeon team and it still is but they actually didn't talk all that much about game performance and a lot of the titles that were shown had FSR enabled that neatly gets around competitive analysis doesn't it so no RTX 3000 Series and certainly no 4000 series were compared here but since we've benchmarked some of the games that AMD is showing at the same resolutions and the same settings and we technically know the uplift between the 7900 XTX and the 6950 XT I guess we can do some creative math and see if we can figure out where these cars are going to land when they actually launch and look I just want to mention right away these are lose calculations and aren't meant to represent actual performance in any way shape or form I was just having a bit of fun with the numbers and I decided to add them to this video it's a lot harder to predict the XT though so it's not being added anyways Nvidia might be in a spot of trouble here are at least in raster performance since the 6950 XT was already super competitive relative to its price and now amd's boosting its performance by a pretty big amount so the XTX could conceivably match or beat the 40 80 16 gigabyte depending on the game while costing less that's the situation at least for people who just won a game without any Ray tracing I mean as we go through these numbers it's not hard to see why Nvidia decided to Nuke the 12 gigabyte 4080 but there's one point that keeps on getting brought up over and over again and that's nvidia's feature set outside of regular game performance but the red team they've been making some pretty significant improvements on that front too because for dlss there's FSR in the new fsr3 for shadowplay they've got Radeon reliving not only that you don't have to sign in to a service in order to access that then there's Nvidia broadcast well there's a bunch of OBS add-ins that are AMD specific that really bring it up to the level of Nvidia broadcast as well but there's one area that Nvidia does have a significant significant advantage in still that's GPU compute so many Key Programs support Cuda these days that making any inroads for AMD has been tough they still don't support a lot of apps and the ones they claim to support like Pro render for Maya are a year behind despite the community asking for them luckily though we're seeing some amazing advancements from them in programs like resolve and Premiere there's also a positive side here like Nvidia these cards are gonna have dual media engines for encode and decode that operate at a much higher frequency too plus their support for av1 what you didn't hear talked about all that much was guess what Ray tracing and look AMD is going to be making some advances in that area which is definitely good news but overall it just feels like AMD is looking at the slow uptake of RT Technologies and games and the performance impact that they actually impart in those games and just basically shrugging their shoulders based on the performance we saw with the rx6000 series well they're basically starting at almost nothing and going to something I guess because let's be honest 50 here is a step in the right direction but there's just no way this will be enough to compete with Nvidia and yet does that really matter to you guys I'd love to know to Ray trace or not the ray Trace let me know in the comments below so I guess that pretty much wraps things up for my coverage of this thing and I guess I have to say that what AMD did is exactly what people were asking them to other than competing with the RTX 4090 competing with that Halo card from Nvidia that is not happening at least not yet what they have done is increased performance they didn't go nuclear with their power consumption they added features and they kept the price under a thousand bucks and I mean in this kind of environment I guess that's the best we can ask for but I do have a little asterisk a side note to all of this the one thing that I was really hoping for personally was those cards under under the 7900 series maybe just announce them let us know that they're coming because right now there's a big blank in both amds and nvidia's lineup that yes it is taken care of by the older series of cards but I just want to see what is on the horizon for people who don't have this kind of money to spend but anyways maybe that is going to be a 2023 conversation actually I'm pretty sure it's going to be a 2023 and maybe CES conversation but anyways I really hope that you enjoyed this quick content I'm Mike with Hardware Canucks and I'm going to see you in the next one have a good day guyswell hello everybody Mike here with hard Canucks and amd's presentation for the rdna3 architecture just wrapped up and what is the major takeaway from it though do a pins no I I'm I'm just kidding but those dual eight pins serve as a microcosm I think to represent everything that AMD is doing with the rdna3 architecture and that's because they're basically sticking to what works they're not trying any fancy new technologies like I don't know hbm that are going to add to cost and kill availability what they're doing is laser focusing on things that they know work and that can put the screws to Nvidia especially when it comes to price because after what we saw this could be nvidia's worst nightmare when the 7900 XTX and XT launch on December the 13th so starting with rdne3 the underlying architecture here these cards are built using a new chiplet style approach on a five nanometer manufacturing process for the main Graphics compute die or gcd there are also memory cache dies or mcds here using a six nanometer process oh and it's still on pcie Gen 4 due to costs amd's goal here was to push performance per watt as far as humanly possible so some of the biggest changes are a completely revised compute unit and Graphics pipeline that have been optimized to save dye space and lower cost while also increasing overall performance there's some pretty significant Infinity cash and memory controller updates too going on behind the scenes that push theoretical bandwidth way way higher than the 6000 series I've always wanted to be inside one of these seven inches of pure Dimitri pixels you can kind of see into my soul oh what's this behind me just a 576 mini LED zone for gorgeous exposure and HDR performance with the 1200 nit Peak brightness feel the immersion in reality with the new 4k 160 Hertz mini LED monitor The Cooler Master gp27u bringing everything to life but what I'm sure you're all here for is of course the specifications and think about it this way cheaper faster better and less expensive to produce than the previous generation what we're looking at here is pretty incredible in my opinion amd's been able to increase the amount of cores on their gpus versus the previous generation while still also boosting overall frequencies versus the original 6900 XT just take note that while Shader or core count looks like it only got a minor boost each of those units can now issue two commands at the same time so there might be some confusion when it comes to reporting how many shaders these cards actually have some might say the higher one gets 61.44 While others will maybe say 12 288. neither is right neither is wrong right now unless AMD says something different one thing that does need to be pointed out is infinity cash which has been cut down from the original 128 megabytes on the RX 6900 series to 96 and 80 megabytes here supposedly though the updates to this cache allow to perform just as good if not better than the larger amount on previous generation cards memory on the other hand that gets a pretty big overhaul too instead of 256 bit we're looking at a 384-bit bus and 24 gigabytes of gddr6 memory on the xdx while the XT gets a 320 20 gigabyte layout I'm guessing this was done to partially offset the smaller amount of infinity cash the most interesting thing here though is amd's claimed power consumption is just 355 Watts on the XTX and 300 watts on the 7900 XT and look I'm saying just here because when compared to what Nvidia is pushing out it's a lot more efficient and that means less heat smaller coolers and a hell of a lot less stress for gamers plus and then this this is the good thing is the fact that you are not going to need any of these ridiculous dongles that Nvidia has right now in order for your power supply to properly support your new GPU these things cause a nightmare for cable routing and not only that they are also sort of melting gpus but the biggest thing about this whole presentation is that Nvidia has been put on notice that maybe just maybe they've reached a little bit too far with their pricing for their current generation of gpus so what we're looking at is 999 MSRP for the XTX and 8.99 for the XD there it is that's what you need to know amd's focus on cutting manufacturing costs mean that they can undercut the RTX 4080 16 gigabyte in the high end by a lot too plus this makes it even more interesting when you consider the rx6900 series originally launched for more than this too actually this is a big deal since it bodes well for the rest of the rx7000 series lineup whenever that launches and that's good news considering Nvidia seems to want to bump their cards a bit higher every year but it also means the XTX is going to be competing price wise under the RTX 4080 16 gigabyte rather than against the 4090 meanwhile the XT would technically be competing against well I guess the 30 90 year 3090 TI these days the most important thing that AMD told us when we asked is simply the fact here that they are not competing with the 4090. why and that's simply because they can't they don't have the necessary tools to do that at this point in time that's not to say it isn't going to happen sometime in the future but from a pricing standpoint and from a performance standpoint they're basically going to leave the 4090 alone for the time being and while the XTX technically can either match or beat the 4090 in very very select apps especially in AMD sponsored titles right now that card just was not in their crosshairs whatsoever so right now now the 7900 series is being launched into an area that's pretty much open other than a couple of previous gen cards that have received some massive price Cuts lately and speaking of those GPU prices are falling like stones lately because of excess inventory so if you're lucky you can find an RTX 3090 TI for a cool yes it's still Ultra expensive especially now twelve hundred dollars and the RX 6950 XT for significantly less than it was launched for I'd expect those to fall even more as Black Friday approaches but I also need to go on a small rant here what I don't really like seeing is AMD following nvidia's bad habits by only launching their ultra high end and frankly unaffordable gpus first with the rx6000 series we saw two under 700 cards launch right out of the gate while the flagship 6900 XT launched a few weeks later but now we have new gpus from both companies and not a single one that costs less than 900 bucks sure I understand the under underlying market and inventory conditions that have led to why this is happening but I don't have to like it hell no let's talk about design too because basically these cards look a lot like the older generation 6000 series is just basically an evolution of this design and personally I think this is one of the best looking reference designs that has ever been created except except I've got a special place in my heart for this thing oh man I wish cards would still look like this minus the blower style fan of course so that evolutionary approach makes it look still great in my opinion I prefer this personally to the founders Edition design but look you can tell me I'm crazy in the comments below anyways what we're talking about here is a pretty basic simple triple fan design that's about 2.5 slots high and yes even a pair of regular bog standard eight pin power connectors hey if it just works why fix it right I'm just really hoping that board Partners see the light and release smaller cards than they did with the Ridiculousness that was the the RTX 4090 because all things considered the reference cards here have grown only a bit when compared to the 6900 series another good bit of news is that unlike nvidia's RTX 4000 series AMD is going with DisplayPort 2.1 for all their cards which is so important for Next Generation monitors I mean you want to basically pair up a high-end GPU with a Next Generation monitor right it supports up to 8K 165 or get this 480 Hertz at 4K resolution and 900 Hertz at 1440p oh and there's also an HDMI 2.1 Port another thing you might have missed is a USBC connector something that ever has been asking for back on Nvidia cards forever now and guess what here it is and of course the performance that AMD is claiming here too is well impressive it's a new generation of gpus but look they set themselves a goal like they always do a 50 performance per watt increase and they actually surpass that by a little bit too at least in amd's hand-picked benchmarks these things are Leaps and Bounds better than the 6900 tiers which was already a high water mark for the Radeon team and it still is but they actually didn't talk all that much about game performance and a lot of the titles that were shown had FSR enabled that neatly gets around competitive analysis doesn't it so no RTX 3000 Series and certainly no 4000 series were compared here but since we've benchmarked some of the games that AMD is showing at the same resolutions and the same settings and we technically know the uplift between the 7900 XTX and the 6950 XT I guess we can do some creative math and see if we can figure out where these cars are going to land when they actually launch and look I just want to mention right away these are lose calculations and aren't meant to represent actual performance in any way shape or form I was just having a bit of fun with the numbers and I decided to add them to this video it's a lot harder to predict the XT though so it's not being added anyways Nvidia might be in a spot of trouble here are at least in raster performance since the 6950 XT was already super competitive relative to its price and now amd's boosting its performance by a pretty big amount so the XTX could conceivably match or beat the 40 80 16 gigabyte depending on the game while costing less that's the situation at least for people who just won a game without any Ray tracing I mean as we go through these numbers it's not hard to see why Nvidia decided to Nuke the 12 gigabyte 4080 but there's one point that keeps on getting brought up over and over again and that's nvidia's feature set outside of regular game performance but the red team they've been making some pretty significant improvements on that front too because for dlss there's FSR in the new fsr3 for shadowplay they've got Radeon reliving not only that you don't have to sign in to a service in order to access that then there's Nvidia broadcast well there's a bunch of OBS add-ins that are AMD specific that really bring it up to the level of Nvidia broadcast as well but there's one area that Nvidia does have a significant significant advantage in still that's GPU compute so many Key Programs support Cuda these days that making any inroads for AMD has been tough they still don't support a lot of apps and the ones they claim to support like Pro render for Maya are a year behind despite the community asking for them luckily though we're seeing some amazing advancements from them in programs like resolve and Premiere there's also a positive side here like Nvidia these cards are gonna have dual media engines for encode and decode that operate at a much higher frequency too plus their support for av1 what you didn't hear talked about all that much was guess what Ray tracing and look AMD is going to be making some advances in that area which is definitely good news but overall it just feels like AMD is looking at the slow uptake of RT Technologies and games and the performance impact that they actually impart in those games and just basically shrugging their shoulders based on the performance we saw with the rx6000 series well they're basically starting at almost nothing and going to something I guess because let's be honest 50 here is a step in the right direction but there's just no way this will be enough to compete with Nvidia and yet does that really matter to you guys I'd love to know to Ray trace or not the ray Trace let me know in the comments below so I guess that pretty much wraps things up for my coverage of this thing and I guess I have to say that what AMD did is exactly what people were asking them to other than competing with the RTX 4090 competing with that Halo card from Nvidia that is not happening at least not yet what they have done is increased performance they didn't go nuclear with their power consumption they added features and they kept the price under a thousand bucks and I mean in this kind of environment I guess that's the best we can ask for but I do have a little asterisk a side note to all of this the one thing that I was really hoping for personally was those cards under under the 7900 series maybe just announce them let us know that they're coming because right now there's a big blank in both amds and nvidia's lineup that yes it is taken care of by the older series of cards but I just want to see what is on the horizon for people who don't have this kind of money to spend but anyways maybe that is going to be a 2023 conversation actually I'm pretty sure it's going to be a 2023 and maybe CES conversation but anyways I really hope that you enjoyed this quick content I'm Mike with Hardware Canucks and I'm going to see you in the next one have a good day guys\n"