Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT review: AMD’s ‘reasonable’ stab at 4K gaming
Once again, AMD is ready to take on NVIDIA's latest video cards with powerful alternatives at a lower price. And once again, AMD still lags behind when it comes to ray tracing. That's pretty much the story behind the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, two confusingly-named GPUs meant to be the pinnacle of AMD's new RDNA 3 graphics architecture. At $899 and $999, respectively, these cards are certainly easier to stomach than NVIDIA's $1,199 RTX 4080 and the monstrously expensive $1,599 RTX 4090 (both of which actually sell for far more at most stores).
For the most part, AMD’s new cards deliver solid 4K gaming performance, especially with the help of the company’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. It's just a shame that you'll have to live with slower ray tracing performance than the competition. (On the bright side, they offer a major ray tracing upgrade over AMD's last batch of Radeon GPUs.)
So what makes these cards so special? They're the first GPU's built on a chiplet-based design, similar to AMD's latest CPUs. That should allow AMD to tweak its designs easily down the line, making it simpler to scale RDNA 3 down to laptops and lower-end GPUs. The 7900 XTX and XT feature a 5nm compute die and a 6nm memory die connected by a 5.3 TB/s interconnect. Together, that means they can reach up to 61 teraflops of computing power and utilize up to 24GB of GDDR6 RAM.
AMD also claims it beefed up ray tracing performance by 50 percent per compute unit, compared to its previous RDNA 2 architecture. Its video engine has been upgraded with support for AV1 encoding and decoding at up to 8K/60fps. That format isn't widely adopted yet, but it aims to deliver better video compression for 4K and 8K footage compared to
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