AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Review: The RDNA 3 GPUs are off to a fantastic start

With the Radeon RX 7900 series, the red team set out to make the ultimate graphics card for under $1000. To achieve this, AMD made some changes to its hardware architecture.

In this review, we will look at the Radeon RX 7900 XT, one of the linchpins of its RDNA 3 portfolio. Does AMD succeed in achieving its goal?

RDNA 3: The new hotness

AMD bills the RX 7900 XT as one of the first GPUs with the company's new chiplet design, which means bigger chips within the enclosure, are cut into smaller pieces.

For the RX 7900 series, AMD created two specialised dies for the architecture connected by a 5.3 TB/s interconnect. The core GPU engine is built on a 5nm die that, in theory, enables good performance per watt.

The GDDR6 memory interface on a 6nm die features AMD's 2nd generation Infinity Cache. The RX 7900 XT has 80MB on a 320-bit memory bus with fast 20Gbps GDDR6 memory, capable of delivering 2912 GB/s of bandwidth.

Besides these is the new Dual Media Engine that adds hardware support for AV1 up to 8K and 60fps. It allows for simultaneous streams for encoding or decoding.

The RX 7900 series is the first GPU in the industry with support for the DisplayPort 2.1 interface, which unlocks bandwidth up to 54 Gbps. It also supports high refresh rates - 900 Hz at 1440p, 480 Hz at 4K, and 165 Hz at 8K.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT comes with 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM and has a base frequency of 2.0GHz that can boost to 2.4GHz. It has 84 RDNA compute units with a maximum board power of 300W.

Benchmarks

Testing rig

CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 7900X @ 5.6 GHz
Motherboard - ASRock X670 E Taichi
Cooler - Cooler Master Liquid ML360L V2 ARGB
Storage - Western Digital WD Black SN 770 1TB NVMe SSD
GPU - AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
Memory - Kingston Fury Beast 32GB DDR5-5600MHz (2 X 16GB) PSU - XPG CORE Reactor 850G (850 Watts)

Synthetic Benchmarks
For 4K benchmarks, we put the 7900 XT through its paces with the Fire Strike Ultra test. It managed to output a graphics score of 16900 and a combined score of 8852.

On average, Nvidia's RTX 4080 scores 17069 on graphics and 9670 as a combined score.

Time Spy Extreme, the second 4K benchmark, saw the 7900 XT score 12658 on graphics and bests the RTX 4080 on the combined score, with 9739.

At 1440p, we used Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme. In Time Spy, the 7900 XT managed a graphics score of 25800, and in Fire Strike Extreme, the 7900 XT managed a graphics score of 33730.

Compared to the RTX 4080, which scores 28450 and 33100, the RX 7900 puts up a great fight.

4K Benchmarks
We started our tests with Borderlands 3. With all settings set to Ultra High, we saw framerates hover around 86fps on average.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the 7900 XT delivered a consistent 56-60 fps on Ultra settings. Though we did see dips to below 40fps on certain occasions, the game overall remained playable.

Doom Eternal is a tuned experience on the PC. So we weren't surprised when the 7900 XT delivered 170 fps on average. Far Cry 6 proved no obstacles for the GPU either. It managed to crank out 102 fps on Ultra settings.

Metro Exodus at Extreme settings in 4K is quite a visual treat, and the RX 7900 XT did not slouch in performance with an impressive 80 fps on average.

Hitman 3, with its lush levels and attention to detail, looks beautiful in 4K. It performs well on the 7900 XT, with an average of 159 fps at Ultra.

Turning on Raytracing at 4K proves to be a challenge for the 7900 XT, with Cyberpunk 2077 averaging around 20 fps at Ultra settings.

In Hitman 3, turning on Raytracing didn't make the game unplayable, but at 30fps, it could be better.

1440p benchmarks
Borderlands 3 at 1440p averaged 120 fps on average at the highest settings. The 7900 XT aced Cyberpunk 2077, as well, with an average of 115fps at Ultra settings.

Doom Eternal flew by at an average of over 260 fps at the highest settings, on average, and looked great while doing it. Metro Exodus also joined the other games on the over-100 club with an average of 120fps at Extreme.

Conclusion

The Radeon RX 7900 XT almost achieves what it set out to do, providing stiff competition to Nvidia's RTX 4080 in some titles while besting it in others.

Raytracing remains an Achilles heel for the 7900 XT, which is understandable since Nvidia uses dedicated RT cores. Still, the 7900 XT competes favorably in several titles and proves its worth as a premium graphics product.

The icing on the cake is the pricing. AMD undercuts Nvidia here with a retail price of Rs 90,000

The RTX 4080 starts at Rs 1,19,000 in India.

Overall, RDNA 3 GPUs are off to a great start, providing performance comparable to the RTX 4080 at a lesser price.