AMD is back and Nvidia is about to pay for their outrageous pricing practices the rdna3 announcement just concluded and while AMD gave us very little in the way of meaningful performance data I'm really optimistic anyway and here's why immediately after the stream ended our Labs team sprang into action building up test benches as close as possible to the ones that AMD used in their performance preview that allowed us to expand on AMD's rather vague slides that didn't include a single Nvidia GPU and extrapolate some actually useful comparative performance data now the bad news is that Nvidia might still be the performance King but the good news is that I can confidently say that AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XTX should come within spitting distance of NVidia’s RTX 4090 for 600 dollars less. AMDs together we advance underscore gaming live event they announced the two Flagship tier GPUs that will lead their RDNA 3 family the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX with 20 and 24 gigabytes of gddr6 respectively which was my first surprise I mean why would they cheap out on the memory when they need to compete with Nvidia cards that are using faster gddr6x two reasons one to save power which fair enough given the reputation their competition is built for unreasonable power consumption in thermals and two they just don't seem to need it the most useful slide that AMD provided was this one where we see the 7900 XTX performing between one and a half to 1.7 times the outgoing Flagship 6950 XT at 4K now AMD was frustratingly vague about the exact settings that they used to achieve these results even when we probed them after the event but we managed to extract just enough information to create our own set of performance graphs by extrapolating from our own reference 6950xt let's start with cyberpunk 2077 AMD's previous best managed 46 FPS not great but multiply that by 1.7 and we've got a spicy 78 frames per second that's just a single frame per second behind the RTX 4090 flood a generational Improvement in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 our RX 6950xt managed a respectable 90 FPS when we multiply that by AMD's 1.5 times assuming of course they're not just outright lying we can expect the 7900 XTX to lag NVidia’s Flagship by only six percent pot dang finally in Watchdogs Legion the 7900 XTX takes its largest L compared to the RTX 4090 but that still only has it lagging behind by about 10 not too shabby AMD of course performance is meaningless if it'll cost you two fingers and your right butt cheek Nvidia and I have more good news the 7900 XTX is a thousand dollars while the 7900 XT comes in a hundred less at 900 which I mean I never thought I'd be happy about even a top tier GPU being only a thousand dollars but I guess that really shows just how out to lunch Nvidia has been with the pricing of the RTX 4000 series but wait a second didn't NVidia’s CEO Jensen go out on stage and basically say the pricing is so high because the factors outside is control Moore's Law is dead he said well.
How did AMD pull it off then well first of all by not using the latest and greatest manufacturing process RDNA 3 GPUs at least the ones we've seen so far are made using a combination of TSMC's five nanometer and six nanometer processes making this both the very first chaplet design GPU and way cheaper to manufacture than the four nanometer monolithic dies that Nvidia uses for RTX 4000 but you'd think there'd be a downside to that right like don't all their manufacturing nodes have worse power consumption believe it or not the total board power of the 7900 XT and XTX is just 300 and 355 Watts respectively and it's delivered by two good old-fashioned eight-pin pie power connectors I never thought I'd be adding not a fire hazard as a selling point for a GPU but here we are this also means that if you're upgrading from something like a GTX 1080 TI or an RTX 2080 you probably don't need to upgrade your system power supply and you also probably don't need to upgrade your case the reference 7900 XTX is a much more reasonable 287 millimeters wide and two and a half slots tall compared to the 304 millimeters and three and a half Slots of the RTX 4090 again I never thought a GPU physically fitting in your computer would be a major selling point but here we are how did they do this then well AMD also packed in some really cool power management Innovations for starters they decoupled the clock speed of the shaders which now run at up to 2.3 gigahertz and the front end which runs at 2.5 we've actually seen this before in Mobile products but never in a desktop GPU and the main benefit of this approach is that it allows them to prioritize the speed of one over the other depending on the workload for instance if the gain you're running doesn't hit the shaders super hard maybe those are fine just sipping power at 1.8 gigahertz while the front end runs at full speed AMD says this can reduce total power consumption by 25 percent which might not be something you care about if you have a beefy power supply and a well-cooled case already though fear not AMD says there will be AIB partner cards with more Cooling and higher power consumption to enable even higher clock speeds or AMD says anyway so far we've only found this Asus tough model with three eight pin connectors which might indicate higher power consumption but nothing to say of the clock speeds now possibly the dumbest problem with the RTX 4090 aside from the burning up 12 pin power adapters is that it only supports DisplayPort 1.4 which given how freaking fast it is could actually become a problem in the very near future as new displays become available
AMD on the
other hand managed to avoid this embarrassing situation by including DisplayPort
2.1 which can support ridiculous resolutions and frame rate combinations like
4K 480 Hertz or 8K 165 Hertz now obviously whether you go team green or team
red your GPU won't be able to keep up with that today but with the way that
upscaling and frame generation technology is progressing VP 2.1 is some massive
future proofing that could make the RTX 4090 unable to take full advantage of
monitors that could be releasing as early as next year AMD has also included a
new media engine that has 8K 60 av1 and code and decode support this is a huge
Boon for streamers who are looking to get the best image quality going forward
and they announced smart access video which can share the load of encode and
decode operations between AMD GPUs and CPUs apparently giving a 30 uplift in 4k
multi-stream transcoding though we'll have to see how well this actually works when
it lands an OBS in December I'm a little skeptical but In fairness to AMD the
recent software upgrades that they made to their media engine for Radeon 6000
did bring about image quality improvements to get them closer to Nvidia Zen
bank than I would have thought possible so with this new media engine AMD might
finally be a sensible choice for people who want to stream or record their
gameplay another sensible choice is signing up for floatplane.com for amazing
behind the scenes and Extras like the shooting of our star forge systems review
intro to be clear not everything that AMD announced today was mind-blowing in AMD's
own slides they show a 1.5 to 1.6 times increase in Ray tracing performance
which will take you from literal slideshow to cinematic FPS at best and the RTX
4090 walked all over AMD's best at nearly double the frame rate based on our cyberpunk
test and these projected numbers also AMD built new AI accelerators that should
allow for up to 2.7 times more AI throughput per compute unit but the way it's
implemented makes this increase only matter for games at the moment it's not
going to help you with general purpose Ai and actually come to think of it
there was almost no mention whatsoever of non-gaming tasks and this this is a
long time thorn in Radeon users sides some applications like blender or
SolidWorks visualize only support Nvidia Cuda making Nvidia cards absolutely
embarrass their AMD counterparts and it doesn't look like this is going to
change anytime soon AMD also promised that their new fsr3 upscaling would be up
to a two times increase over fsr2 but it looks like at least one of the ways
they're going to achieve this is with technology similar to NVidia’s DLSS 3 by generating new frames
and well let's just say we're currently working on a video about DLS S3 and its
frame generation and it's a first gen product overall though it looks like the
RX 7900 XT and XTX are going to be hacking fast GPUs for the money and this
might end up being the first generation of what feels like forever where AMD is
positioned to grab a good chunk of market share from our green overlords which
will hopefully push Nvidia to compete harder on pricing and meanwhile give AMD's
GPU division the cash that it needs to ramp up r d spending and come back even
stronger next time I can't wait to give you guys the full review when these
cards launch on December the 13th.