AMD’S NEW GPU series, known as RDNA3, has landed in the form of the 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the 20GB 7900 XT. AMD claims the cards have the most advanced technology and ‘breakthrough’ levels of performance. Both cards use the 5nm Navi 31 die, the biggest the company has, with the 7900 XT being a slightly cut-down version with 84 compute units against its bigger sibling’s 96. It’s a chiplet design, with the main 5nm GPU surrounded by six 6nm memory chips with attendant controllers. The game clocks are 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz respectively. Much to everybody’s relief, they use two 8-pin power connectors. For a more in-depth look at the technology inside the new RDNA 3 cards, see page 32.
First impressions are that it looks as if AMD is on to a winner. AMD estimates that the RX 7900 XTX is between 1.5x and 1.7x faster than the previous generation’s RX 6950 XT. The prices aren’t cheap, but they do seem competitive next to Nvidia’s next-gen cards. The RX 7900 XT is $899 and the 7900 XTX is $999. Not exactly loose change, but given their expected performance, it seems reasonable. Nvidia’s monstrous GeForce RTX 4090 may offer the ultimate performance, but the RX 7900 XTX gets close for $600 less.