AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 GPUs Launch, Providing Stiff Competitors for Nvidia

Shopping for a video card over the previous few years has been an train in frustration, however in 2022, your cup runneth over with selections. Nvidia launched its new and really costly RTX 40 Sequence this fall, and now we have now AMD’s reply within the type of the Radeon RX 7000 Sequence. There are two video playing cards within the lineup proper now, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. The critiques are in — these GPUs don’t fairly match the newest Nvidia choices, however the beginning worth is simply $900, which is a number of hundred cheaper than the RTX 40 Sequence.

The brand new AMD playing cards run on the brand new RDNA 3 structure, which makes use of a chiplet design akin to the Ryzen CPUs. AMD makes use of a 5nm course of for the compute die and a 6nm course of for the GDDR6 reminiscence, utilizing a 5.3TB/s interconnect to hyperlink the 2. AMD says this strategy boasts a greater than 50% enchancment in performance-per-watt, placing them in the identical ballpark as Nvidia’s RTX 4090 and 4080.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT prices $899 and options 20GB of RAM, 84 compute items, and a base clock velocity of 1,500MHz. The $999 RX 7900 XTX has nearly the identical 2.5-slot design, but it surely sports activities 24GB of RAM, 96 compute items, and a 1,900MHz base clock. The XTX additionally has one good {hardware} bonus — a USB-C port on the cardboard for high-speed knowledge and VR connectivity. Nvidia dropped its USB-C port beginning with the RTX 30 Sequence. The XT has a 300W TDP, and the XTX is 355W. Fortunately, the RX 7000 playing cards use a pair of 8-pin energy connectors somewhat than the 16-pin connector adopted by Nvidia which is inflicting a spate of melting cables.

Credit score: IGN

In real-world testing, the RX 7000 playing cards carry out inside about 10 p.c of the newest Nvidia GPUs. Whereas AMD does assist ray tracing on the RX 7000, the RTX 40 Sequence handles this graphical possibility significantly better. DLSS can also be extra helpful on Nvidia, however the RX 7000 reveals glorious native 4K rendering efficiency. In the event you’re enjoying beneath 4K and with out heavy reliance on ray tracing or DLSS, you may not even discover any efficiency hole between AMD’s and Nvidia’s newest.

Nvidia is asking a minimal of $1,200 for the RTX 4080 and $1,600 for the RTX 4090. AMD’s new playing cards don’t take the crown, however anybody trying to spend a thousand {dollars} on a video card ought to take a protracted, onerous have a look at the RX 7000 household. The RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will go on sale tomorrow, December thirteenth.

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