After months of leaks and eager anticipation, it's finally here. AMD unleashed the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship GPUs earlier today at the RDNA 3 Tech Event in Las Vegas. RDNA 3 is extremely exciting for gamers everywhere -- not only due to the ongoing shortages and safety concerns with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, but also because of RDNA3's unique combination of hardware and software features leveraged by Radeon 7000-series.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about the upcoming Radeon 7900XTX and Radeon 7900XT, including pricing, availability, technical advancements, and performance.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Price, Performance, and Availability
Let's start off with the most relevant factors for gamers everywhere: Price and Availability. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU will cost $999 USD, and it will be available for purchase on December 12, 2022. This includes first-party cards and cards from AMD's Add-In-Board partners (AIBs).
Although spending a grand on a new graphics card is certainly out of reach for mainstream gamers, pricing is actually quite reasonable for what you're getting. Based on AMD's internal testing (we'll verify this in our upcoming first-hand review), the Radeon RX 7900 XTX offers true flagship-level speed, with up to 1.7x performance in traditional raster workloads and up to 1.8x performance in ray tracing compared to the outgoing 6950 XT.
So how does it get there? The Radeon 7900 XTX is a massive, chiplet-based GPU with 96 Compute Units, running at 2.3 GHz game clock (decoupled), and backed by 24GB of GDDR6 memory on a 384-bit memory bus. And being that RDNA3 is chiplet-based, AMD is able to leverage TSMC's most advanced 5nm node for the primary Graphics Compute Die (GCD), alongside TSMC's more robust and value-focused 6nm node for the 6x Memory Cache Dies (MCD). The GCD houses the traditional render pipeline components such as FP32 shaders and ROPs, whereas the MCDs take care of Infinity Cache and the GDDR6 memory controllers.
These specs and performance figures put the Radeon RX 7900 XTX in the same ballpark as Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 in terms of raw raster performance, but at a significant $600 cost savings. But reading between the lines, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX doesn't fare quite so favorably to Nvidia's offerings once you factor in real-time ray tracing performance -- something that's increasingly relevant in today's gaming ecosystem. AMD's own quoted figure of "up to 1.8x" the ray tracing performance of a 6950 XT means that the 7900 XTX likely won't be able to match Nvidia's last-gen RTX 3090, let alone the current-gen RTX 4090.
Nevertheless, if you care most about high frame rates in traditional, rasterized games such as e-sports, the 7900 XTX will be a tough package to beat. In other words, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is shaping up to be the fastest graphics card for traditional raster workloads for under a thousand dollars.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Price, Performance, and Availability
As impressive as the 7900 XTX is, not everyone has $999 to spend on a graphics card. Fortunately, AMD also unveiled its little brother, the Radeon RX 7900 XT. The Radeon RX 7900 XT costs $899 USD, $100 cheaper than the 7900 XTX, and it will be available on December 12, 2022.
What's missing on the Radeon RX 7900 XT? Not much. Stepping down one tier, you get 84 Compute Units instead of 96, and 20GB of GDDR6 on a 320-bit bus instead of 24GB on a 384-bit bus. In addition, clocks are reduced a tiny bit from 2.3GHz to 2.0GHz -- but you can obviously use first-party software to overclock your card to make up the difference. Taking both the reduced core count and reduced clocks into consideration, the XT looks like it has about 76% the raw compute power of the XTX when both are at stock speeds. But whether that will translate to a 24% difference in gaming performance is yet to be seen. However, one can reasonably assume that with fewer enabled CUs, the 7900 XT may have a bit more overclocking headroom than the XTX when both are pushed to their limits.
Regardless of the performance delta between the parts, the Radeon 7900 XT is shaping up to be a great option for those who value high performance in traditional raster workloads. But if I were buying for myself, I'd eat ramen for dinner for a few weeks (Nongshim black, please?) and save up the extra $100 to get the XTX instead.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX doesn't require a new PSU, and it won't burn your house down
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT are poised to offer phenomenal performance and attractive pricing, but that's not all. They're both powered by two traditional 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Yep, you read that right, you don't need a new PSU and you don't have to worry about those dodgy 12VHPWR adapters currently plaguing the GeForce RTX 4090. And since these cards are powered by just two 8-pin connectors, total board power is just 355W on the 7900 XTX and 300W on the 7900 XT.
There's plenty more to talk about, but only so much we're allowed to cover today. That said, we'll fill you in on all the key details in future content pieces, so keep an eye out on the XDA Portal for all the latest RDNA3 news.
Which RDNA3 GPU are you most excited about? How do you think the 7900XTX and 7900XT stack up to Nvidia's RTX 4090 and 4080? And are you as relieved as we are that AMD went with 2x 8-pin power connectors instead of the 12VHPWR plug? Sound off in the comments below!