AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Review: RDNA 3 Flagship is Fast

[b3rdm4n]

RDOA3

omg I laughed out loud. A time honored tradition of somehow f**king up another launch.

 

[rmcrys]

I can easily see the difference in fps, which is why I got a 144hz monitor. Below 45ish fps it becomes annoying. Where did you hear you can't notice anything above 24fps?

Up to 100 fps I notice the difference very well, though I must admit that above (real) 60 fps it's much hard to notice...

 

[meric]

It's the little blurb at the bottom that makes me think of people who buy only nVidia cards.

I read some of your comments, I agree mostly and I'd like to add that I'm sure even if AMD had made a much better card than 7900 XTX, most people would still prefer to pay extra for nVidia's inferior card. And there are past examples of this. I don't know if this is a result of marketing or something else, not an expert in that area.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I read some of your comments, I agree mostly and I'd like to add that I'm sure even if AMD had made a much better card than 7900 XTX, most people would still prefer to pay extra for nVidia's inferior card. And there are past examples of this.

Yes, there are several past examples of this. You're not wrong.

I don't know if this is a result of marketing or something else, not an expert in that area.

I think that it's because nVidia controls well over 80% of the market so when everyone that someone knows is using nVidia, they might not even be aware that there's something else. I do remember when I was working at Tiger Direct, nVidia was trying to get everyone that works there to own an nVidia card. When the sales rep you're dealing with owns an nVidia card, that tends to be what they offer. I'm pretty sure that the margins are higher on GeForce cards as well so their management may also be pushing nVidia cards.

After all, selling a higher-priced item looks better on the books, eh?

 

[b3rdm4n]

AMD should be paying some of ya'll for how much free marketing and sales effort is being put in. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free though.

 

[m3tavision]

Fact remains, that you can walk into MicroCenter and ask for a sold out 7900 XTX and they will immediately try to sell you a RTX 4080 at a discount...

Even though they openly say they can't sell the RTX card below MSRP, they will "gift" you things from the store if you buy a 4080 of their shelves.


The sales staff are so pro-nVidia it blows their heads off that people want an XTX. So I had to explain it to them... frames matter, gimmicks are for casual players..!

 

[EvilRebar]

As a 7900XTX buyer I would recommend the 4080. $150 more than the cheapest AIB 7900XTX for better RT, better upscaling, better driver support, and lower power draw. Available everywhere off the shelf instead of playing store stock games.

I just couldn't stomach paying $1,200 for just the GPU, even if it would have been the better long-term choice.

 

[EvilRebar]

AMD should be paying some of ya'll for how much free marketing and sales effort is being put in. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free though.

Yeah, as someone with a dual-AMD system, I never understand people who think that a computer part maker is their identity or their friend.

 

[Ohnooze]

As a 7900XTX buyer I would recommend the 4080. $150 more than the cheapest AIB 7900XTX for better RT, better upscaling, better driver support, and lower power draw. Available everywhere off the shelf instead of playing store stock games.

I just couldn't stomach paying $1,200 for just the GPU, even if it would have been the better long-term choice.

The 4080 isn't selling off the charts either which means it may drop in price.

Personally I'm waiting until next year unless I find a really great deal.

 

[m3tavision]

As a 7900XTX buyer I would recommend the 4080. $150 more than the cheapest AIB 7900XTX for better RT, better upscaling, better driver support, and lower power draw. Available everywhere off the shelf instead of playing store stock games.

I just couldn't stomach paying $1,200 for just the GPU, even if it would have been the better long-term choice.

Why would anyone buy a RTX4080...?

The 7900 XTX beats it in nearly every game, but a few. The 7900 XTX has ray tracing equivalent to a 3090... (that some people were paying $2k for just 8 months ago), if somehow ray-tracing is even a thing for you (which snobs care about, but FPS gamer laugh at...

Call of Duty Warzone is what is fueling the GPU war right now. That game (released 3 months ago) had over $1 Billion in pre-sales. People do not buy $800+ dGPUs to get less frames... and see RTX and RT as visual hoaxes for the couch gamer's.

FPS players want frames.... and XTX & XT offer a superior price/performance ratio.



Secondly, if you run several PC gaming systems in your house that regularaily need driver updates, or hardware swaps has become much easier over the last decade. Being hardware agnostic and having at least 6 EVGA cards.... I can tell you that AMD's RDNA driver's are superior to NVidia's.

This did not use to be the case back to the VEGA era, but Dr Lisa Su started RDNA/CDNA from scratch and even when announced the industry was in shock that AMD kept RDNA hidden.

Now... Sonly PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and all RX5/6/7000 series dGPU and the new APUs all use a unified API driver. (THe Industry standard in gaming is RDNA.... whether you like it or not.)

The mantra AMD's driver suck... is a lie! They use to suck.... now, they are multithreaded driver stack and respond better with less jitter. Opposed to NVidia single-threaded driver stack... that requires higher frequency CPU to maintain the driver overhead.

Not to mention, NO TRUE GAMER uses NVidia GFE (GeFarce Experience)


On top of all of that, there are the reviews....

It doesn't matter what site you visit or review you read... the story is the same. You start to see through all the propaganda now that people have them in their rigs.


AMD is releasing a mobile APU later this year (gaming laptop), that will have 20% more performance than the XSX... with no need for a GPU.



NVidia already announced they are going to stop selling their MX mobile gpu... bcz they are about to become pointless.

 

[Beerfloat]

Not to mention, NO TRUE GAMER uses NVidia GFE (GeFarce Experience)

So pleased to not be a TRUE GAMER, haha.

Heck, I haven't touched a Call of Duty since 2009!

 

[Neatfeatguy]

The 4080 isn't selling off the charts either which means it may drop in price.

Personally I'm waiting until next year unless I find a really great deal.

Zotac has noticed that the 4000 series isn't selling well. They sent out an email end of last or maybe it was the start of this week saying how you can buy discounted Zotac 4000 cards at retailers (newegg, amazon, Micro Center and some other retailers were listed).

I was curious what kind of discounted pricing there was so I checked out Micro Center.
There is a base $799 Zotac 4070Ti - that one is not discounted.
There is a $1000 Zotac 4070Ti - it is discounted by $120, making the current price $880.
There is also a $850 Zotac 4070Ti - it is discounted by $20, making the current price $830
There is a $1400 Zotac 4080 - it is discounted $100, making the current price $1300
There is a $1300 Zotac 4080 - it is discounted $50, making the current price $1250

The discount they're offering is on cards that are normally priced over MSPR. You're not going to really save any money on their cards since most AIB provide very little difference over a base MSRP model.

 

[m3tavision]

So pleased to not be a TRUE GAMER, haha.

Heck, I haven't touched a Call of Duty since 2009!

I spent too many years playing ARMA & CS:G0 with my squad mates, and over the last 3 years gravitated to games that allow a skill gap play. So many people so much randomness so much spontaneity. FWIW, very little are actually playing Call of Duty... they are playing Warzone...!

Spend 15m to re-familiarize why Warzone 2.0 had over $1 billion in pre-sales.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Yeah, as someone with a dual-AMD system, I never understand people who think that a computer part maker is their identity or their friend.

I don't consider any company to be my friend. Having said that, I've been fed up with the practices of Intel and nVidia long enough to say that I truly hate those companies. I don't have a Ryzen/Radeon build because I love AMD, I choose AMD by default because I don't want anything from the other two. The fact that AMD generally gives better value on CPUs and definitely gives better value on video cards only makes the decision that much easier to implement. The last Intel CPU that I owned was a Core2Duo and the last nVidia video card I had was a Palit GeForce 8500 GT 1GB. Everything since then has been all-AMD for me but I don't consider it to be a part of my identity.

My avatar is actually a Radeon icon. Back in the day, ATi decided to throw a bit of "Canadiana" into their video card box art for the Radeon 9600 Pro. As a Canadian I am obligated to love goalie masks so I loved this box art:

Then, when XFX got on board with Radeon, I guess that someone at XFX was also in love with that 9600 Pro box art because the box art for the XFX HD 4870 was a fresh take on that amazing 9600 Pro box art:

I loved it then and I love it now just because it's awesome!

 

[Avro Arrow]

As a 7900XTX buyer I would recommend the 4080. $150 more than the cheapest AIB 7900XTX for better RT, better upscaling, better driver support, and lower power draw. Available everywhere off the shelf instead of playing store stock games.

I just couldn't stomach paying $1,200 for just the GPU, even if it would have been the better long-term choice.

Would it really be the better long-term option though? I don't know what you're basing your claim on because I don't see that AT ALL. The RTX 4080 isn't that great of a card and I don't know why you think that it is. Why do you think that the 7900 XTX was immediately embraced by the gamer community and the 4080 was immediately panned? I'll tell you why you actually made a better long-term choice with the XTX:

I see the same issue with the RTX 4080 that I saw with the RTX 3080, the fact that it has a much smaller VRAM buffer than the Radeon equivalent. At $1,200, the RTX 4080 has only 16GB of VRAM, no more than my RX 6800 XT. I don't know why you'd find that impressive, especially when undersized VRAM buffers are not a new thing from nVidia.

Most examples of the RTX 3080 only have 10GB of VRAM, just 2GB more than the old RX 5700 XT and 6GB less than my RX 6800 XT! Now, the RTX 4080 has 16GB of VRAM while the RX 7900 XTX has 8GB more at 24GB. Sure, the RTX 4080 is more resistant to the FPS drop caused by RT but the 7900 XTX is still very usable with RT on. It actually out-paces the RTX 4080 12GB...er, the RTX 4070 Ti:

The RT advantage offered by the RTX 4080 is 16% which would be impressive if the RX 7900 XTX's performance with RT on was actually bad, but that's not the case. I don't remember anyone complaining about the RTX 3090 Ti's performance with RT on, do you? Of course not, because it was good enough that you could actually use it without sacrificing everything else while running in native mode:

The RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4080 are essentially the same overall performance in normal games (I don't consider the XTX's 4% "advantage" to be meaningful):

Then, of course, there's the fact that the RX 7900 XTX is $200USD ($268 in my native CAD language) less expensive than the RTX 4080 with a 20% advantage in performance-per-dollar. This is nothing to sneeze at:

Now, sure, I'll concede that the power use of the RTX 4080 is 13.8% less than that of the RX 7900 XTX, there's no denying that but is it really that big of a deal? Nobody seemed to care that the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT were more efficient than the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Suddenly caring about it when nVidia has that advantage is called 'moving the goal posts" and it's about as weak as an argument can get. One of JayzTwoCents' better videos is great for putting power use into perspective and does a great job of explaining why it's not even close to being a significant criterion when buying a CPU or video card:

So, let's recap the advantages of both cards objectively because the fact that you own an XTX doesn't necessarily make you objective. Your objectively weak reasons why you think that the RTX 4080 is a better long-term choice is proof of that.

RTX 4080 Advantages for Gamers:
- 16% better RT performance than the RX 7900 XTX <- Advantage
- 13.8% more power efficient <- small advantage
- Arguably better driver support <- Big Advantage

RX 7900 XTX Advantages for Gamers:
- $200USD less expensive <- Big Advantage
- VRAM buffer is 50% larger than that of the RTX 4080 <- HUGE ADVANTAGE
- The price to performance ratio is 20% better than that of the RTX 4080 <- Advantage
- Technically 4% faster <- small advantage

small advantage = Is measurable but not significant
Advantage = Makes enough of a difference to consider it in the criteria
Big Advantage = Makes a significant difference to most people
HUGE ADVANTAGE = An advantage so large that it eclipses several others combined

The biggest advantage to the 4080 is its availability which it has only because most people decided that the RTX 4080 wasn't worth it. The RX 7900 XTX's "Big Advantage" of price is specifically what made you pick red over green, you said so yourself. The advantages of the RX 7900 XTX far outweigh those of the RTX 4080. That's why it sold out immediately and the RTX 4080 never did. Radeon drivers haven't been problematic for years and people are finally starting to wake up to this reality. I went from HD 4870 to HD 7970 to R9 Fury to RX 5700 XT to RX 6800 XT. If I had all kinds of driver problems, I wouldn't be still using Radeon cards. If I wasn't completely happy with the performance they were capable of or the gaming experience that I was getting, I wouldn't have kept buying them. I also wouldn't be saying to buy them because I wouldn't feel right recommending anything to anyone if I had a bad experience with them. Have I had some issues? Sure, but nothing major and certainly nothing that made gaming unenjoyable. It was usually something slightly annoying like the screen scaling being too big for my display. That's the only issue big enough that I remember it.

This is why I don't recommend anything made by MSi to anyone, because once upon a time, I had a flagship MSi motherboard and to this day, it's the only motherboard that ever died on me. I replaced it with a cheap ECS motherboard that cost me about a third what the MSi board did and it still works to this day.

I see nothing here that tells me that the RTX 4080 is the better long-term choice. As a matter of fact, I see the exact opposite when I look at that huge VRAM difference. How on Earth could you think that a video card would be a better long-term choice than a card with essentially the same performance and 50% more VRAM? VRAM is, in many ways, a long-term equalizer. If a game in the future needs more than 16GB of VRAM, the RTX 4080 will be just as useless as an RX 6800. That's because no amount of graphics horsepower can compensate for a lack of VRAM. A card with a slow GPU with enough VRAM can still run a game slowly but a card with a rocket-fast GPU without enough VRAM can't run the same game AT ALL. In this case, both cards have rocket-fast GPUs but the RX 7900 XTX will still be usable for years after the RTX 4080 is considered obsolete. More than anything else, THAT is what makes the RX 7900 XTX the better long-term choice.

I experienced this very real problem myself because while my R9 Fury has a more potent graphics engine than the RX 580, the fact that it only has 4GB of VRAM cripples it badly in games that want more than 4GB. An RX 580 with 8GB is a far more capable card than an R9 Fury in this day and age and it has nothing to do with the power of the GPU itself. Seeing your card get beat by cards with weaker GPUs just because your card doesn't have enough VRAM is a harrowing experience that makes you grind your molars in frustration. You made the better choice with the RX 7900 XTX, seemingly in spite of yourself.