Wednesday, May 17th 2023
Volt-modded RX 7900 XTX Hits 3.46 GHz, Trades Blows with RTX 4090
An AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card is capable of trading blows with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, as overclocker jedi95 found out. With its power limits unlocked, the RX 7900 XTX was found reaching engine clocks as high as 3.46 GHz, significantly beyond the "architected for 3.00 GHz" claim AMD made in its product unveil last Fall. At these frequencies, the RX 7900 XTX is found to trade blows with the RTX 4090, a segment above its current segment rival, the RTX 4080.
Squeezing 3.46 GHz out of the RX 7900 XTX is no child's play, jedi95 used an Elmor EVC2SE module for volt-modding an ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XTX, essentially removing its power-limit altogether. He then supplemented the card's power supply, so it could draw as much as 708 W (peak), to hold its nearly 1 GHz overclock. A surprising aspect of this feat is that an exotic cooling solution, such as liquid-nitrogen evaporator, wasn't used. A full-coverage water block and DIY liquid cooling did the job. The feat drops a major hint at how AMD could design the upcoming Radeon RX 7950 XTX despite having maxed out the "Navi 31" silicon with the RX 7900 XTX. The company could re-architect the power-supply design to significantly increase power limits, and possibly even get the GPU to boost to around the 3 GHz-mark.
Sources:
jedi95 (Reddit), HotHardware
Squeezing 3.46 GHz out of the RX 7900 XTX is no child's play, jedi95 used an Elmor EVC2SE module for volt-modding an ASUS TUF Gaming RX 7900 XTX, essentially removing its power-limit altogether. He then supplemented the card's power supply, so it could draw as much as 708 W (peak), to hold its nearly 1 GHz overclock. A surprising aspect of this feat is that an exotic cooling solution, such as liquid-nitrogen evaporator, wasn't used. A full-coverage water block and DIY liquid cooling did the job. The feat drops a major hint at how AMD could design the upcoming Radeon RX 7950 XTX despite having maxed out the "Navi 31" silicon with the RX 7900 XTX. The company could re-architect the power-supply design to significantly increase power limits, and possibly even get the GPU to boost to around the 3 GHz-mark.
75 Comments on Volt-modded RX 7900 XTX Hits 3.46 GHz, Trades Blows with RTX 4090
So yeah, trade blows in CP2077 and Timespy only LOL
edit: thats not a slight to 4090 owners btw, if i had a better paying job id more than happy buy a 4090 and max out games. lol
Note that der8auer promptly kiiled his card afterwards.
The only games where the 7900 XTX equals the 4090 are games where there are problems with CPU optimization or something seriously wrong with the Nvidia driver (yes, it can happen). In any game which performs normally and can leverage the hardware correctly, it doesn't stand a chance.
That's aside from the other advantages of chiplets, like being able to stack cache, modularization of parts of the GPU (which allowed AMD to increase the density of cores in it's latest GPUs), exceed the reticle limit, improved binning, and more.
Architecturally speaking Ada is Ampere on a much better node with extra cache taped on and not the fancy stacked cache either. RDNA3 simply being the first dGPU based on a chiplet design makes it more impressive than adding more cache to a monolithic die as Nvidia has done. The only shame is that AMD didn't go for the throat with pricing like they did with Zen 1. The 4090 is an impressive card but the architecture itself is more a beneficiary of node improvements than itself being anything revolutionary.
no different than someone buying a card to mostly play COD where the xtx is faster than a 4090 by quite a bit
Love to see a volt-modded 4080 take on a 4090.
Just like the good old days. Buying the cheaper one and getting the same performance as the more expensive ones. I feel those days are gone sadly.
Did you consider this?
vs
And let's not forget the 5nm GCD is only 300mm2 as well.
Ada is not superior, its more dense, a bigger die and a LOT more expensive to bake. Most other metrics that originate from the hardware are much the same, such as power consumption / W/frame. That 20% ish gap on raster translates almost directly in the transistor count gap as well. What else has Nvidia got? Featureset. Not hardware or architecture. That's why they push DLSS3 so hard.
This is the equivalent of early day Ryzen vs Intel monolithic, and its clear AMD is building competitive advantage if you look at die size / perf. Oh lol, missed this one :D
The 4080 still has 45,900M
and oh look:
57,7 : 45,9 = 1,2570
Ergo 25% gap
The cache just makes sure the 4090 doesn't choke as hard on RT workloads as the rest of the stack, so it shows in a handful or heavily RT focused titles, yay
The rest is just cold hard numbers, no avoiding it.
I would argue raster is not a valid performance metric...
That is why not. I'm gonna leave it here ;)
That's like comparing a 16 core cpu to an 8core cpu in single threaded performance and claiming the 2nd one is better architecturally cause it has a much smaller die. I mean come on....you know you are wrong.
The reason I say this is because we're still in the early adopting days. There is no transparency here wrt which architecture will remain best fit going forward. What we are seeing though is that engines deploy lighter / more adaptive technologies to cater to different performance levels. Nvidia is capable of leveraging their proprietary approach today, but that advantage is going to end soon - and its not an architectural advantage so much as an optimization exercise with developers.
When RT gets more mainstream and there is more consensus on how it gets used, we can get a much better view on what the architectural impact is on RT perf. Today it simply is bonus, at best, and many gamers will be turning it off, especially lower down the stack.
The analogy to core counts on CPUs though... lol. There is a lot wrong with that - if games would have been primarily single threaded, guess what, the 8 core CPU is definitely the more competitive product and if it has, say, a fast cache to accelerate gaming workloads and topped out at 8 cores, while beating high core count adversaries in the other camp on a smaller footprint, then yes, it is architecturally stronger, at least for that use case. So I guess if you buy into the RT fairy tale, you can defend Ada is stronger for your use case right now.
But there is the long term perspective here, and with architectures that one matters. Nvidia I'm sure has a plan going forward, but the fact is, 600mm is the end of the road for Geforce products, and they're on it, while giving that same SKU a very high power limit while on a very efficient node. All I see here is another Intel, to be fair, with the added point of using RT/DLSS to avoid the death of monolithic instead of a big little approach :)
Regarding your comment about cpus, your argument leads to the 7700x being better architecturally than a 7950x,since they perform similarly in games. Which is just not true, it's just flawed comparison, exactly like comparing 4090 purely on raster is flawed.
Anyways we have the 4080 vs the xtx comparison, amd is achieving much less with much more. Bigger die, bigger bus widths, more vram, more of everything, it just ties the 4080 in raster, loses in rt.