Finally! AMD's RDNA 3 architecture is here, and it brings with it the world's first GPU based on chiplet technology. Why is that a big deal you ask? Making large chips is expensive, more expensive than making several small chips. AMD realized that years ago and built their Ryzen CPUs using the chiplet approach, which is the foundation for the company's tremendous comeback in the CPU space. Team Red is betting that the same can happen in the GPU world, and today we're testing their first products built using that philosophy. Using chiplets gives another major advantage—you can combine multiple production processes. For the case of the Navi 31 GPU that powers the Radeon RX 7900 Series, the central compute die is fabricated on TSMC's leading 5 nanometer node, because efficiency greatly matters for its design. On the other hand, the memory-cache dies don't put out as much heat, and contain analog technology, which doesn't scale as well with process size. That's why AMD decided to build those with 6 nanometer tech, which makes them cheaper to produce.

In this review we're covering the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, a second review that looks at the RX 7900 XT is also out right now. The XTX is AMD's flagship for this generation—it comes with the full Navi 31 GPU: 6144 cores, 96 compute units, 24 GB GDDR6 and six MCDs with 96 MB of L3 cache. RDNA 3 also introduces an upgraded display engine, which has support for DisplayPort 2.1, for higher refresh rates on upcoming 4K and 8K displays, and you also get support for hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding—the video format of the future.

For this round of reviews I've switched my testing to a Core i9-13900K, replacing our aging Ryzen 7 5800X that served us well for many years. Originally I wanted to switch over the holidays, but constant feedback on how "outdated, slow, and terrible" the 5800X is (it is not), made me switch early—just last week. So in addition to working on the RDNA 3 reviews, I also had to retest all my cards on the new setup, which is why there's fewer comparison cards in this review than what you're used to. I'll keep retesting, and update this review with data for the remaining GPUs. All the important high-end cards are included right now, so the outcome won't change in any way, it will just give you a broader overview.

Averaged over our whole 25-game test suite at 4K resolution, with RT off, we find the Radeon RX 7900 XTX 4% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080. While that definitely falls short of AMD's own projections, it's still a tremendous result. The differences between individual games are huge, in some titles the XTX is 20% faster than the 4080, in others it's 20% slower. I've added a new chart at the end of the "Relative Performance" page, to break that down for you. Depending on the game selection, you can easily get an average of +10% for the XTX, it all comes down to what titles you're playing (or benching as reviewer). At the end of the day I'd say RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX will both give you an amazing gameplay experience, especially if you don't look at FPS counters all day.

Compared to RTX 3090 Ti, the last-generation flagship, the RX 7900 XTX is 19% faster, wow! The performance increase over the Radeon RX 6900 XT and 6800 XT is 47% and 58%, respectively. The mighty GeForce RTX 4090 is 22% faster than the RX 7900 XTX, at more than twice the cost right now. Today AMD has also released the RX 7900 XT, that card is 16% slower than the XTX, at 4K, at lower resolutions the gap is considerably smaller.

It's also possible that the press driver isn't fully optimized for all our games yet. RDNA 3 introduces new dual-issue compute units, which require special code optimization, so that they can achieve the +100% performance uplift. In briefings AMD has made it clear they have been optimizing the driver for the new units, and I'm sure a lot of work has already been done in the shader compiler, but I'm just as certain that there's some cases where hand-optimization can yield further benefits. During testing I also encountered crashes in AC:Valhalla and Elden Ring, no doubt these will be fixed soon.

With those performance characteristics, RX 7900 XTX is a formidable choice for gaming at 4K, with maximum details and 1440p at high-refresh-rate. You can crank up everything and you'll still run at over 60 FPS. Things are different when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XTX is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. On average (new chart in the RT section), the RTX 4080 is around 15% faster than the RX 7900 XTX with ray tracing enabled, which isn't monumental, but definitely more than what I would have expected. I think everyone agrees that ray tracing is the future, and just disagrees on how quickly that future is happening. If you're part in the "I want this now" camp, then you should probably consider the RTX 4080, or RTX 4090. On the other hand, if you feel like ray tracing is just minor additional eye candy, that comes with a huge performance hit, then you can happily grab the RX 7900 XTX. That's not to say that AMD's new cards are useless with ray tracing, but if you consider the differences in price and RT performance, then the value-proposition of both cards is virtually identical, with NVIDIA RTX 4080 giving you the higher overall performance.

While NVIDIA's RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 are huge cards that will not fit all cases, the AMD reference cards that we're reviewing today are relatively compact. While they are not "small" by any standard, they roughly match the size of the previous generation cards, so you can easily upgrade just the graphics card. Power requirements are very similar, too, and there's no 16-pin power connector, so your existing PSU will be fine for upgrading from a 6800/6900-Series card to a 7900 XT/XTX. A smaller cooler does mean that keeping things cool isn't as easy. Temperatures are actually super low on the RX 7900 XTX, just 58°C, which is among the lowest I've seen in a long time. The Hot Spot temperature reaches 74°C under full load, which is also comfortably low, especially when considering that AMD confirms that "up to 110°C" is "within specification." While such low temperatures are certainly nice, they come at the cost of increased noise levels. With 39 dBA, the RX 7900 XTX is not "loud," but it's definitely not "quiet." NVIDIA's RTX 4080 Founders Edition is considerably quieter than that, and custom designs are nearly inaudible. I'll be testing a bunch of RX 7900 XTX custom designs soon, hopefully these will offer a better balance between noise levels and temperature. As expected from all modern graphics cards, both the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT come with the idle-fan-stop capability that shuts off the fans when not gaming.

Power efficiency of the new Radeons is fantastic, clearly much better than the previous generation of RDNA 2 and NVIDIA Ampere cards. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 cards are a bit better still, by 10% (RTX 4090) and 16% (RTX 4080). During gaming the RX 7900 XTX uses around 350 W of power, sitting right at its power limit. While the choice for dual 8-pin makes a lot of sense, it slightly limits the card in what it can do in terms of power. I also noticed that as the card heats up, the frequencies will drop by a lot. In our thermal load test, the card starts out running at 2673 MHz, and stays in that state for around 20 seconds, good to get a boost on short running benchmarks, but then clocks go down to 2505 MHz and stay there until the card cools down again at the end of your gaming session. This 6.7% drop is clearly significant and costs AMD against the RTX 4080, which loses only 1% in the same test.

We measured a shocking power consumption result for multi-monitor and media playback. Here, just the graphics card alone consumes 103 W and 88 W, respectively. This is way too high, RTX 4080 uses only 20-23 W in the same scenario, even the last generation RDNA 2 cards were less than half that with 40 W. This can only be some sort of driver bug, because it basically disqualifies the new Radeons for multi-monitor use. Remember, this is idle sitting at the desktop, not gaming. Wasting that much power is simply a big no-no, especially in these times. This also affects YouTube playback in your browser (YT 4K/1440p = ~100 W, 1080p = ~50 W, 720p = ~20 W). AMD has had a long history of drawing a lot of power in these power states, so I'm not 100% convinced this really is so easy to fix. I also find it hard to imagine that nobody at AMD tests multi-monitor power draw, so in some meeting somewhere, someone decided "we will release it like that."

AMD has already announced a $1000 price point for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which is still a ton of money, but highly competitive, especially when compared to the $1200 that NVIDIA wants for the RTX 4080. At $1000, the XTX is a fantastic card, especially when you're focusing on performance with ray tracing disabled. Our price/performance charts confirm—this is the most cost-efficient high-end card available at this time, by quite some margin. The only card that offers more value is the Radeon RX 6800 non-XT, currently discounted to $510, but offering a fraction of the performance. What's surprising is that the Radeon RX 7900 XT (without the X at the end), is the worse deal for 4K. It costs $900, spending another $100 (or 11%) will give you 16% more performance—a no brainer I'd say. If you want high FPS at 1440p, then the XT could be worth a second look, because at that res olution it does much better, spending the same 11% more only gives you 11% higher performance.

I would say that a lot of (most?) 4K gamers are looking for the best image quality, which probably includes enabling ray tracing. Here I feel that AMD dropped the ball a bit and didn't achieve the performance uplifts needed to catch up with NVIDIA. As mentioned before, if RT is an essential capability for you, and there's no doubt that a lot of upcoming titles will have RT, then RTX 4080 is worth another look. Spending 20% extra for 16% higher RT performance is not that bad of a deal, and on top you're getting support for DLSS, in case some future title won't have support for FSR. DLSS 3 frame generation is also a new and interesting tech, that works today, AMD's counterpart comes out in 2023.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX will be available for sale tomorrow, both Made-by-AMD boards and custom-designs will be available. Our custom design reviews will be live, soon, too.