AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX has been on the market for more than a year now. Both cards have established themselves firmly as AMD's top dog options for the RDNA 3 lineup. The XTX goes to trade blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, whereas the RX 7900 XT goes up against the RTX 4070 Ti. At launch, both cards were more expensive than today, 7900 XT launched at $900 and has dropped down quite a bit, due to competition from NVIDIA. You can find the cheapest RX 7900 XT cards at $780 these days, which includes the regular ASRock Phantom Gaming. The card in this review, the Phantom Gaming White, sells for $800, a reasonable $20 increase for the white design theme.

The Phantom Gaming / Phantom Gaming White are ASRock's second-highest clocked custom design cards, the flagship Taichi is slightly higher clocked, but also much more expensive. Just like all other factory-overclocked SKUs that we've tested, the gains from the OC out of the box are pretty meager, we got around 1%. We've retested all cards with the newest drivers and new games recently and the results confirm that RX 7900 XT is notably faster than RTX 4070 Ti in pure rasterization scenarios. The ASRock Phantom Gaming White is 8% ahead at 1080p, 9% at 1440p and at 4K the gap grows to 12%. While both cards are somewhat constrained in the capability of their memory interface, it seems that RX 7900 XT handles the switch to 4K a little bit better. Compared to previous-gen, the RX 7900 XT can beat NVIDIA's RTX 3090 conclusively, and it's even faster than RTX 3090 Ti—the fastest card available at the time. NVIDIA RTX 4080 is 13% faster at 4K, and the RX 7900 XTX has a 18% lead. It's also important to look at 1440p performance, for gamers looking to drive high-refresh-rate monitors with their GPU. Here the RX 7900 XT does much better, closing the gap to the 4080 to 9%, and the lead of the 7900 XTX shrinks to only 13% now. While RX 7900 XT works great on 4K, it works even better on 1440p, because at that resolution the demands on L3 cache are not as high as on 4K, so the smaller size (compared to RX 7900 XTX) doesn't matter as much.

Things change when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XT is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. While we saw a 10% lead for the AMD card vs RTX 4070 Ti without ray tracing, turning on RT switches the numbers around and now the NVIDIA card is around 15% faster. There is one unexpected difference, and that's 4K with ray tracing. While the 7900 XT offers 20 GB of VRAM, the 4070 Ti comes with just 12 GB, which means it loses big time in VRAM-intensive titles like Alan Wake 2, Far Cry 6 and Spider-Man Remastered. Despite these results I'd still say that 4070 Ti is the superior card for RT, even at 4K. Due to the high performance hit of RT, you'll usually enable some sort of upscaler like DLSS or FSR, which renders the game at a lower resolution, which in turn brings down the VRAM usage. On the other hand, a lot of gamers are convinced that great gameplay does not depend on RT, and will happily turn it off to get higher FPS, making RX 7900 XT a great choice for this crowd.

With GeForce 40, NVIDIA has introduced DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which effectively doubles the framerate by generating "middle" frames based on two frames. As complicated as it sounds in theory, it works really well to boost your framerates, and you'll be unable to spot any issues during normal gameplay. While AMD does not support DLSS, the company has released their own frame generation technology recently, called FSR 3. While it's only available in very few games so far, it works quite well and is able to boost framerates, too. The frame generation war has just started, and the outcome will depend on who can get better traction with game developers. As of today, DLSS 3 is much more established, but AMD has announced that approximately a dozen titles will receive FSR 3 support, so 2024 will definitely be interesting.

Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test shows that ASRock's Phantom Gaming White comes with a powerful cooling solution that's much stronger than the AMD reference design—by 12°C at normalized noise levels with the same heat load. The cooler can also beat the XFX Merc 310 by 10°C and the Sapphire Pulse by a small margin. Only the ASUS TUF thermal solution is stronger, by around 5°C. ASRock did a fantastic job with the acoustic tuning of their thermal solution, at full load the card is whisper quiet, emitting only 28.6 dBA, which makes it the quietest RX 7900 XT that we've tested. If you switch the ASUS TUF to the quiet BIOS, then that card ends up a tiny bit quieter, at higher cost though. While Sapphire's Pulse does have a weaker cooler, it's just as quiet as the ASRock card, but with higher temperatures. Many other vendors are using a dual BIOS feature to offer some choice in terms of settings, ASRocks's card comes with a single BIOS only and that's perfectly fine. The fan settings are as good as they get—no need to mess around, just install the card and enjoy your games. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2023, the fans will stop spinning when not gaming, for the perfect noise-free experience.

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, especially the RTX 4080. The RTX 4070 Ti is roughly the same efficiency as the 7900 XT, in raster, in RT it will end up a bit more efficient, the differences are not day and night though. 277 W (4070 Ti) vs 319 W (7900 XT) does sound like a big difference, it's 20%, but for PSU considerations it's the same, because any PSU that can handle a 277 W GPU can also power a 320 W GPU, too. Just like other 7900 XT cards I did notice that as the card heats up, the frequencies will drop by a lot. In our thermal load test, the card starts out running at 2632 MHz, and stays in that state for a few seconds, good to get a boost on short running benchmarks, but then clocks go down to 2442 MHz and stay there until the card cools down again at the end of your gaming session. This 7% drop is clearly significant and costs AMD against NVIDIA's cards, which don't drop nearly as much. Our benchmarks are designed to be realistic, by simulating a longer gaming session, there's a warm-up period before I start recording FPS numbers.

While power consumption in non-gaming states like multi-monitor and video playback was terrible in the first round of reviews, AMD is constantly improving things. With the newest drivers (the ASRock data), the non-gaming power numbers are lower than before (RX 7900 XT reference data), but not as low as what NVIDIA offers, still almost twice as high. For future reviews I'll update the RDNA 3 power numbers on all reference cards.

Overclocking worked well on our card, once you know what to do. Without a power limit increase or undervolting you will not see any meaningful gains—check out my step-by-step guide in the OC section and you'll have a good starting point. With 12.4% performance gained after OC, the card almost matches the RX 7900 XTX in performance, beating the RTX 4080, too. Double-digit OC gains are quite rare these days and always nice to see.

As mentioned before, RX 7900 XT started out at a somewhat expensive $900 but has dropped to sub-$800 now. It is still not super affordable—RTX 4070 Ti comes at the same price point. While NVIDIA's card might have weaker raster performance and only 12 GB VRAM, it is still a strong offering, thanks to its higher RT performance and support for DLSS 3. The ASRock Phantom Gaming White is a fantastic custom design because it includes a very capable cooling solution that's whisper quiet, and of course the white color theme looks excellent. I would spend the 20 bucks if I wanted a white design-theme card, otherwise just buy the regular Phantom Gaming, it's identical, except for the color theme of course. Previous generation cards aren't really that attractive, even at $650 for 6900 XT I'd prefer the 7900 XT all day. A used RTX 3080 can be found for less than $500, definitely better price/performance, but it lacks NVIDIA's most important GeForce 40 technology: DLSS 3 Frame Generation. NVIDIA is expected to announce new GeForce 40 Super cards in the coming days, which could shift things around in this segment, but I'm convinced that AMD will adjust their pricing accordingly, to stay in the game.