Just yesterday we took a look at the AMD reference design Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. Today the review embargo for the custom-design partner cards expires and we have two reviews for you: ASUS RX 7900 XTX TUF and XFX Radeon RX 7900 XTX Speedster Merc 310 OC. There's more reviews in the pipeline, including of XT versions, so stay tuned.

AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture 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, making them cheaper to produce.

The RX 7900 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 Originally I wanted to switch over the holidays, but constant feedback on how "outdated, slow, and terrible" the 5800X is (it is not), made me switch early—just last week.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, the factory-overclocked ASUS Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a 2% performance lead over the AMD reference design, which increases the performance uplift to RTX 4080 from 3% to 5%. While a few percent here and there isn't "much," it's still a welcome improvement. The gap to RTX 4090 shrinks to 20% now. Compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, the XFX card is 22% faster and the increase over the RTX 3090 is 37%. Compared to last generation's RX 6900 XT, the TUF is a whopping 52% faster. The differences between individual games are huge, in some titles the XTX is 25% faster than the 4080, in others it's 10% slower. I've added a new chart at the end of the "Relative Performance" page, to break that down for you.

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.

We've seen the ASUS TUF design before, on the RTX 4080 and 4090. This monstrous quad-slot cooler is huge, and that helps with cooling. In our apples-to-apples heatsink comparison test at normalized noise and power output, the TUF heatsink can achieve a temperature reduction of 14°C (!) over the AMD reference XTX—very impressive. Of course the larger card means that upgrading might require a new case, or that the quad-slot design will block a motherboard slot that you need. For the vast majority of gamers this will be a non-issue though, multi-GPU is dead, so you'll have plenty of unused slots. As expected, temperatures are fantastic with with only 59°C, but ASUS was clever and didn't just waste all their cooling potential on the lowest possible temps, but they also brought down noise levels too. While the AMD reference card was "not quiet, but not loud" with 39 dBA, the ASUS TUF is really quiet with 31 dBA. If you want an even quieter experience, then activate the "quiet" BIOS and your noise levels drop to a whisper-quiet 29 dBA. At this setting the card is barely audible, especially with other noise sources in your PC, like a CPU cooler or PSU fan. Good job ASUS! Best cooler right there! Just like the reference cards, the ASUS TUF includes 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. As mentioned before, ASUS has overclocked and overvolted their card, to unlock higher performance. This means that power consumption is increased, by roughly 40 W, which is perfectly fine and makes sense, given that this is a 3x 8-pin design. This move does lower energy efficiency by 7% though, which is unfortunate, but still acceptable I'd say. Just like the AMD board, as the card heats up, the frequencies will drop by a lot. In our thermal load test, the card starts out running at 2777 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 2522 MHz and stay there until the card cools down again at the end of your gaming session. This 9.2% 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 99 W and 86 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. 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."

Overclocking worked really well on the ASUS TUF, better than on any other Navi 31 card that I've tested so far. What definitely helps here is the 3x 8-pin power inputs. While the AMD reference card very quickly ran into its power limit, even at the +15% power setting, the ASUS card has more headroom, which allows higher overclocks. Overclocking is still complicated, but I have to admit it was fun seeing all the pieces come together to unlock an overclock that's better than what we usually see in our reviews (from both AMD and NVIDIA).

ASUS hasn't given us any pricing yet, throughout this review I've assumed a price point of $1100 and will update this review when final pricing is out. No doubt, the ASUS TUF is an impressive piece of engineering, and it comes with a thermal solution that's so much better than the AMD reference card. Noise levels are now fantastic, and this combo could definitely tempt me to spend the extra $100. On the other hand, at $1100, there's "only" another +$100 to the RTX 4080 MSRP, which offers lower raster performance but higher ray tracing FPS, with better energy efficiency overall. What's definitely great is manual overclocking on the ASUS TUF, if you love playing with OC and are willing to try and learn, then there's some fun to be had here.