AMD’s new Radeon RX 7900 XT is based on RDNA 3 and costs $899. It is not a cheap graphics card. PC gamers will likely have to wait until well into 2023 for a “budget-friendly” GPU built on AMD’s new architecture, but this is now the most affordable ultra-high-end GPU of AMD’s and Nvidia’s new generations. So far, it is your only choice between AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 line and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series that costs less than $1,000.
The only other choice is to buy a card from the generation before. It’s a winner, but the drop in performance that comes with the price cut makes it a much less appealing option than AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which came out at the same time and won the Editors’ Choice award. But the smaller RX 7900 XT could be a good deal if it goes on sale or if you can’t get your hands on an RX 7900 XTX, which sold out in minutes when it came out this week.
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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
Soon, you’ll be able to buy the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. Its RDNA 3 GPU will compete with the Nvidia RTX 4000 series. We’ve put together everything we know about the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU, like its release date, price, specs, and benchmarks, to make it easier to understand all the latest news about it. Even though the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT may not be the best graphics card in the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series in terms of specs, its price and performance may make it a great deal.
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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Design
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is an ordinary graphics card. The way it looks and how it uses color is nothing special. The design is simple and clean. It is all black with a few red accents. The 6000 series of AMD Radeon cards had a different design, but the cooling system used here to keep the temperature of the RX 7900 XT within a certain range isn’t new.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Features
AMD was able to get more performance per watt, which let the company keep using the same three-fan cooling system. It’s mostly too much for what’s on this card, but it should work well in games. There are three fans that shoot down at the full-size PCB with 92mm blades. The metal backplate and shroud make it quite heavy.
Even though this GPU isn’t as big as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, AMD calls it a 2.5-slot GPU, which means you’ll have to give up three PCI slots. We do hope that people will stop selling things in 2.x slots. If there are 2.5 slots, then there are 3 slots. You can’t plug anything into the slot below this GPU, but that’s a fair trade-off for a GPU with this much power. The graphics card gets power from two 8-pin PCIe ports. It makes sense that this card doesn’t have a 12-pin special port because it only needs 315W of power.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Performance
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT was tested at UHD (2160p) and QHD (2560×1440) resolutions (1440p). All games were loaded and played from the same Sabrent PCIe 4.0 SSD for the best performance. Putting an AMD GPU with an Intel motherboard and processor shows that AMD’s Smart Access Memory does affect performance.
But most people probably won’t notice a difference unless they want the best frame rates. During testing, sensors and other metrics were kept track of with a kilowatt measurement device and software. During our tests, we turn off all technologies that keep things in sync. This includes AMD FreeSync, NVIDIA G-Sync, and V-Sync. But we might keep track of how much these technologies change things when they are turned on.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Construction
AMD switched to a design with chiplets, which is the first time we’ve seen one on a graphics card. This means that each watt can do more work for the company. Other highlights include the 2nd Gen AMD Infinity Cache with up to 3,494GB/s of bandwidth using Smart Access Memory with an AMD Ryzen CPU, better ray tracing cores, hardware-accelerated AV1 support, and a new Radiance Display Engine.
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This GPU is mostly the same as the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but it has less memory, slower clock speeds, and less cores. The goal of RDNA 3 was to make good GPUs that cost less than $1,000. With the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, this is almost possible, but the Radeon RX 7900 XT is a little cheaper at $899. This is closer to what we would have expected to pay for a top-of-the-line GPU before the pandemic and the crypto mining craze drove prices through the roof.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Release Date
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT will come out on December 13, 2022. But it won’t be the only one for sale. At the same time, AMD will release the more powerful AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Reference models from AMD and custom designs from board partners should come out at the same time, and pre-orders should start soon.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Price
The AMD Radoen RX 7900 XT costs $899 USD, which is less than the most expensive card from the last generation. Even though it costs more, the RX 7900 XTX is not the most expensive GPU in the series. This MSRP is only for the AMD Radeon nRX 7900 XT reference design. Board partners like Asus and MSI usually make more expensive models.
Conclusion
The high-end AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT desktop graphics card uses the RDNA 3 architecture. It uses the Navi 31 Chip, which has five out of six Memory Cache Dies (MCD) made with a 5nm process and a Graphics Compute Die (GCD) made with a 5nm process. The 7900 XT has a maximum clock speed of 2.4 GHz and an average game speed of 2 GHz.
It has 5.376 cores. It also has 80 MB of Infinity Cache, L3 cache, 20 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory with a 320-bit memory bus and a speed of 20 Gbps, and a 320-bit memory bus width. The average performance in games without raytracing is just a little bit worse than the GeForce RTX 4080.
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So, the RX 7900 XT is best for QHD games with higher frame rates up to 4K resolution and the highest detail settings in 2022. Raytracing speed is still a bit slower than with Nvidia cards, but it’s a big improvement over the last generation. The built-in video encoders and decoders can handle videos with resolutions up to 8K in AV1, H.264, and HEVC.
One of the best things about the new chip is that it supports DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR13.5 for up to 54 Gbps bandwidth at up to 8K 165 Hz with DSC. In our tests, it used about the same amount of power as the RTX 4080, which is 315 Watts.
