The Red team has already launched the Radeon RX 7900 series for some time now consisting of the $899 priced Radeon RX 7900 XT and the absolute flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX that should retail for $999 but cannot be found. While we have reviewed the latter and found out to be an amazing card in terms of raw 4K performance but essentially lacks the ray tracing performance when you compare it against the RTX 4080.
Now, obviously, anyone and everyone will go for the flagship card by paying $999 GPU which has made the RX 7900 XTX rare but if you find the same it makes no sense to buy the RX 7900 XT unless AMD reduces prices in future.
So, suppose you get this RX 7900 XT for cheap and you think of actually buying, here is our review suggesting the complete performance of the GPU and whether it's worth buying or not:
Specifications of AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX GPUs have a pretty similar design with almost the same dimensions when you compare with the RX 6900 XT reference GPU from last year but with that black accent which makes it look much more masculine.
On the other hand, when you compare both the two new AMD GPUs, the flagship RX 7900 XTX is a tad bit fat and heavy thanks to more memory as well as transistors, and the RX 7900 XT feels more of an RX 6800 XT in terms of weight. Both have triple fans and now with increased thermal limits, these AMD GPUs can be pushed further.
While the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX draws 350W of power ideally and nearly goes about 450W during gaming, its brother RX 7900 XT draws only 315W. Sporting up to 84 CUs based on the new RDNA3 architecture, this card has a lesser boost clock speed of up to 2400MHz.
The GPU features up to 5376 stream processors, a 20GB GDDR6 memory with up to 20Gbps speeds, this results in an effective memory bandwidth of 800GB/s and finally results in a whopping 52TFLOPs of peak single precision performance. Again, there is very minimal improvement in the number of Ray Accelerators but we now have 6 Shader Engines, a memory bandwidth of up to 960 GB/s alongside AV1 Decode/Encode support.
Test Config Specifications:
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE Z690 UD AX WIFI Motherboard
- CPU: Intel Core i7-12700KF
- RAM: 32GB (2X16) Corsair Vengeance Performance DDR5 Memory
- Primary SSD: Western Digital SN850 500GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD
- Secondary/Game SSD: 480GB Crucial SATA SSD, WD Green 960GB SATA SSD
- Power Supply: Antec HCG-1000-EXTREME PSU
- GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
- CPU Cooler: DEEPCOOL GAMMAXX L360 ARGB
- Cabinet: Cooler Master MasterBox K501L
- OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Productivity
While not many will actually use this AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT primarily for productivity work but with 20GB GDDR6 memory, it could be a nice gaming/productivity option. But does it stand against the RTX 4080? Well, here in terms of mature productivity numbers NVIDIA has taken the lead in the last few years but AMD isn't bad though if you get the GPU for cheap.
Here are the synthetic benchmarks for your reference to give you a better idea of how this card performs for professional work:
As you see in the benchmarks, in some of them both the RX 7900 XT and XTX GPUs have very close performance while in some you have a 10-15% difference. So, essentially here to spend a few extra bucks on the RX 7900 XTX makes better sense and it's needless to say the RX 7900 XT is a decoy card only.
Now, if you are the creator and need the best performance, these days NVIDIA GPUs are better in terms of rendering speeds and content creation, so, spending on an RTX 4090 for the long run is a better investment to be honest if you ask me from the productivity standpoint. However, if someone gets two RX 7900 XTX for $1998 could indeed be more powerful, so, this is completely up to you.
Gaming
The main attraction of this $899 GPU is the gaming performance and talking about that this graphics card is up to 10-15% slower than the RX 7900 XTX. Be it any game you take the 4K gaming performance is really impressive and when you compare it against the last-gen, the improvement is decent.
Here are some gaming benchmarks in 15 of the most demanding titles which will give you a better idea about the raw performance you can expect from this graphics card:
As you see in most of the high-end games like Control, Unchartered, and Watch Dogs Legion, this Radeon RX 7900 XT performs quite well but somewhat less than the RX 7900 XTX. For anyone who wants to enjoy 4K gaming comfortably without stressing about the ray tracing numbers, then this GPU is a serious one you should indeed consider.
So, why we haven't included the data of other GPUs and the RTX 4080? Well, we are planning for a mega comparison between the RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT and RTX 4080, so do follow us if you wanna see that detailed comparison.
Talking about ray tracing performance, the best game to use for comparison has to be Cyberpunk 2077, which even in 2022 is a hard game to even touch 4K 60 FPS at Ray Tracing set to Ultra. In this game, the GPU was able to give decent numbers when ray tracing was not used but when RT was turned on there is a huge drop in performance, especially at High or Ultra preset making the game really unplayable.
So, in those cases, you will require FSR to help you, but we expected better results from AMD especially when you compare with the RTX 40-series which has slightly better ray tracing performance. If someone wants to enjoy a ray-traced performance at 4K should probably opt for the RTX 4080 which we also reviewed recently.
While we would love this RX 7900 XT's price to drop to $799 maybe sometime later and only then buying this GPU would actually make sense. However, though the gaming performance is good for most triple-A titles but doesn't guarantee 100FPS+ in all games like the RX 7900 XTX does at 4K Max settings.
Verdict
Now, let's cut to the chase, should you buy this $899 priced AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT over its brother flagship? Well, no if you are getting the RX 7900 XTX for a slightly more price and that will be a good decision because for just a few extra bucks who wouldn't like to have a 10-15% better performance?
This GPU is nothing but a decoy card from AMD to make the RX 7900 XTX a better buy and that is pretty intentional. So, while we reviewers get two cards to review, personally, I will surely be more inclined towards the flagship and so are the people, now, to be very honest recommending this decoy card is very stupid unless its price decreases over time.
It's not that this RX 7900 XT is a bad GPU though, with good 4K performance, it too is a flagship of its kind and has improved a lot compared to the older RX 6000 series. However, in terms of price-to-performance ratio, it somewhere lags behind and after knowing all this I will keep the choice to you if you want to buy this GPU or not.
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