AMD strikes back at Nvidia with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Let them fight
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny
💻 Two new graphics cards
✏️ AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
💸 AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX - $999 | RX 7900 XT - $899
📆 Launches December 13
Just a few weeks after Nvidia launched the RTX 4090, AMD has followed with its next-generation graphics cards, led by the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
In addition to the XTX, Team Red also debuted the RX 7900 XT. It seems like confusing naming schemes are really in fashion for this generation of graphics cards.
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT will launch on December 13, for $999 and $899 respectively. Hopefully, they’ll be in plentiful supply when they launch, but even if they aren’t, we’ll do everything we can to help you buy it.
Ok Jackie, but what can these cards actually do?
While the two have very similar names, they’re very different cards. The 7900 XTX is a 24GB graphics card with 96 compute units and a 2.3GHz game clock. The 7900 XT, on the other hand, cuts the VRAM down to 20GB and the compute units down to 84.
So, if you want the most power you can get from your AMD graphics card, make sure you pay attention to the name and make sure you’ve got that extra “T.”
But today’s presentation wasn’t just loud dubstep music and glorified games trailers.
AMD put a lot of emphasis on the future with these cards, and to that end, the 7900 XT and XTX are the first graphics cards to support DisplayPort 2.1. This doesn’t seem that exciting at first glance, but it will let you output video in 8K at 160Hz and 4K at 480Hz.
There are lots of gaming monitors coming out in the first half of 2023 that will take advantage of these new limits; AMD showed off the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9, which will be an 8K ultrawide (🤯🤯) monitor.
However, when asked if the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX will compete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, Scott Herkelman told the audience that AMD is “competing with the $1,000 and less range and that [The RTX 4090] is in a class of its own]. So, these graphics cards are likely meant to compete with the RTX 4080, instead.
AMD did upgrade its answer to DLSS, though. FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0 is being introduced with these graphics cards and should be more comparable to Nvidia’s tech. A large part of that is because of AI accelerator cores being built into each Compute Unit, similar to Tensor Cores. I have no idea how these work yet, though, so you should take that with a grain of salt.
As for ray tracing, AMD claims the RX 7900 XTX is 1.5 times faster than the RX 6950X. That might not be enough for Team Red to pull ahead in performance there, but if it’s better, I’ll take it. It’s all about progress, after all.