AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX review: can RDNA 3 bring the value?

Rasterisation analysis - part one.

Review by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 12 Dec 2022

So far, RDNA 3 has performed exactly how we expected it to in terms of ray tracing performance - there's a solid generational increase in frame-rates compared to RDNA 2, but effectively we're looking at AMD matching Nvidia's last-gen showing. The gloves should come off at this point, where we'll see RDNA 3's rasterisation performance take the Radeon cards ahead of the RTX 4080. Some have predicted frame-rates within striking distance of RTX 4090, even, but let's remember that AMD itself has never positioned the XTX as anything other than a 4080 competitor.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Control

Cutscenes in Control are hard to benchmark repeatedly, since save points aren't anywhere near them generally. Instead we rely on the opening minutes of the game to give some idea of relative performance between our line-up of graphics hardware. There may well be some degree of disappointment based on this bench alone as the top-end XTX can only match the RTX 4080, while it lags behind with RT enabled. Still, it is cheaper.

The RX 7900 XT is problematic in that it's 90 percent as expensive as the XTX, but only offers 83 percent of the performance. Looking back at RDNA 2, the RX 6800 XT enjoyed a far higher discount vs the RX 6900 XT and wasn't cut down to the same degree. Gen-on-gen, AMD has 'done an Nvidia' in moving the best price/performance ratio to the higher-end card. Just because AMD is cheaper than Nvidia, this doesn't mean that hiking prices on the cheaper cards is any more acceptable.

CONTROL, HIGH, DX12, TAA

Cyberpunk 2077

4K rasterisation tests in Cyberpunk 2077 are extremely demanding, but the RDNA 3 cards offer some impressive performance here. The RX 7900 XTX offers almost 90 percent of the frame-rates delivered by the RTX 4090 now, effortlessly powering ahead of the RTX 4080 with a nine percentage point lead. Gen-on-gen gains from both RDNA 3 cards are impressive here too and it seems that we're looking at what must be one of the best case scenarios based on our tests. The XTX is around 13 percent ahead of the XT here, which is surprisingly close based on the specs differential.

CYBERPUNK 2077, ULTRA, DX12, TAA

Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal hits CPU limits on the RTX 4090 in this test, so it's not the fairest comparison when stacked up against its less capable rivals. Factor out the RTX 4090 though and we have some interesting face-offs, with the number one takeaway being that the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4080 are effectively neck and neck here, with the RX 7900 XT delivering around 15 percentage points more performance than the XT model. As well as the stalemate against RTX 4080 falling short of expectations, the gen-on-gen improvements over RDNA 2 are hardly overwhelming here either.