Launching at $899, AMD’s new RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 XT looks nothing like a budget graphics card. PC gamers will likely have to wait until 2023 for anything built on AMD’s new architecture that we consider truly “on the budget,” but this is now the most affordable ultra-high-end GPU of the new generations from AMD and Nvidia. It’s also your only choice, so far, between AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 line and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 40 series, which is under $1,000; the alternative is to buy a state-of-the-art card. It’s a plug, but the performance drop that comes with that price cut makes it a noticeably less attractive option than AMD’s award-winning Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which debuted alongside it. However, the smaller RX 7900 XT is still worth picking up if you can find it on sale… or if you just can’t get your hands on an RX 7900 XTX, which sold out within minutes of its launch earlier this year this week.
You can trust our reviews
The design: You know the RX 7900 reducer
AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT is not far from the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in any significant way. In other words, they’re about 10% off each other, with the Radeon RX 7900 XT coming in at $899 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at $999. We see a similar trend when it comes to hardware resources, as the Radeon RX 7900 XT uses the same GPU as the 7900 XTX, just with a few pieces missing.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Some hardware components have been disabled in the RX 7900 XT, likely due to slightly flawed chips that can be converted to 7900 XT GPUs, but this only creates a relatively small difference between AMD’s two new graphics cards. In our AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX review, we covered AMD’s new RDNA 3 microarchitecture and its chip, so we won’t go into those details in depth here. Instead, we’ll focus on the basics of what’s inside the Radeon RX 7900 XT.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
A cornerstone of AMD’s new RDNA 3 GPUs is that they are built on chips rather than large monolithic chips. This includes a single large chip called the Graphics Compute Die (or GCD) and several smaller chips called Memory Cache Dies (MCD). The GCD contains most of the core feature units, such as shaders, TMUs, and ROPs. MCDs contain memory controllers and GPUs have Infinity Cache.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
In the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the GCD contains 6144 stream processors, 384 TMUs, 192 ROPs and 96 ray tracing cores, and the shaders are clocked at 2300MHz with a boost clock of 2500MHz. The Radeon RX 7900 XT contains the same GCD, but with some shaders disabled, leaving 5,376 stream processors, 336 TMUs, 168 ROPs, and 84 ray tracing cores active. The clock speed was also slightly reduced, to 2000 MHz with a boost clock of 2400 MHz.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT have six MCDs, but one of these units is disabled on the Radeon 7900 XT. The Radeon 7900 XTX, with 96 MB of Infinity cache and a 384-bit memory interface, has 20 GB of GDDR6X RAM that allows 960 GBps of bandwidth for this card; the Radeon RX 7900 XT loses about a sixth across the board, giving it 80MB of Infinity cache, a 320-bit memory interface, and 800GBps of bandwidth while using 20Gbps of GDDR6X vRAM.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
AMD reworked several aspects of the Radeon RX 7900 XT to accommodate these reductions. In addition to having fewer cores and less bandwidth, the Radeon RX 7900 XT has a lower TDP of 315 watts and a smaller overall physical size, measuring 4.4 by 10.9 by 2.1 inches (HWD) . Three fans are fitted to the card to provide cooling in this AMD reference design.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The card’s ports are identical to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with two cards featuring two eight-pin PCI Express power connectors, two DisplayPort outputs, an HDMI port, and a USB Type-C port.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Test: Configuration and Competition
We tested the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT in our 2022 GPU testbench, which consists of an Intel Core i9-12900K processor running at stock clocks on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. The processor has access to 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM running at 5600MHz, and the processor is kept cool by a Corsair Hydro Series H100X water cooler.
The system also contains a 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro NVMe 4.0 SSD as the primary storage device with Windows 11 Pro installed. Power is supplied by a Corsair HX1500i 1,500W 80 Plus Platinum power supply.
With AMD and Nvidia only having two graphics cards each in their new product generations, the competition is a bit thin at the moment. The two new graphics cards in Nvidia’s RTX 40 series are significantly more expensive, with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 costing $1,199 and $1,599, respectively.
Due to the large price difference, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT’s main competitor is currently AMD’s own Radeon RX 7900 XTX. With only a $100 difference between them, if you’re considering either, both are worth considering. There are also higher-end cards, but as you’ll see in a moment, even the best of them don’t offer much competition against the Radeon RX 7900 XT, especially when you consider the price. We might not recommend the upgrade if you already have one of the high-end graphics cards, but we were also hesitant to buy one at this point.
Synthetic reference points
Synthetic test results show that the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX are relatively close, with a difference of 18% to 26% in the worst and best cases, respectively.
These tests don’t mean much as they are more of an indication of the best case scenario for each card in narrow use cases and not really indicative of real world performance. The actual test results are a little less consistent, but in this case, they match the synthetic results more often than not.
Ray tracing, DLSS and FSR tests
With or without FSR enabled, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX manages to maintain an 11% to 17% performance difference over the Radeon RX 7900 XT in F1 22 and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
Nvidia’s RTX 40 series performs better in games that implement Ray-Tracing, its performance when using FSR and DLSS (AMD’s and Nvidia’s upscaling technologies respectively) seems to favor FSR d AMD, at least in F1 22. The GeForce RTX 4080 still outperforms the Radeon RX 7900 XT in this test without a doubt, but the 5% advantage at 2K and 6% at 4K are especially small if you consider account for the $300 price difference between these two cards.
Tests of modern games
This is where things get a little more negative for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. The performance results of these tests strongly favor the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, with a 10% to 24% performance advantage. A performance gap of around 10% isn’t too bad, as it matches the relative price drop between these two cards. However, a whopping 24% advantage means you’ll get much better value from a Radeon RX 7900 XTX for just $100 more.
There are some tests that show the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX together, but we have reason to believe that the CPU is creating a bottleneck in these tests. The best thing we can say about the Radeon RX 7900 XT here is that its performance is once again surprisingly close to the GeForce RTX 4080 in some select tests. The difference in Far Cry 5 at 4K is just 5% in favor of the RTX 4080, and it’s just 14% behind Red Dead Redemption 2.
Legacy game testing
Performance on legacy games is all over the place, with the best we can tell is that all of these tests were successful. This is something we are not always able to say.
The legacy games we use generally run better on Nvidia’s RTX 40 series cards, but this win is undermined by the fact that these games run even better on older RTX 30 series cards than the RTX 40 series. In general, games run well enough on most cards, including the Radeon RX 7900 XT. However, if you plan to play older games, we recommend getting an older graphics card or computer for this purpose.
Radeon RX 7900 XT: power and thermals
We test system-wide power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt monitor to measure power consumption between cards. Power consumption on the Radeon RX 7900 XT is about on par with many of the card’s other test scores, ie about 10% lower than the 7900 XTX.
The temperatures we measured during testing are slightly higher, but still quite low compared to many last generation cards. We also noticed during testing that the 7900 XT doesn’t get as loud as the 7900 XTX and was typically significantly quieter. This indicates that the GPU fans are not working as hard, and the slightly higher temperatures and quieter operation are likely due to a difference in the cooling settings out of the box.
The verdict: A cry that should be cheaper
It’s hard to deny that the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT performs well in the games we tested. This card does it all without a hitch, clearly outperforming the latest AMD cards and occasionally pushing the much more expensive Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080. At the same time, however, it falls a bit behind the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX than we would like. see the small price difference of $100.
(Credits: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
If you’re ready and willing to pay $899 for a high-end graphics card, you’re really going to stop here and not pay the extra $100 for a card that performs 10-24% better in games, and more often than not landing closer to being 20% faster?
Not everyone is willing or able to pay that much for a graphics card to begin with, but we have trouble believing that those who can and won’t just get the best card…especially when you get better value and overall performance for an increase in relatively small prices. In short, we…