AMD has responded to NVIDIA's uber-expensive RTX 4000 series GPUs with their Radeon RX 7900 series.
Don't get us wrong, you'll still pay a pretty penny for them as the 7900XT will cost 900 bucks
while you'll pay a cool thousand for the top-end 7900XTX. I guess a hundred dollars for the extra X
is a fair deal, especially when you consider NVIDIA's top two cards start at 1200.
But are these cards of better value or is it another case of you get what you pay for?
Well, AMD's strategy has always been to compete on value against the likes of NVIDIA,
but this time one of the reasons Team Red's offerings are cheaper clearly doesn't have to
do with lower performance. The RX 7000 series utilizes GPUs made up of chiplets, so instead of
having a monolithic chip that's one solid piece like NVIDIA does, AMD instead is putting several
smaller chiplets together to form one cohesive GPU. Now this saves AMD money because the chiplet
approach improves yields, that is if one chiplet is defective they can throw out just that chiplet
instead of the entire GPU, which makes manufacturing cheaper. Additionally, the chiplets that are
dedicated to memory control and cache are made on a 6nm process, allowing AMD to cut costs where they
can while still giving gamers a high performance rendering chiplet on the 5nm process. As much
as AMD has done a really good job with RX 7000 and its RDNA 3 architecture, there are a couple
aspects where the lower price point does track with what the cards offer. The big elephant in
the room is ray tracing, which you might have predicted considering that we're now on the
third generation of cards where NVIDIA has really emphasized ray tracing as a strength of their
products, which you can even see from their inclusion of dedicated ray tracing cores and even
in how they've named some of their GPUs. AMD on the other hand has cards that support ray tracing,
but don't quite have the same chops for it as NVIDIA. But here's the thing, plenty of games
still do not support ray tracing, and even if your favorite titles do, you may not find yourself
caring all that much at all. For many gamers, more conventional visual enhancements such as higher
texture quality and more aggressive anti-aliasing makes a more noticeable difference than ray
traced light, and that doesn't even mean that the RX 7000 series is bad at ray tracing, it just
means that the team green options are better at it, at least for now. Now the other way in which
RX 7000 looks to lag a bit behind RTX 4000 is power consumption, possibly due to those six
nanometer chiplets, which is a bit disappointing, as chiplets are traditionally thought of as being
more power efficient than monolithic designs. The 7900 XTX, which competes with the RTX 4080,
tends to draw more power across titles and in synthetic benchmarks, so this could be a
consideration if you're running up against limits with your power supply. However, the difference
isn't obscene, and the 7900 XTX's superior performance in certain titles may be more than
worth it for many of you. Which card wins in which game depends quite a bit on whether that
particular title is optimized for NVIDIA or AMD, and if you're considering the slightly cheaper
7900 XT, know that while it doesn't quite hit the heights of the RTX 4080, it's not terribly far
off and will save you an additional hundo. But be warned, that also means it's not nearly as good
of a value, which is actually kind of crazy to say. We also cannot ignore how well these cards
could end up maturing over time, not just with driver updates as we saw with the RX 6000 series,
but also with FSR 3, the next generation of AMD's upscaling technology that competes with NVIDIA's
DLSS. FSR 3 isn't out yet, but it should be sometime in 2023, and Team Red is promising
significant framerate gains once it drops. However, it's an open technology that even
works on NVIDIA cards, so it's really unclear at this point as to whether RX 7000 will give you
an advantage if you use FSR 3. And it also generally stinks to pay good money today on the promise
that the product might be worth the cost tomorrow. So what's the bottom line here? Right now,
if you don't care about ray tracing, and can afford putting a few more watts of load on your
power supply, AMD's RX 7000 is probably a better buy. If ray tracing is a big deal to you, though,
you might want a spring for an NVIDIA RTX 4000 card. Whatever you do, be sure to read benchmark
results to find out how the cards perform in the games you want to play before buying.
Let us know down in the comments which card you're going with, but please don't turn the
discussion into a classic red versus green flame war. They're both doing us dirty these days.
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