AMD's RX 6950xt is almost a totally
different class of GPU compared to when it first launched to tepid reviews
earlier this year and with recent price adjustments it is such a good deal now
that its green opponent no longer makes any sense and neither does its
predecessor the 6900 XT but why am I talking about the 6000
series because however the RX 7900
series performs today and it's good I
want you to also keep in mind AMD's track record for dramatically improving
the performance of their gpus through new features and Driver optimizations
personally I'm counting on it because now that I have publicly committed to
skipping NVIDIA's latest 40 series cards AMD is my only hope for an upgrade this
generation just like my only hope of paying our
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right out of the gate the 7900 series is
full of upgrades it features AMD's brand new rdna 3 architecture up to 24
gigabytes of much higher bandwidth gddr6 memory substantially boosted core clocks
across the board and this is great the step down 7900 XT comes with as many
compute units as AMD's previous Flagship with the beefier XTX rocking even more
despite having more and faster cores though one of AMD's boldest claims is
that they've managed to improve efficiency by 54 this is thanks in large
part to AMD's high bandwidth chiplet design the first of its kind in a modern
GPU what's more they've beefed up their Ray accelerator cores for real-time
raytraced Lighting in supported games and finally included AI accelerator
cores to bring Radeon to feature parody with NVIDIA and Intel's offerings
unlike those offerings however the Radeon RX 7900 series cards we're
looking at today come equipped with DisplayPort 2.1 which enables support
for up to 8K 165 Hertz displays is that even
necessary who cares it's awesome
and it's something that NVIDIA's top-end GPU the RTX 4090 cannot do in spite of
its staggering sixteen hundred dollar sticker price
all of this is while actually fitting in your case and costing 900 and a thousand
dollars for the XT and the XTX respectively that is 200 to 300 less
than the RTX 4080 that AMD says they
should be able to compete with for Speed Of course we won't be taking their word
for that AMD has been known to be optimistic at 4K it's clear out of the
gate and Shadow of the Tomb Raider that whatever team red fans might have hoped
for the RX 7900 XTX is not AMD's answer
to the RTX 4090 it's got performance that is realistically more in line with
the 4080 though that is what AMD said
and this pattern continues in Hitman cyberpunk 2077 and Modern Warfare 2.
well great right I mean why did I spend
all that time talking about the importance of AMD's ongoing driver developments keep that in mind well
there's this for one thing Forza Horizon 5 is a clear loss for team red thanks to
those subpar one percent and five percent low frame rates but also this
for another reason that right there is a
one thousand dollar GPU beating a sixteen hundred dollar GPU in F1 2022
and if the results I'm looking at right now are any indication of the kind of
raw power that AMD's driver team has on tap here there is some serious aging
like fine wine potential on the table
of course you should never buy a promise though and today AMD's best Trails
NVIDIA's best by about 17 which sounds
bad Until you realize that NVIDIA's card costs 60 percent more compared to the
4080 the XTX is a no-brainer at nine percent faster and 20 cheaper and the
7900 XT does even better I mean sure the
4080 is seven percent faster but costs 33 percent more
1440p doesn't always show us a difference compared to 4K but here we do
see some strange behavior in Forza that we retested several times the 7000
series is actually slower than AMD's older 6000 series cards we think this
could be a problem with the game as it's the only one out of our suite that does
it and when we went to test for it says Ray tracing performance we saw that it
was in fact pretty broken we also see
the RTX 4080 pull ahead of even the XTX
in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption which is especially
surprising considering that virtually every other game shows AMD closing the
Gap instead the biggest example is in Modern Warfare 2 where the minimum frame
rates aren't quite up to the level of the RTX 4090 but the average frame rates
are which again can set some potential for optimization in total these numbers
put the 7900 Series in a very good position to compete with NVIDIA's 40
series to the point where if traditional rasterized gaming was all that existed
NVIDIA would need to lower their prices but it isn't all that exists and Ray
tracing is sadly still not AMD's strong
suit while substantially better in cyberpunk than the rx6000 series these
7000 series gpus are behind NVIDIA by at
least a factor of two at 4K at 1440p AMD
at least manages to break the 30 FPS minimum Mark making the game playable
and you can use FSR to render at a lower resolution and upscale for smooth
gameplay but at that point we could also do the same thing for Team Green and the
overall story would still be the same F1 2022 fares slightly better for AMD at
least with the 7900 XTX pulling up to within 16 percent of the RTX 4080 in
minimum frame rates and actually near parity on average which again gives me
hope that some of AMD's woes with Ray tracing are a matter of optimization and
that feeling only grows with shadow of the Tomb Raider where even at 4K it's
within about 12 percent of the 4090 and turning out nearly 60 FPS it is an older
game but that's not bad it's just that a
good race ran when the other guy ran faster is still an l and ultimately the
RX 7900 XTX just couldn't even come close to the RTX 4080s level of
performance with Ray tracing enabled I suspect that most people myself included
still don't use Ray tracing often and won't really be affected but given that
these things do still cost a thousand flipping dollars it's definitely a skid
mark on what has otherwise been a pretty good showing so far and I'm afraid
there's more where that came from the professionals who have need of this kind
of graphical horsepower will be well disappointed isn't quite the right word
but looking at these numbers they're not going to be excited either yes blender
runs a good eight to twenty percent faster on the 7000 versus the 6000
series but NVIDIA walks all over AMD's
entire stack at between three to four times the performance thankfully AMD's
new encoding engine helps them push ahead of the RTX 4080 in DaVinci Resolve
in both h.264 and especially h.265 which
their encoding engine seems to favor that's a good 20 more speed for the XTX
there not bad though the 49d does remain
on top procyon video and photo are also pretty good for AMD with performance
that I would call comparable it's within a few percentage points either way you
look at it and rounding out the video editing Suite is topaz AI which despite
the name is using GPU compute here rather than any AI course and wow even
the 7900 XT outperforms the RTX 4090
here this workload seems to heavily favor AMD's Infinity cash as the 6000
series cards aren't too shabby either specvperf brings AMD about as many wins
as losses but the degree to which the 7000 series wins over the competition is
often much lower than the losses that they suffer with especially poor results
in 3ds Max Maya and SolidWorks which
even dip under the performance of the 6000 series that's pretty rough those
are kind of important applications they pull off major wins in Catia Creo energy
medical and especially Siemens NX though
as we've said in the past this is because the version in specview perf
doesn't support Hardware acceleration on NVIDIA and actually this is just going
to be excluded from our averages when we calculate it later on spec workstation
Paints the radons in a significantly better light though with product
development life sciences and energy all pushing well past Team Green but media
and entertainment as well as GPU compute still stay with NVIDIA likely thanks to
opencl's relative obscurity next to Cuda despite the blows the 7900 series car
cards took though their beefed up media engines and GPU compute horsepower
placed them with an average of two to ten percent of Team Green given the wide
performance spread we saw depending on the workload potential prospective
professional people will want to think long and hard about which capabilities
are most important to them before making a final decision changing gears a little
we found something interesting when we were testing resizable bar on both Intel
and AMD platforms it seems like the performance improvements regardless of
whether you have a team blue or team red CPU can be expected to be pretty similar
despite AMD heavily marketing smart access memory as a selling point for the
ryzen plus Radeon ecosystem bear in mind
that this is a sample size of just two games but without resizable bar we're
figuring you can expect anywhere from a 10 to 35 percent reduction in
performance regardless of which side you
swing for as for AMD's updated video encoder there's a lot to be excited
about here av1 support and baked in machine learning to improve quality at
the top of my list but despite receiving our cards early we actually only had a
few days to test these things prior to embargo because we didn't have a driver
so we were forced to push our image quality comparisons to a separate video
that you can expect to see in the next couple of weeks one of AMD's other selling points is its
smaller footprint compared to NVIDIA's 40 series gpus and I was concerned that
this would come at the expense of thermals so I was extremely pleased to
see that AMD's new cooler design has the 7000 series actually performing better
than the 6000 series with that said though AMD does not have the luxury of
only competing with themselves and NVIDIA is clearly in the better position
here though with that said both of the
NVIDIA cards we tested have substantially larger heatsinks with fan
off modes while AMD's new cards always ran their fans it's probable that
designs from the likes of ASUS or power color will run much cooler and hopefully
quieter now we need to talk about core clocks
because they're a little different this generation thanks to the decoupling of
the front end and the Shader clocks the idea here is that the front end will
benefit more from higher clocks while the more numerous Shader units crunch
data in parallel at a lower clock speed resulting in a better balance of
performance and efficiency and you can see that in action here where both the
7900 XTX and XT have a consistent 200
megahertz gap between the two clocks and even in a power virus like MSI combustor
these clocks remained higher than the previous generation clock stability in
game is similar to the 6000 series cards but NVIDIA's 40 series manages flatter
lines throughout the Run suggesting that AMD is trying to be pretty aggressive
with managing power consumption which makes sense because AMD talked a
lot about performance per watt in their marketing and looking at these in-game
paragraphs no that seems to suggest that their
self-congratulations are well Justified the Radeon RX 7900 XTX Drew comparable
power to the 4080 and this held even when we hit it with MSI combustor the XT
was even better still staying in line with its predecessor but what's
interesting is when we take a magnifying glass to how many watts the 7000 series
poles per frame in this example while
the raw wattage drops much closer to the RTX 4080 when we capped the frame rate
to 100 the total watts per frame increases substantially this suggests
that while the RTX 4080 is able to throttle itself effectively AMD is
actually having some trouble with power management and AMD's idle power
consumption numbers seem to corroborate this where the RTX 4080 idles at around
15 to 20 watts the 7900 XTX regularly
sucks Back 40 and sometimes over 50
Watts while doing nothing at all what's
even more baffling is that we noticed what seems like a major bug during our
testing depending on the monitor that we plugged into the GPU we saw a wildly
different total system power at the wall from a respectable 52 Watts with nothing
plugged in to a whopping 171 Watts with our 27 inch Rog Swift
bench display using some other monitors
even caused performance to drop now
given that I have a high-end display and I live in Vancouver Canada where energy
is the one thing that is still cheap none of this is a deal breaker for me
but if I was in Europe where Energy prices had surged pun intended it would
give me pause before I was willing to look at team red adding insult to injury
this high idle power draw means that the fans are spinning at all times kicking
that heat out into your room even if you're just scrolling Reddit meaning
that the 7900 series is going to be a little less comfortable to live with
maybe if you go team red you could pick up a blank T rather than a retro polar
fleece from ltdstore.com space heater one possible explanation for this high
idle power consumption could be that this is a similar situation to the ryzen
7 5800 X 3D that CPU's use of 3D V cash
limited its stability if voltages weren't dialed in just right and we
could be witnessing similar teething issues with this new chiplet
architecture and supporting that theory is the fact that the driver straight up
locks out power adjustments below 90 percent of total board power when we
asked them about this AMD played pretty Coy with us which tells us either we're
right or that they're not sure either now it's time to talk about what this
data means for the GPU Market first of all anyone who was hoping that the 7900
series would come in and compete head to head against the RTX 4090 will be sorely
disappointed at least for today we saw a brief glimpses of Glory but the RTX 4090
remains on its Throne making it tough to dislodge its price from that TI Titan
perch that it currently occupies as a Halo product but while AMD doesn't have
a direct competitor to it I still think the 7900 XTX is a much better value
as for the RTX 4080 well the comparison
gets a little more complicated even the XT model comes really close in
traditional rendering and the value proposition of either 7900 GPU is a
damning indictment of NVIDIA's pricing but AMD does remain on the back foot in
Ray tracing performance and that's something that NVIDIA can point to and
claim makes up the difference even if nobody seriously cares it'll take people
like me running out and buying 7900
series cards instead of 40 series to make NVIDIA realize that they're out to
lunch but wait why are we saying this now you
might think we took a lot of flack for covering for NVIDIA's pricing in the RTX
4080 review didn't we well not so much first off we compared it to cards that
were available at the time it released and we ended the video with a message to
wait for our dna3 and we're reviewing the 7900 Series in much the same way
second it had already been made known that the RX 7900 XTX was not going to
compete with the 4090 which depending on how you look at it means that either the
RTX 4080 is actually a 90 class card and
priced accordingly with the 490 being a TI or something or the 7900 XT and XTX
are the current gen equivalent of the 6800 and 6800 XT and are themselves
overpriced basically it's kind of a game
of pick your Villain at this point because the reality is that 600 top of
the line gpus are a thing of the past and that was an assumption that our
review made but did not fully explain it's worth pointing out by the way since
I'm being a downer right now anyway that while AMD supports DisplayPort 2.1 and
NVIDIA's 40 series does not AMD went with a half measure by supporting only
the uhbr 13.5 spec what this means is
that it can only achieve its lofty resolution and frame rate support
through display stream compression DSC allows up to three times more bandwidth
than is both near zero latency and Visually lossless though that doesn't
mean that there is no quality loss practically speaking this won't be a
problem even if it were noticeable given that these gpus aren't really capable of
pushing those resolutions and frame rates anyway but we brought it up with
the RTX 40 series so we're bringing it up here for the sake of completeness it
means that those new 8K ultrawide displays being shown up at CES will just
barely be able to run at 85 Hertz without DSC but I would never expect
that to be a problem for an actual user one slightly problematic thing that I do
need to address is that we've taken a very glass half full approach today and
I can understand why some of you might be frustrated by it we've gone and spun
AMD's potential future driver improvements as a good thing when
actually they're kind of bad another perspective is that it means that AMD is
releasing these products even though they haven't really finished optimizing
them and if you've kind of felt that way up to this point I totally get where
you're coming from we ran into some kind of bizarre no really bizarre crashes and
there are certainly features that could be added or refined but In fairness to
our charitable approach today AMD is pricing these gpus according to what
they are now and their track record for fixing these things is actually pretty
good even if sometimes it takes a while as they focus on new features like FSR
3.0 and the hyper RX performance
Optimizer that have yet to Launch and if this is where performance is now with
some of what broken certainly unoptimized drivers AMD clearly has some
great Hardware on their hands here they even brought back the USBC Port
something that is great for hooking up a monitor via a single cable and a godsend
for enthusiasts like myself I'm still mad that NVIDIA removed it after the 20
series so the RX 7900 XTX is going into my
gaming rig and I'm officially switching to team red for the first time since the
3870. goodness gracious
the performance is good enough the price is good enough well at least compared to
the competition and the downsides are small enough that I am comfortable
making the leap just like I'm gonna comfortably leap to this Segway from our
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check it out at the link in the video description if you enjoyed this and
you're looking for something else to watch maybe go check out that Arc 30 day challenge video I mentioned Intel's
doing some really good things over there but they also have a lot of work to do