AMD is back and NVIDIA is about to pay
for their outrageous pricing practices the rdna3 announcement just concluded
and while AMD gave us very little in the way of meaningful
performance data I'm really optimistic anyway and here's why immediately after
the stream ended our Labs team sprang into action building up test benches as
close as possible to the ones that AMD used in their performance preview that
allowed us to expand on AMD's rather
vague slides that didn't include a single NVIDIA GPU and extrapolate some
actually useful comparative performance
data now the bad news is that NVIDIA might still be the performance King but
the good news is that I can confidently say that AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XTX
should come within spitting distance of NVIDIA's RTX 4090 for 600 dollars less
the only thing with better performance per dollar is this segue to our sponsor
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pdq.com LTT
in AMD's together we advance underscore
gaming live event they announced the two Flagship tier gpus that will lead their
rdna 3 family the Radeon RX 7900 XT and
7900 XTX with 20 and 24 gigabytes of
gddr6 respectively which was my first
surprise I mean why would they cheap out on the memory when they need to compete
with NVIDIA cards that are using faster gddr6x two reasons one to save power
which fair enough given the reputation their
competition is built for unreasonable power consumption in thermals and two
they just don't seem to need it the most useful slide that AMD provided was this
one where we see the 7900 XTX performing
between one and a half to 1.7 times the
outgoing Flagship 6950xt at 4K now AMD
was frustratingly vague about the exact settings that they used to achieve these
results even when we probed them after the event but we managed to extract just
enough information to create our own set of performance graphs by extrapolating
from our own reference 6950xt
let's start with cyberpunk 2077 AMD's
previous best managed 46 FPS
not great but multiply that by 1.7 and
we've got a spicy 78 frames per second that's just a single frame per second
behind the RTX 4090 what a generational
Improvement in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 our RX 6950xt managed a
respectable 90 FPS when we multiply that by AMD's 1.5 times assuming of course
they're not just outright lying we can expect the 7900 XTX to lag NVIDIA's
Flagship by only six percent hot dang
finally in Watchdogs Legion the 7900 XTX
takes its largest L compared to the RTX 4090 but that still only has it lagging
behind by about 10 not too shabby AMD
of course performance is meaningless if it'll cost you two fingers and your
right butt cheek NVIDIA and I have more
good news the 7900 XTX is a thousand
dollars while the 7900 XT comes in a hundred less at 900 which
I mean I never thought I'd be happy about even a top-tier GPU being only a
thousand dollars but I guess that really shows just how out to lunch NVIDIA has
been with the pricing of the RTX 4000 series but wait a second didn't NVIDIA's
CEO Jensen go out on stage and basically say the pricing is so high because the
factors outside is control Moore's Law is dead he said
well how did AMD pull it off then well
first of all by not using the latest and
greatest manufacturing process rdna 3 gpus at least the ones we've seen
so far are made using a combination of
tsmc's five nanometer and six nanometer
processes making this both the very first chiplet design GPU and way cheaper
to manufacture than the four nanometer monolithic dies that NVIDIA uses for RTX
4000 but you'd think there'd be a downside to that right like don't hold
their manufacturing nodes have worse power consumption
believe it or not the total board power of the 7900 XT and XTX is just 300 and
355 Watts respectively and it's
delivered by two good old-fashioned eight-pin PCIe power connectors I never
thought I'd be adding not a fire hazard as a selling point for a GPU but here we
are this also means that if you're upgrading from something like a GTX 1080
TI or an RTX 2080 you probably don't
need to upgrade your system power supply and you also probably don't need to
upgrade your case the reference 7900 XTX
is a much more reasonable 287 millimeters wide and two and a half
slots tall compared to the 304 millimeters and three and a half Slots
of the RTX 4090 again I never thought a
GPU physically fitting in your computer would be a major selling point
but here we are how did they do this then well AMD also
packed in some really cool power management Innovations for starters they
decoupled the clock speed of the shaders which now run at up to 2.3 gigahertz and
the front end which runs at 2.5 we've actually seen this before in Mobile
products but never in a desktop GPU and the main benefit of this approach is
that it allows them to prioritize the speed of one over the other depending on
the workload for instance if the gain you're running doesn't hit the shaders
super hard maybe those are fine just sipping power at 1.8 gigahertz while the
front end runs at full speed AMD says this can reduce total power consumption
by 25 percent which might not be
something you care about if you have a beefy power supply and a well-cooled
case already though fear not AMD says there will be aib partner cards with
more Cooling and higher power consumption to enable even higher clock
speeds or AMD says anyway so far we've
only only found this ASUS tough model with three eight pin connectors which
might indicate higher power consumption but nothing to say of the clock speeds
now possibly the dumbest problem with the RTX 4090 aside from the burning up
12 pin power adapters is that it only supports DisplayPort 1.4 which given how
freaking fast it is could actually become a problem in the very near future
as new displays become available AMD on the other hand managed to avoid
this embarrassing situation by including DisplayPort 2.1 which can support
ridiculous resolutions and frame rate combinations like 4K 480 Hertz or 8K 165
Hertz now obviously whether you go team
green or team red your GPU won't be able to keep up with that today but with the
way that upscaling and frame generation technology is progressing DP 2.1 is some
massive future proofing that could make the RTX 4090 unable to take full
advantage of monitors that could be releasing as early as next year
AMD has also included a new media engine that has 8K 60 av1 and code and decode
support this is a huge Boon for streamers who are looking to get the
best image quality going forward and they announced smart access video which
can share the load of encode and decode operations between AMD gpus and CPUs
apparently giving a 30 uplift in 4k
multi-stream transcoding though we'll have to see how well this actually works
when it lands an OBS in December I'm a little skeptical but In fairness to AMD
the recent software upgrades that they made to their media engine for Radeon
6000 did bring about image quality improvements to get them closer to
NVIDIA zenbank than I would have thought possible so with this new media engine
AMD might finally be a sensible choice for people who want to stream or record
their gameplay another sensible choice is signing up for Floatplane.com for
amazing behind the scenes and Extras like the shooting of our starforge
systems review intro to be clear not everything that AMD
announced today was mind-blowing in AMD's own slides they show a 1.5 to 1.6
times increase in Ray tracing performance which
will take you from literal slideshow to
cinematic FPS at best and the RTX 4090
walked all over AMD's best at nearly
double the frame rate based on our cyberpunk test and these projected
numbers also AMD built new AI
accelerators that should allow for up to 2.7 times more AI throughput per compute
unit but the way it's implemented makes this increase only matter for games at
the moment it's not going to help you with general purpose Ai and actually
come to think of it there was almost no mention whatsoever of non-gaming tasks
and this this is a long time thorn in Radeon users sides some applications
like blender or SolidWorks visualize only support NVIDIA Cuda making NVIDIA
cards absolutely embarrass their AMD counterparts and it doesn't look like
this is going to change anytime soon AMD also promised that their new fsr3
upscaling would be up to a two times increase over fsr2 but it looks like at
least one of the ways they're going to achieve this is with technology similar
to NVIDIA's dlss 3 by generating new
frames and well let's just say we're currently
working on a video about dlss3 and its frame generation and
it's a first gen product overall though it looks like the RX 7900 XT and XTX are
going to be hacking fast gpus for the money and this might end up being the
first generation of what feels like forever where AMD is positioned to grab
a good chunk of market share from our green overlords which will hopefully
push NVIDIA to compete harder on pricing and meanwhile give AMD's GPU division
the cash that it needs to ramp up r d spending and come back even stronger
next time I can't wait to give you guys the full review when these cards launch
on December the 13th just like I can't wait to tell you about this segue to our
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this video go check out our RTX 4090
undervolting video where the power consumption of the 4090 starts to look
not that bad even if the price is still obscene