AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX Review

Conclusion

When AMD first mentioned their RDNA 3 architecture and intentions, an awful lot of their talk was about the price limitations they’d set themselves and how their cards were good performers in a bang for buck way. This is exactly the type of thing that normally sets our alarm bells ringing. Manufacturers are so committed to telling you how fast and capable their products are, that to lean so heavily into the value for money side normally smacks of the actual performance not being great. However, now we’ve spent some time with the newest entry level (oem done properly, none of this FE crap where they are basically OC cards) additions into the AMD Radeon range it’s clear they were playing their cards close to their chest and hiding their light under a bushel.

The Ryzen CPUs dragged AMD kicking and screaming to the leading edge of performance, and now things have settled down in their CPU branch it’s clear they’ve spent a lot of their R&D time working on the RDNA 3 architecture with some spectacular results.

Their 6000 series cards had good performance in anything until you turned on ray tracing when it plummeted like a stone. That’s not as detrimental as it might sound as Nvidia had similar issues with their 2000 series, ones they eliminated in the 3000 series and have absolutely nailed in the most recent launch. AMD have seemed to skip that awkward middle period and gone straight to almost matching the 4080. Certainly in non-RT scenarios the cards – the RX 7900 XTX in particular – are a match for the RTX 4080 despite the AMD price ceiling that is at the heart of their design. Even with ray tracing on we might not find the newest Radeons exactly up there with their rivals, but they’re on a par with the best of the 3000 range and that’s a massive step forwards for the Radeon cards.

It’s amazing to see how quickly AMD have caught up across their whole suite of products. For the longest time you always had to bring up caveats to justify their purchase, normally to do with cost effectiveness, but now you don’t. They are just good. Full stop. End of discussion. To be this good when the design brief was to get the most performance they could whilst guaranteeing the MSRP was under a grand is fantastic.

Which to buy? We think that both are good, but the price difference between them is slender enough, and the extra performance of the XTX big enough, that you would be best going for the big RX 7900 XTX, particularly if you plan to game at 4K. If you’re only at 1440 then there is little reason to spend the extra as the cards are so capable that your CPU will become the limiting factor. We cant help but feel like the XTX is so good for the money that the XT being just £100 cheaper really does mean its left in the shadows, don’t get us wrong its a great card and it pretty much beats the RTX 3080 consistently, but that’s now an outdated card and we feel like the RX 7900 XT is a bit over priced and think they should have played aggressive here too and just listed it as £749. 
Sure its going to be interesting in January to see how it performs against the RTX 4070 Ti but we already know that will cost £899 and we already think that’s too expensive too.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a fantastic improvement upon the 6000 series and has enough extra performance, particularly at 4K, to win our OC3D Performance Award. The RX 7900 XT is a great card but overshadowed by its bigger brother and with there just being a £100 price difference for such a big step in performance we would just say dodge the XT and spend your money on the XTX.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

 
  

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