AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Performance Claims Extrapolated, Performs Within Striking Distance of RTX 4090

AMD on Thursday launched the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT RDNA3 graphics cards. With these, the company claims to have repeated its feat of a 50+ percent performance/Watt gain over the previous-generation, which propelled the RX 6000-series to competitiveness with NVIDIA’s fastest RTX 30-series SKUs. AMD’s performance claims for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX put the card at anywhere between 50% to 70% faster than the company’s current flagship, the RX 6950 XT, when tested at 4K UHD resolution. Digging through these claims, and piecing together relevant information from the Endnotes, HXL was able to draw an extrapolated performance comparison between the RX 7900 XTX, the real-world tested RTX 4090, and previous-generation flagships RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT.

The graphs put the Radeon RX 7900 XTX menacingly close to the GeForce RTX 4090. In Watch_Dogs Legion, the RTX 4090 is 6.4% faster than the RX 7900 XTX. Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus see the two cards evenly matched, with a delta under 1%. The RTX 4090 is 4.4% faster with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022). Accounting for the pinch of salt usually associated with launch-date first-party performance claims; the RX 7900 XTX would end up within 5-10% of the RTX 4090, but pricing changes everything. The RTX 4090 is a $1,599 (MSRP) card, whereas the RX 7900 XTX is $999. Assuming the upcoming RTX 4080 (16 GB) is around 10% slower than the RTX 4090; the main clash for this generation will be between the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX. Even here, AMD gets ahead with pricing, as the RTX 4080 was announced with an MSRP of $1,199 (exactly 20% pricier than the RX 7900 XTX). With the FSR 3.0 Fluid Motion announcement, AMD also blunted NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 Frame Generation performance advantage.