AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Review: 1440p/4K Benchmarks, Ray Tracing, and Power

AMD will launch its 3rd Gen RDNA 3 graphics cards to improve its position in the PC gaming market. While the previous lineups offered solid raster performance, bleak ray-tracing capabilities and the lack of a proper DLSS alternative limited the Radeon market share. With RDNA 3, Team Red has tried to address these shortcomings. The Ray Accelerators do much more than intersection testing, allowing ray sorting, optimized traversal, and early subtree culling. Each CU features an AI accelerator, and FSR 3 is being prepped for an early 2023 release.

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Test Bench

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
Motherboard: ASRock B650E Steel Legend
Heatsink: NZXT X73
Power Supply: NZXT C1000

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT vs. NVIDIA RTX 4080 4K Gaming Benchmarks

We tested ten recent titles with and without ray tracing. For the former, the benchmarks were conducted at native resolution, while FSR 2 “Balanced” was used for the latter.

The GeForce RTX 4080 is notably faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XT across all nine rasterized games. The deltas vary from just 2 FPS in Far Cry 6 to 40% in The Callisto Protocol. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we see the RTX 4080 lead by 25%, which drops to just 10% in Hitman 3. On average, it is 15-20% faster than the RDNA 3 part in rasterized gaming workloads.

Far Cry 6 is the only benchmark where the Radeon manages to level with the RTX 4080 with an average of 98 FPS.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT vs. NVIDIA RTX 4080 Ray Traced Gaming Benchmarks

Things do not get any better for the Radeon RX 7900 XT in ray-traced gaming. In fact, in some titles, it’s even slower than the RTX 3080 Ti.

The performance varies even more drastically with ray tracing enabled. The RTX 4080 is 20% faster than the RX 7900 XT in Ghostwire, 50% faster in Dying Light 2, and 60% faster in Cyberpunk 2077.

The GeForce RTX 4080 beats the Radeon RX 7900 XT across F1 2022, Metro Exodus, Hitman 3, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider by 40-50%. To add insult to injury, the RTX 3080 Ti also one-ups the RX 7900 XT in all four games.