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

The Radeon RX 7900 XT has a better showing at 1440p. It nips at the heels of the RTX 4080 in Hitman 3, Far Cry 6, F1 2022, and Cyberpunk 2077. The Ada heavy-weight still leads by a fat margin in The Callisto Protocol, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and A Plague Tale: Requiem.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT vs. NVIDIA RTX 4080 1440p Ray Traced Benchmarks

With ray-tracing turned on, the RX 7900 XT gets butchered in eight of ten scenarios. The Callisto Protocol is the only game where the Radeon registers a win. Far Cry 6 and F1 2022 also treat the Navi 31 SKU fairly well.

Overclocking and Power Efficiency

Overclocking the Radeon RX 7900 XT turned fruitless. Setting the GPU core limit to 3,200MHz results in a sharp increase in TBP with little to no performance improvement. Setting the memory to 2,700MHz or 21.6Gbps isn’t any help either.

The total board power jumps from 310W at stock to ~360W when overclocked. Meanwhile, the core clocks see a nominal 100MHz uplift with this adjustment.

The result is a negligible FPS bump in some of the workloads. Certain games like Far Cry 6 and Callisto Protocol see no performance gain from the overclock. Like the power, the thermals also spike, surging from 65C to over 80C under load (hotspot).

We also tried reducing the card’s power consumption, setting the TBP to 268W, down from 315W. Luckily, the performance drop was in line with our expectations.

Looking at these numbers, I’d say that rumors of a design flaw in the Navi 31 frequency function are legit. Overclocking the GPU has little to no impact on performance while substantially increasing power consumption and thermals. Furthermore, the core clocks get bumped by only 100MHz (to 2.7GHz), even though the set target was 3.2GHz.

It’s worth noting that the RX 7900 XT draws more power than the RTX 4080 while being substantially slower. The latter draws around 300W on stock and under 350W when overclocked.

Conclusion: A Mediocre GPU Redeemed by Aggressive Pricing

Objectively speaking, the Radeon RX 7900 XT is a beefed version of the RX 6900 XT. Sure, the process node is more efficient, the graphics pipeline is overhauled, and the Compute Units may be revamped. But, the result is more or the same. The 7900 XT gets decisively beaten at both 4K and 1440p. Considering that this is an $899 part while the RTX 4080 costs $1,199, you can forgive the deficit in traditional raster performance. However, falling short of the RTX 3080 Ti in ray-traced gaming multiple times is quite humiliating. NVIDIA’s hardware from 2 years back is better at ray-tracing than Radeon’s recently launched offerings.

[taq_review]

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Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Divinity, Torment, Baldur's Gate and so much more... Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
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