It would seem like AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics architecture is a disaster regarding ray-tracing performance. Official benchmarks shared by the chipmaker show the Radeon RX 7900 XTX running at a meager 21 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, roughly the same as NVIDIA’s previous-gen RTX 3080 Ti. In this case, the next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 is at least 2x faster, if not more. In AMD’s defense, this is a solid ~70% improvement over the paltry 13 FPS managed by the RX 6950 XT in this title, but it’s nowhere as competitive as Lovelace.
The Radeon RX 7900 XT nets 18 FPS on average, leaving the XTX with a 15% lead. With FSR enabled (Performance Mode), the RX 7900 XT/XTX approaches the 60 FPS mark, but given how DLSS 3 triples the performance, it’s a moot point in the end. Dying Light 2 and Hitman 3 are similar examples. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages 24 FPS and 38 FPS in the former and latter, respectively. These figures make the RDNA 3 heavy-weights approximately half as fast as the RTX 4090 in three consecutive ray-traced workloads.
The raster performance of the “next-gen” Radeon cards is nothing to brag about, either. The RX 7900 XT is a mediocre 50% faster than the RX 6950 XT in Watch Dogs: Legion and ever so slightly in COD: Modern Warfare. Resident Evil Village and Cyberpunk 2077 show more encouraging results, with 60-70% gains over the RX 6950 XT. We know these are cherry-picked benchmarks, and contrary to what we assumed, it’s more of a Bulldozer rather than a Zen moment for AMD.
