Reviews of the Radeon RX 7900 series are out. Ignoring the aggressive price point of the Navi 31 SKUs, RDNA 3 doesn’t have much going for it. We reviewed the RX 7900 XT earlier today and found it slower than the GeForce RTX 4080 in almost every workload, ray tracing or not. While traditional rasterized games see a modest performance delta between the two, the Radeon gets destroyed in ray-traced titles.
Rasterization
Ray Tracing Performance
As you can conclude from the above benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 4080 comes out on top in nearly every benchmark. To make matters worse, the RX 7900 XT draws more power too. While the RTX 4080 pulls 290W on average, the 7900 XT averages 307W.
Upon overclocking, the GeForce RTX 4080 tops out at 343W, just under the peak power draw of the RX 7900 XT. Even when the 4080 is limited to 275W, it retains over 98% of its performance, beating the XT across every metric.
Looking at these numbers, I’d say that rumors of a design flaw are legit. Navi 31 is barely more efficient than the RTX 3080 Ti in ray-traced games. Overclocking the GPU has little to no impact on performance while substantially increasing power consumption and thermals. Setting the GPU core target to 3.2GHz pushes the clocks by barely 100MHz (to 2.7GHz) while increasing the board power by 50W.
