The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT are here, and they promise to break the mold in performance per watt

After introducing the new Zen 4 architecture this year, and with it the Ryzen 7000 processors, AMD is taking a significant step forward in its universe of graphics cards. The company led by Su Lisa has announced this Thursday at its event focused on gaming the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT which, precisely, release the new RDNA 3 architecture.

We are facing an ambitious proposal that presents substantial improvements to face the competition from Nvidia. Not only are they the first graphics cards to feature chiplet architecture that splits logic across multiple interconnected chips, but they also promise to deliver up to 54% higher performance per watt and be the first to adopt DisplayPort 2.1.

Technical specifications of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT

Taking the graphics experience to the next level

Let’s start shelling out the news. The RX 7900 XTX, AMD’s flagship graphics card, comes with 24 GB of memory. The Radeon RX 7900 XT, which is slightly less ambitious, has 20 GB of memory. At the performance level, the company claims that the 7900 XTX will be up to 1.7 times faster than the RX 6950 XT in 4K resolution. The average consumption of this card, meanwhile, is only 355 watts, considerably less than the 450 watts of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. The RX 7900 XT will have an average consumption of 300 watts. Both cards will require 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

As we say, it is the first graphics card to be based on the RDNA 3 chiplet architecture, something we have already seen in AMD CPUs. This means that the logic is divided into several chips interconnected by high-performance links manufactured by TSMC in 5 and 6 nm. In this way, the more advanced photolithography, 5 nm, is present in graphics processing while the more mature process, 6 nm, is present in memory caching.

AMD has also updated its Ray Accelerators, the equivalent of Nvidia’s RT Cores.. Its second generation accelerators have a capacity 1.5 times better than the first generation RDNA 2. The company has also announced that it has decided to decouple the clock speeds. What does this mean? Instead of running the entire Graphics Core Die (GCD) at the same speed, the shaders will operate at 2.3 GHz while the front end It will be located at 2.5 GHz.

As we mentioned above, AMD’s display engine (AMD Radiance Display Engine) has been updated to support DisplayPort 2.1, the great rival of HDMI 2.1. What does this translate to? In that Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards now have twice the bandwidth of DisplayPort 1.4, which translates to higher resolutions and refresh rates. 8K gaming continues to assert itself as the norm.

Beyond the standard capabilities of these graphics cards, AMD is also working on a series of alternatives to increase the performance of its Radeon RX 7000. On the one hand, SmartAccess video will arrive later this year, a solution that will work with its processors. Ryzen 7000 whose mission is to distribute the work of encoding and decoding to improve video editing and transcoding tasks. It will be compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro, OBS and other applications.

In addition, at the beginning of 2023 it will launch HYPR-RX, its overclocking solution that will allow the most enthusiastic to establish certain adjustments for increase frame rate and reduce latency. The well-known AMD Adrenalin software, for its part, will continue to concentrate all software functions, performance reports, driver updates and game statistics.

Price and availability of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT

The new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT will be available in some markets starting next December 13 priced at $999 and $899, respectively. It is time to wait to know its price and availability in Europe.

Images: AMD

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