AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX & 7900 XT Review: RDNA 3 Brings Big Gains

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

---

Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon 22.9.1 / 22.40.00.57 NVIDIA Drivers v526.74

Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 Forza Horizon 5 F1 2022 / F1 2021 A Plague Tale: Requiem Guardians Of The Galaxy Fortnite

---

LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

Both of the new Radeon RX 7900 series cards significantly outpaces the previous-gen Radeon RX 6900 XT in this benchmark, but again, the GeForces offered better performance. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX outgunned the RTX 3090 Ti with the more taxing "Bedroom" model, but the GeForce led with the "Supercar" model.

Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...

Blender leverages NVIDIA's OptiX framework to accelerate rendering on the GeForce RTX GPUs' RT cores and that advantage allows the GeForce cards to absolutely dominate overall. Relative to the previous-gen Radeon RX 6900 XT, however, the new Radeon RX 7900 series cards offered big performance gains. Without any special sauce at work with Blender though, there's no catching the GeForces.

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results

The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.


Although this is a totally different type of test relative to the ray tracing and 3D rendering tests above, the Blackmagic Speed Test tells a similar story. Here, the new Radeon RX 7900 series offered significantly more performance then the Radeon RX 6900 XT in the 8K 12:1 test, but the GeForces put up much better scores overall. In the more taxing 8K 3:1 test, which uses much less compression, however, all of the cards are much more evenly matched.