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

Radeon RX 7900 XTX Details @ 4K w/ RT


Radeon RX 7900 XT Details @ 4K w/ RT

AMD new Radeons took a knee with ray tracing enabled in this game. We suspect there's some driver work to be done in this game, because the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT trailed even the Radeon RX 6900 XT, and finished near the bottom of the pack.  

Far Cry 6 Benchmarks

The new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT outperformed the GeForce RTX 4080 at both resolutions in FarCry 6, though the 4080 did offer a better minimum framerate than the XT when the resolution was increased to 4K. Let's see what happens when you throw ray tracing into mix, though...

With ray tracing enabled, this game remains CPU bound at 1440p, hence the funky order. At 4K though, the spread is more in-line with expectations, and we once again see AMD newest RDNA 3-based Radeons sandwiching the GeForce RTX 4080.

F1 2021 & F1 2022 Benchmarks

F1 2022 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. This latest addition to the franchise supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA technologies (like DLSS). We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray-tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what the graphics cards could do.

F1 2021 / F1 2022

We tested both F1 2021 and F1 2022, which happens to support both FSR and DLSS. In F1 2021, the GeForce RTX 4080 maintains a slight advantage over the new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti outguns the Radeon RX 7900 XT. 

In the newer, more taxing F1 2022, the framerates are somewhat lower, and the Radeon RX 7900 XT is able to overtake the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at both resolutions, but the RTX 4080 holds onto a small lead.

FSR / DLSS 3 And Latency Testing

We also tested F1 2022 and a couple of additional games—namely A Plague Tale: Requiem and Fortnite—with the various DLSS and FSR modes available, to asses framerates and latency where possible. Please note, all of these games were also tested with beta builds, updated to support DLSS 3 with resolution scaling and AI Frame Generation options.

FSR and DLSS resolution scaling in its various modes boosts F1 2022 performance significantly, but the GeForce RTX 4080 maintains its leads overall, across all of the various modes, at least when AI Frame Generation is enabled. AMD has Frame Generation planned for FSR 3, but that won't be arriving until sometime in 2023.


Unfortunately, A Plague Tale: Requiem doesn't support FSR and would only capture latency data with a GeForce installed, so we'll resort to comparing frame rates alone. Once again we see the new Radeons finishes just ahead (XTX) or just behind (XT) the GeForce RTX 4080.


Finally, we did some performance and latency testing with the latest version of Fortnite. In terms of frame rates, the GeForce RTX 4080 finished somewhat ahead of both Radeon RX 7900 series cards here, but the difference in latency is much more stark -- with the advantage going to NVIDA. We experimented with Radeon Anti-Lag here as well, which did seem to reduces latency on the Radeons by about 10 - 20ms, but we couldn't get reliable / repeatable frame rates with Anti-Lag enabled. For now, we'll close this section by saying NVIDIA's RTX 4080 16GB card has the advantage, but we need to dig into this further.