The 7900XTX is a SUPER powerful GPU!
PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!!!
I ran Beat Saber on it at 4704 x 2384 at 120Hz with all the games settings maxed out and
it didn't even break a sweat.
I tried it with Vader Immortal... same thing.
I then tried Contractors...
it crushed it.
Pavlov... crushed it too.
In fact, it ran every game I tested really well, but there were some things I noticed
in the headset, in some of the games I tested, that don't show up in these captures or even
on the performance graphs.
The most annoying thing I experienced while doing my testing was stuttering.
Unfortunately you can't really see it in these captures but one of the games I experienced
this problem in was The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners.
When you look at the frame rate and performance headroom graphs the 7900XTX crushed it, but
as I would move around I experienced a fair amount of stuttering.
To add a little insult to injury there were also moments here and there where I experienced
some brief performance...
'hicups'.
To be fair this is normal behavior for this game though.
I've experienced these same hicups while testing with other GPU's.
I don't know why exactly they happen but occasionally the performance headroom will spike and the
frame rate will drop down momentarily and then come right back.
This happens almost every time you fight a walker, but you'll also see it when there
doesn't really seem to be a reason for it to happen.
Another little oddity I ran in to was in Vader Immortal, there was these weird artifacts
in the background in this scene.
It didn't effect the game play at all but it was kind of distracting.
While I was messing around with settings in Contractors and Pavlov I found this glitch
is tied to anti-aliasing.
If I turned the anti-aliasing up past a certain point these artifacts would appear.
To solve this problem in those games I just kept anti-aliasing at a lower setting, but
Vader Immortal doesn't give you the option to turn it down, so there wasn't anything
I could do about it there.
At the time I'm making this video, AMD does acknowledge that performance in some VR games
is not as good as it should be with their 7000 series GPUs.
And they promise to fix these issues in future driver updates.
So hopefully these will be resolved in the not too distant future.
If these were the only issues I encountered, ones that can potentially be fixed through
a driver update, that would bode pretty well for AMD, but for my testing I'm using an Oculus
Quest 2 and this highlighted a weakness in AMD's hardware they've actually had for awhile.
I didn't notice it in some of my past reviews like with the 6700XT and 6950XT because I
wasn't looking for it, but this time around I was looking and I saw it.
AMD's h.264 video encoder is noticeably worse than Nvidia's.
By saying this, I'm not saying AMD's is bad, I'm just saying Nvidia's is better.
Using my Quest 2, even with a Link cable, while the graphics looked good with the 7900XTX,
since I have Nvidia GPU's to directly compare it to, I could easily tell the visuals were
softer looking.
The transcoded video streams on my Nvidia GPUs look sharp and crisp and the graphics
with the 7900XTX were just a little soft.
This is only a problem for me though because I'm using the Quest 2, which does not use
HDMI or Display Port.
For people using a Valve Index or Reverb G2 or some other headset, this will not affect
you.
It's not all bad news for AMD though when using a Quest 2.
While the Oculus software doesn't support h.265 encoding, Virtual Desktop does.
And using h.265 this sharpened the visuals right up on par with what I'm used to seeing
with my Nvidia GPUs.
The downside is you do have to purchase Virtual Desktop to be able to enjoy this.
For my reviews though I prefer being able to see the performance graphs provided with
the Oculus Debug Tool, and since the graphics still looked good using h.264, I did all my
testing using Oculus Link on my Ryzen 7 5800X3D test PC with 32GB of DDR4 3600MHz CL16 RAM
and our GPU is the PowerColor RX 7900XTX Red Devil.
The game where I feel the 7900XTX flexed its muscles the most was in Red Matter 2.
In most areas of the game it ran at 120fps with all the games settings set to their maximum.
Yes, it ran this game at 120fps and the in game Resolution Scale was set to 2.0!
Just to give you guys a point of reference the RTX 4080 ran this game at the same resolution
and refresh rate, but the Resolution Scale was only at 1.3!
Again, this is the performance I saw in most areas of the game, but when I went to my two
stress test areas they turned out to be just a little bit more taxing on the GPU than it
could handle, and our performance headroom dropped into the negative and the compositor
dropped our frame rate in half to keep things feeling smooth.
I then lowered the Render Scale to 1.9 and that was just enough to keep the Performance
Headroom above zero here but when I moved on to my laser scanning tool test on the window
that pushed us over the edge once again.
While this was all really exciting, Red Matter 2 is another game where I experienced stuttering
when moving around.
Hopfuelly AMD can eliminate this stuttering with a future driver update, because performance-wise
this was a very impressive result for the 7900XTX.
For all you sim racers out there I tested the 7900XTX with Assetto Corsa and you'll
be happy to know it was able to run this game at 120fps with all the game settings maxed
out, except for anti-aliasing, at 4704 x 2384.
Performance headroom was really close to the edge at 120Hz so I'd probably recommend 90Hz
rather than 120 just to make sure you're good, but these tests are about pushing the GPU
as far as it'll go, so that's what we do.
Lone Echo 2 is another game I would recommend running at 90Hz rather than 120Hz but to see
what the 7900XTX could do I ran all my tests in this game at 120Hz.
In most areas of the game it ran at, or very near, 120fps with the games settings pretty
well maxed.
As you can see on the performance graphs the settings I used are just a little bit higher
than the 7900XTX can consistently maintain.
Most of the time performance dips were brief enough it didn't effect the experience, however
when I got to this, uh...
I guess I'll call it a cutscene segment; the frame rate fluctuations made the game feel
a bit choppy so while the 7900XTX can run this game pretty well at 120Hz you get a much
more enjoyable experience at 90Hz.
The only game I did not try running at 120Hz is Microsoft Flight Simulator.
This game is just so freakin' beastly.
I did try it at 90Hz though at 4704 x 2384.
My standard settings for running this game, so I can get a good apples to apples comparison
with other GPU's I test, is to set the Render Scaling, World Scale, Terrain Level of Detail
and Objects Level of Detail to 100 and all the other settings to their lowest values.
The only other GPU I've tested that's been able to run this game at or near 90fps is
the RTX 4080, and even it wasn't able to maintain a frame rate as solid as this.
Look at that FPS graph!
Almost no fluctuation whatsoever.
This training flight is of course not exactly the most demanding scenario this game has
to offer though so I switched locations to New York City and as expected the compositor
had to cut the frame rate in half to keep things feeling somewhat smooth.
While that may seem like a less than desirable result, to those not familiar with running
Flight Simulator in VR, all the VR pilots out there know this is actually a very respectable
result.
While the frame rate is low; the fact that Flight Simulator is a slow paced game keeps
things feeling smooth enough that the overall experience is enjoyable.
When I first fired up Half Life Alyx at 120Hz things were pretty choppy.
This wasn't just the driver related stuttering issue I experienced in some of the other games
though as the performance we were experiencing is being reflected in the graphs.
Sometimes things get weird like this when switching from one game to another and the
PC just needs to be rebooted, so I did that thinking that may resolve the issue but upon
starting the game up the 2nd time at 120Hz, it was still choppy just like it was before.
I tried turning the settings down from Ultra to High but that made almost no difference
at all.
I then tried switching the API from DirectX 11 to Vulcan but that actually made things
even worse.
In the end I dropped the refresh rate from 120Hz to 90Hz and that made all the difference.
When I went back and compared it to the 6950XT though I found the performance in this game
to be lacking quite a bit.
As of the making of this video the 6950XT outperforms the 7900XTX in this game.
It would seem Half Life Alyx is one of those VR games AMD says their 7000 series GPU's
performs worse in than it should.
I should also mention I did notice a little bit of the stuttering in this game as well.
Hopefully, AMD will have a driver update in the not too distant future that will unlock
the 7900XTX's full potential in this game as well as fix the stuttering problem.
Going in to this, I knew AMD's drivers for the 7900XTX still needed some work so I wasn't
expecting things to be perfect.
I actually thought I was going to run in to a lot more problems than I did so overall
I was impressed with the way the 7900XTX performed and I'm excited to see what kind of improvements
future driver updates will bring.
For anyone running a Quest 2 though, or other headset that relies on a transcoded video
stream to play PC VR, I do have some reservations when it comes to recommending the 7900XTX,
simply because Nvidia's h.264 encoder produces a noticeably sharper image.
If this isn't something that is going to effect you though I feel the 7900XTX could be a very
nice alternative to Nvidia's ridiculously priced RTX 4080.
Assuming AMD gets their drivers dialed in and working properly of course.