- AMD is back!
And Nvidia is about to pay
for their outrageous pricing practices.
The RDNA3 announcement just concluded.
And while AMD gave us very little
in the way of meaningful performance data,
I'm really optimistic anyway, and here's why.
Immediately after the stream ended,
our labs team sprang into action
building up test benches
as close as possible to the ones that AMD used
in their performance preview,
that allowed us to expand
on AMD's rather vague slides
that didn't include a single Nvidia GPU
and extrapolate some actually,
useful comparative performance data.
Now the bad news
is that Nvidia might still be the performance king,
but the good news
is that I can confidently say
that AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XTX
should come within spitting distance
of Nvidia's RTX 4090 for $600 less.
The only thing with better performance per dollar
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("Supernova")
- In AMD's together we advance_gaming live event,
they announced the two flagship tier GPUs
that will lead their RDNA3 family.
The Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX
with 20 and 24 gigabytes of GDDR6 respectively,
which was my first surprise.
I mean, why would they cheap out on the memory
when they need to compete
with Nvidia cards that are using faster GDDR6X.
Two reasons, one, to save power, which fair enough,
given the reputation their competition is built
for unreasonable power consumption in thermals.
And two, because they just don't seem to need it.
The most useful slide that AMD provided was this one,
where we see the 7900 XTX
performing between 1.5 to 1.7 times
the outgoing flagship 6950 XT at 4k.
Now, AMD was frustratingly vague
about the exact settings that they used
to achieve these results,
even when we probed them after the event,
but we managed to extract just enough information
to create our own set of performance graphs
by extrapolating from our own reference 6950 XT.
Let's start with "Cyberpunk 2077."
AMD's previous best managed 46 FPS, not great,
but multiply that by 1.7
and we've got a spicy 78 frames per second.
That's just a single frame per second behind the RTX 4090.
What a generational improvement.
In "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,"
Our RX 6950 XT managed a respectable 90 FPS.
When we multiply that by AMD's 1.5 times,
assuming of course they're not just outright lying,
we can expect the 7900 XTX
to lag Nvidia's flagship by only 6%, hot dang!
Finally, in "Watchdogs: Legion,"
the 7900 XTX takes its largest L compared to the RTX 4090,
but that still only has it lagging behind by about 10%.
Not too shabby AMD.
Of course, performance is meaningless
if it'll cost you two fingers and your right butt cheek.
(coughs) Nvidia.
And I have more good news,
the 7900 XTX is a thousand dollars,
while the 7900 XT comes in a hundred less at 900,
which I mean I never thought I'd be happy
about even a top-tier GPU being only a thousand dollars,
but I guess,
that really shows just how out-to-lunch Nvidia has been
with the pricing of the RTX 4000 series.
But wait a second, didn't Nvidia's CEO, Jensen,
go out on stage and basically say the pricing is so high
because of factors outside his control?
"Moore's law is dead," he said.
So, well, how did AMD pull it off then?
Well, first of all,
by not using the latest and greatest manufacturing process.
RDNA3 GPUs, at least the ones we've seen so far,
are made using a combination
of TSMC's 5-nanometer and 6-nanometer processes,
making this both the very first chiplet designed GPU
and way cheaper to manufacture
than the 4-nanometer monolithic dyes
that Nvidia uses for RTX 4000.
But you'd think there'd be a downside to that, right?
Like, don't older manufacturing nodes
have worse power consumption?
Believe it or not, the total board power
of the 7900 XT and XTX
is just 300 and 355 watts, respectively.
And it's delivered
by two good old fashioned 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
I never thought I'd be adding not-a-fire-hazard
as a selling point for a GPU, but here we are.
This also means that if you're upgrading
from something like a GTX 1080 Ti or an RTX 2080,
you probably don't need to upgrade your system power supply,
and you also probably don't need to upgrade your case.
The reference 7900 XTX
is a much more reasonable 287 millimeters wide
and two and half slots tall,
compared to the 304 millimeters
and three and a half slots of the RTX 4090.
Again, I never thought a GPU,
physically fitting in your computer
would be a major selling point, but here we are.
How did they do this then?
Well, AMD also packed in
some really cool power management innovations.
For starters, they decoupled the clock speed of the shaders,
which now run at up to 2.3 gigahertz
and the front end, which runs at 2.5.
We've actually seen this before in mobile products
but never in a desktop GPU.
And the main benefit of this approach
is that it allows them to prioritize the speed
of one over the other, depending on the workload.
For instance, if the game you're running
doesn't hit the shaders super hard,
maybe those are fine,
just sipping power at 1.8 gigahertz
while the front end runs at full speed.
AMD says this can reduce total power consumption by 25%,
which might not be something you care about.
If you have a beefy power supply
and a well cooled case already though, fear not.
AMD says there will be AIB partner cards
with more cooling and higher power consumption
to enable even higher clock speeds, or AMD says anyway.
So far we've only found this ASUS TUF model
with three 8-pin connectors,
which might indicate higher power consumption
but nothing to say of the clock speeds.
Now possibly the dumbest problem with the RTX 4090,
aside from the burning up 12-pin power adapters,
is that it only supports DisplayPort 1.4,
which given how freaking fast it is,
could actually become a problem
in the very near future as new displays become available.
AMD, on the other hand,
managed to avoid this embarrassing situation
by including DisplayPort 2.1,
which can support ridiculous resolutions
and frame rate combinations
like 4k, 480 hertz,
or 8k, 165 hertz.
Now obviously, whether you go Team Green or Team Red,
your GPU won't be able to keep up with that today,
but with the way that upscaling
and frame generation technology is progressing,
DP 2.1 is some massive future proofing
that could make the RTX 4090 unable to take full advantage
of monitors that could be releasing as early as next year.
AMD has also included a new media engine
that has 8k 60 AV1 encode and decode support.
This is a huge boon for streamers
who are looking to get the best image quality going forward.
And they announced SmartAccess video,
which can share the load
of encode and decode operations between AMD GPUs and CPUs,
apparently giving a 30% uplift
in 4K multistream transcoding.
Though, we'll have to see how well this actually works
when it lands in OBS in December.
I'm a little skeptical, but in fairness to AMD,
the recent software upgrades
that they made to their media engine for Radeon 6000
did bring about image quality improvements
to get them closer to Nvidia's NVENC
than I would've thought possible.
So with this new media engine,
AMD might finally be a sensible choice
for people who want to stream or record their gameplay.
Another sensible choice is signing up for Floatplane.com
for amazing behind the scenes and extras,
like the shooting of our Starforge Systems review intro.
To be clear,
not everything that AMD announced today was mind blowing.
In AMD's own slides,
they show a 1.5 to 1.6 times increase
in raytracing performance,
which will take you
from literal slide show to cinematic FPS at best.
And the RTX 4090 walked all over AMD's best
at nearly double the frame rate based
on our "Cyberpunk" test and these projected numbers.
Also, AMD built new AI accelerators that should allow
for up to 2.7 times more AI throughput per compute unit,
but the way it's implemented
makes this increase only matter for games.
At the moment, it's not gonna help you
with general purpose AI.
And actually, come to think of it,
there was almost no mention whatsoever of non gaming tasks.
And this, this is a long time thorn in Radeon users' sides.
Some applications, like Blender or SOLIDWORKS Visualize,
only support Nvidia CUDA,
making Nvidia cards
absolutely embarrass their AMD counterparts,
and it doesn't look like this is gonna change anytime soon.
AMD also promised that their new FSR 3 upscaling
would be up to a two times increase over FSR 2,
but it looks like,
at least one of the ways they're going to achieve this,
is with technology similar to Nvidia's DLSS 3
by generating new frames.
And well,
let's just say we're currently working
on a video about DLSS 3 and its frame generation,
and it's a first gen product.
Overall, though it looks like the RX 7900 XT and XTX
are going to be hecking fast GPUs for the money,
and this might end up being the first generation
of what feels like forever,
where AMD is positioned to grab a good chunk
of market share from our green overlords,
which will hopefully push Nvidia
to compete harder on pricing,
and meanwhile, give AMD's GPU division
the cash that it needs to ramp up R & D spending
and come back even stronger next time.
I can't wait to give you guys the full review
when these cards launch on December the 13th,
just like I can't wait to tell you
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out our RTX 4090 undervolting video,
where the power consumption of the 4090
starts to look not that bad,
even if the price is still obscene.