AMD’s 7900 XT and 7900 XTX TESTED! Is RDNA 3 The New Price/Performance KING?

AMD is launching rdna3 just a mere 11 pounds of boxes here in my hands [Laughter] but the software is just as important as the hardware this generation AMD has made some amazing strides in terms of software but first let's take a look at this Hardware [Music] foreign yes you already know what these are you you clicked on the video this is the 7900 XTX which let's be honest I'm a little surprised about the XTX I figured the XTX would be coming at CES maybe the XTX three gigahertz Edition or something like that I mean anticipated cards from AMD that they've ever done and AMD has been very careful so far to give us a modest impression of what these cards will be oh my gosh look at that look look at this look at this madness look at that welcome to the red team the new standard of high performance gaming there's nothing in here except a little card and that's it the move the FCC notices to the back of the card it's got a nice clean back plate and look two eight pin power connectors so from a hardware design and interface standpoint we have two full-size DisplayPort 2.1 ports now this is not the full 80 gigabits of bandwidth DisplayPort 2.1 I'll come back to that it's 57 gigabits per second I know a thing or two about DisplayPort from having worked on some things we've also got HDMI 2.1 as well as USB type-c for VR headsets now USB C is not going to be a full DisplayPort 2.1 thing because the cabling and the connectors and everything else are not rated for data rates that high but it is a good connection combining USBC plus the data rate that you would need for a VR headset so it works pretty good just keep that in mind if you're using a USBC to DisplayPort adapter those aren't super awesome first and foremost two eight pin connectors yeah these aren't 400 or 600 watt Behemoth cards in fact AMD has been pretty conservative with what they tell us these cards have a board power for although we can see from board partner boards that there are some significantly higher wattage boards available from Partners the other big thing is that these are truly chiplets and it's not chiplets in the in the hbm sense or chiplets and there's a multi-packaging technology with two Graphics compute dies on on one package as we've seen with some of the cdna products no this is actually the compute die as one large piece of silicon and then you have six other pieces of silicon which are memory controllers those are the i o part of it so it's sort of an opposite situation as the CPU if you look at the the ryzen chiplet desktop CPUs you got a big old i o die a little tiny compute chiplets where the compute happens well AMD has crammed all of the compute onto one giant monolithic piece of silicon it's a giant at least compared to what we have in CPU land and then they've broken out the memory controller in the i o interface stuff as much as they can into six triplets basically six of those chiplets all six of them are going to run on the 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT you get five of the six and I think the 100 price difference between these two gpus suggests that AMD has a very high yield for this chiplet configuration because I have a feeling that the lower cost gpus are not going to be you know four of the six or three of the six memory interfaces working but time will tell if that prediction is correct so the 7900 XTX in addition to additional memory controller stuff we have 96 rdna 3 compute units versus 84 and the 7900 XT that's 6144 stream processors versus 5376 the game clock is 2.3 gigahertz on the 7900 XTX you know I just okay I want to do the actual game testing but sure sure 96 megabytes of infinity cash versus 80 megabytes 24 gigabytes of gddr6 versus 20 Gigabytes AMD has always earned on the side of lots of video memory and that has worked out really well for them so far you know when their competitors launched they're next to the highest tier GPU I was kind of surprised by their memory selection given that people with those cards and the capabilities of those cards are rocking 4K or even the ultra wide you know like the like the G9 Samsung which is 5K okay it's only 1440 pixels tall it's actually less pixels than 4K but still it's a lot of pixels it's a 384-bit Memory interface bus 61 teraflops the highest end card 355 Watts for the 7900 XTX versus 300 to 315 total board power for the 7900 XT and it'll work with an 800 watt power supply either one of these 750 watts recommended for the 7900 XT and 800 watts for the 7900 XTX and with that let's talk about the actual gaming benchmarks and the actual gaming benchmarks versus Flagship competitors performance performance performance performance that's got to be top of Mind If you're looking at these cards I mean it's a thousand dollars for the XTX or nine hundred dollars for the XT so these are high-end cards but they're not they're not as enormous you know 355 watts versus 315 Watts total board power is a practical matter certainly had a lot of easier time moving them in and out of machines for doing these sorts of tests you know get our fractal North here do the video on that check that out it's a fun case wood grain smart Access Memory all the performance everything is there you will have an absolutely fantastic 4K or 1440p or even 1080 gaming experience with any of these cards I don't think spending a thousand dollars on a graphics card if you're shooting for 1080p even if it's 300 FPS really makes a lot of sense like I'd like to talk to you in the Forum because what are you doing I don't I don't understand my test system here is an LG OLED display so this thing can do 120 hertz and a true pixel response time of OLED is Far and Away better than anything else and so really when we're talking about the performance leaps that AMD has made like if you look at the 6950 the 6900 XT and the 6950 XT generation on generation it's 30 to 45 percent real world for the games that I play a lot of the testing and information that AMD shared ahead of time has games running at their absolute maximum settings and maybe just like one or two notches down from there will get you significantly higher performance so I don't necessarily personally always run with the game absolutely maxed out visually and that sort of reflected a little bit in our benchmarks but they still look really good the big Improvement here is you know there's been a lot of updates with fsr2 so I'll start with cyberpunk 2077. now cyberpunk 2077 when we're looking at these cards and gen on gen improvement from the 6900 XT AMD has really outdone themselves the driver is just better it's better for a lot of reasons but in terms of being a graphics driver it's better graphics drivers are expected to do a lot more than just be a graphics driver there's OBS integration and recording and settings optimizations and finding all kinds of stuff we'll talk about all that in a minute but just in terms of the drive for being a driver with cyberpunk 2077 you know because you can do ray tracing a lot better cyberpunk 2077 also added fsr2 so dlss versus fsr2 in cyberpunk 2077. I really wanted to put some effort into pixel peeping the quality because okay let's face it at the full resolution the full 4K resolution running with Ray tracing on Ultra it's not a super enjoyable uh frame rate here that we're looking at with cyberpunk 2077 but when we turn on FSR then all of a sudden things are a lot more manageable you know North of 60 FPS is entirely possible with the XTX at the top end of the spectrum is ultra performance with 80 FPS now at Ultra performance you're going to notice some visual differences versus the you know 20-ish FPS of you know there's no FSR anything going on so with FSR dialed into a quality settings well we can still get a perfectly playable frame rate this is still a lot better than 20-ish FPS at the full 4K with the ray tracing stuff basically maxed out and I think this is really underscoring how far AMD has come in software it still feels like AMD has a ways to go in software don't get me wrong but this is pretty good also really looking closely at these frames looking at the detail and it's a little difficult here because sometimes different player models load in when you're looking at a benchmark scene but the detail and Fidelity I see what I did there for the lefx really looks shockingly good I think that having these things on for a playable frame rate sort of makes a lot of sense and that's going to factor in a little bit more here in a minute when I talk about the software stuff the driver does other than just the driver stuff but what that means what the driver does is sort of expanding out you know I'll come back to that so let's take Ray tracing out of the equation for a second still with cyberpunk 2077 4K 60fps oh okay that's not bad now what about with FSR FSR turned to a visual quality setting where I can just barely start to tell okay there's something going on you can look in the lights and some other details and see there's something it's not quite as crisp not quite as sharp that's 160 FPS I don't think I need Ray tracing that bad and if we just sneak in a little bit of a comparison here to the 4090 you know 68 versus 86 like for like testing yeah the 4090 is doing a little bit better but the 4090 is a significantly more expensive card we're still talking about you know 900 to a thousand dollar gpus it's also worth noting here that the performance difference between the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX is maybe a little bit more than AMD LED on in some of their initial slides now overclocking is going to be a thing and also partner cards are going some at least some of the partner cards are going to push the board limits a little bit beyond 355 watts of the 7900 XTX for the efficiency curve and small form factor systems and that sort of thing the board power being about 315 Watts on the 7900 XT genuinely very impressive and the performance numbers are there to back it up but at these higher resolutions with more memory bandwidth it really depends on the game certain games really do like having the extra memory controller and the extra memory bandwidth that you get with the XTX over the XT it just depends on the game now keep in mind we're still talking about 4K when we're talking about 1440p and below if if that's your target frame rate that you want to game at the 7900 XT is going to more than tick all the boxes oh it's also worth noting that when we step back for a second and we look at our comparison system benchmarks for 1440p and 4K there really isn't a lot of difference between our 13900k and our 7950x our 7950x is rocking 6 000 Mega transfer memory but our 13900k is rocking that insane g-skill 7200 Kit that I got before which is a good lead-in to talk about Shadow of the Tomb Raider so with that 7200 Mega transfer kit a shadow of the Tomb Raider because shadow of the Tomb Raider really likes memory bandwidth system memory not GPU memory then we're talking about 322 FPS as a ceiling and that's with our 40 90. again these cars don't really necessarily directly compare to a 49 because the 490 is so much more dramatically expensive the 7900 XTX we can we just tickle 300 FPS with shadow of the Tomb Raider which is darned impressive and you don't need the most expensive 7200 Mega transfer memory to do that and you don't need the highest end system to do that so keep that in mind when you're looking at the other benchmarks so for ridiculous insane you know face melting 1080p frame rates these cards will do it and video is going to do a little bit better Ray tracing it still holds its Edge but for 1440p and 4K Andy's really giving Nvidia a run for its money and so we've only talked about two games so far we've got more games to talk about but my hypothesis here is that AMD really wants to capture the bulk of the market look at the board complexity like look at the teardowns in other videos from other YouTubers look at the teardown of the 4080. look at the teardown of the 4090 and then look at the teardown of the 7900 XT and XTX the boards appear to be less complicated the cards are probably going to be cheaper to produce which probably means they're going to have a better profit margin even though they cost less for vendors and everybody else if that's the case then AMD is going to continue to take market share away as long as the software experience is good and as long as the drivers are good darn it we're trying to get ahead of ourselves talking about all the driver features that have not anything to do with drivers let's run through the games Borderlands 3 4K over 100 FPS in any configuration it's sort of breathtaking you can see our performance breakdown here 1440p is faster than this monitor can display and of course 1080p is way faster than this monitor can display 120 FPS is my ceiling on my hardware and I can basically meet that with all three of these and I get close a little bit with the 7900 XT at 4K okay it's just a little below 120 FPS but actually playing the game it's hard to tell the performance of deus ex mankind divided it's pretty much the same as Borderlands 3 the breakdown is pretty much the same toggle the settings play with some settings yeah yeah over 100 FPS of 4K for the performance breakdown I've also got some artificial benchmarks 3D Mark time spy fire strike fire strike extreme time spy extreme so that you can get an idea of how this card is going to break down but for everything the time spot tells you it's like oh yeah you can do over 155 FPS in Battlefield 5. okay sounds good whatever so okay okay you get it the gaming performance is there amd's got the goods Andy's got the goods across a whole variety of games going back you know there's no weirdness with DirectX 9 there's nothing going on with you know DirectX 11 where there's some sort of weird performance regression sometimes over the 6900 and 6900 XT there wasn't as much of a performance uplift as I expected especially at the lower resolutions it just depends on the game uh and certainly Nvidia was able to get more performance especially in the Intel platform at those lower resolutions I mentioned that actually to show how easy it is to go off into the weeds like you forget as a gamer sometimes you just want to enjoy the game and that's why I really want to talk about the new stuff in the driver I want to talk about OBS because finally there's good OBS integration there's Hardware av1 encoding there's Hardware h.265 encoding and AMD is really trying to dot the eyes across the teeth with their software but more important than all that while I still have your attention hyper RX if you just want to launch a game and the driver says oh you have Tiny Tina's Wonderland's installed oh you've got Battlefield 5 installed oh you've got you know whatever the driver is going to tell you okay you've set something dumb this game is going to perform badly because this is turned on or this is turned on or this is a non-optimal setup what hyper RX does is it turns on the features that you need depending on what your goals are for visual Fidelity or frame rate or whatever for your game from the driver's side of things so like the little driver control panel it's like you want to run a liquid smooth 120 FPS and that's more important than visual Fidelity and you want to run a native 4K you know because you're rocking an LG OLED display it gives you one click to do that that's not here yet though it's coming in January AMD was kind enough to share some demonstration b-roll of what this is conceptually you click a button and then boom it's optimized and so hyper RX is coming sometime in the first half of 2023 hopefully sooner rather than later but what is in the driver right now today is the little status thing showing you okay this is optimal you know you might have a yellow you might have a green showing that you've got everything turned on or it might be red saying okay you're playing cyberpunk 2077 and you've got Ray tracing turned up to ultra do you really want to play at 30 FPS or 20 FPS at 4K with that why don't you let me turn on fsr2 why don't you let me dial in some settings and then just try the game at those settings for a little while and see how it goes you don't have to be an expert in all the little nuances and everything else that goes into this the other thing is that if you want to run the game at a higher frame rate than your monitor supports they can also negatively impact your input latency meaning from the time you click the mouse to something happens and it's kind of noticeable when you have a display that's as fast as an OLED display the game seems snappier it seems more responsive it's really easy to notice this on older games like GTA 5 especially when you're playing it on a really ancient machine because it's like oh it's got I'm underwater or there's you know there's an ambiguous effect there that uh feels weird because the game is responding and it's a high frame rate but it's doing it you know milliseconds after it does on a nicer machine I don't know it's hard to explain all of this is meant to deal with that so it's nice that we see that on the AMD side of things and finally OBS whatever weirdness was going on between AMD and the people that do open broadcaster has finally been resolved there's no weird plugin that you have to install there's no special incantation that you have to do in order to configure the AMF encoder to work properly with OBS it basically just works and OBS can actually use multiple encoders simultaneously so av1 av1 is a really high fidelity visual compression codec it's next Generation codec there's not a streaming service that actually uses av1 but it's very very good but you can capture locally at a very high high fidelity bit rate so it looks really good in fact we use that for some of our cyberpunk capture and everything else so that you can really see what's going on and then you can also stream in h.264 but the software will also use the h264 Hardware encoders that are built into your CPU so if you're using a 7950x like I am in my fractal North test system here it can use the hardware encoders physically on the CPU you can use the hardware encoders physically on the GPU you can use both you can use both mini encoders there to figure that out whatever is the right size operation for whatever it is that you're trying to do and the AMD driver has had a lot added to it to really make those things more accessible to you a gamer without being overly complicated to an extent AMD is a little bit playing catch up here but I think that AMD is competing on the merits of their product a little bit more transparently than Team Green we look at the 4080 launch and I'm a little bit behind with my 4080 coverage but we look at the 4080 launch and Nvidia sort of unlaunched one version of their 4080 but then just a few weeks later and the reason stated was that oh it would be confusing to have two different 4080s that have wildly different performance and then just a few weeks later Nvidia launched a 3060 that has wildly different performance than another 3060. Nvidia is capturing as much money as they possibly can but at least some of that money comes from Gamers who aren't willing to really obsess to the nth degree over all of the little details about oh do I need eight gigs of RAM or do I need 12 gigs of RAM does the ram needs to be this speed should the core be clocked this High how does this work if they're not really competing on the merits of the product they're just saying it's like I need a 30 60. and they get a 30 60 and you can have wildly different performance from 130 60 to the next and the software ecosystem signing into the drivers stuff like that no one has ever wanted to sign in to the drivers ever period comment below if you have wanted to sign into the drivers it's a mild annoyance you're willing to put up with because you need the features that seems like a hostage situation to me personally just say it AMD doesn't have that I mean no Nvidia rant is complete without g-sync and then freesync and now g-sync is freesync because the original g-sync was like this crazy fpga that was wildly impractical anyway video has a pattern of this Behavior now the part of versions of these cards are probably going to be you know three four slots this you know it's it's sapphires tease the vapor chamber version of this and it's been a while since they've done the vapor chamber thing but the reference cards from AMD are two and a half slots and they're not super long and I will probably pick up another 7900 XT for a giveaway or use here at the office or something like that because it's a powerful card it's two and a half slots it's not super long and it's not super unwieldy and it's two eight pin power connectors it's nice so to wrap it all up AMD has got the win in the bag in terms of frames per dollar if you as a gamer want to get the highest end performance per dollar amd's the clear winner here it's not even like by a little bit it's it's a significant margin even when you factor in the ray tracing performance of the 4080 and the 40 90. right now amd's got it locked up in terms of value per dollar the drivers are better than I've ever seen them the OBS performance is better than it's ever been am5 is a promising platform though it is a little expensive still for what it is and these cards will perform great on last generation Hardware so maybe you don't need the latest and greatest CPU and desktop computer platform the graphics part of it's pretty good so I think amd's got the win here in in terms of things that make sense so congratulations AMD uh don't forget to finish hyper RX and don't don't let up on the gas on the drivers like the drivers have come a long way they're still a ways to go in terms of Polish and Improvement but stability is there which is good I think at least it is so far my testing you know comment below engagement challenge I don't know let me know in the Forum if I'm wrong about that or let's let's do a deep dive and figure it out anyway I'm one of those level one these are my thoughts of the 7900 XT and the XTX and let's do some more videos oh be sure to check out the Linux video because these cards Day Zero Linux support yeah a plus yeah amd's getting their stuff together hiring people they're figuring it out it's nice to see competition is great actually the Playbook if we look at what AMD has done for the CPU Market they're doing that in the GPU Market our DNA is uh you know Nvidia is releasing fire breathing cards like the 4090 because amd's cards are so good and and Nvidia just can't help the charge too much I don't know I'm one of this level when I'm signing out and find me the level one forms [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 63,567

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: DyRMFNui6vk

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Evleos]

This is the channel whose reviews you guys should post. Wendell is intelligent and has integrity.

Give him your clicks.

[u/sixpointnineup]

(21:47) "AMD has got the win in the bag"

"AMD is the clear winner here"

"It's not even by a little bit..it's a significant margin."