AMD has been talking up its incoming RDNA 3 graphics cards while throwing some shade at Nvidia’s imminent RTX 4080 GPU.
This is all part of a bunch of presentation materials on AMD Advantage PCs and their various perks, which are systems that use the latest Ryzen processors and RDNA 3 GPUs to great effect, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab) (via Wccftech (opens in new tab)).
The really interesting bits relate to the GPUs, which are AMD’s inbound RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, and these are compared to the RTX 4080 in terms of their base specs. The presentation slides show that the 7900 XTX loads up with 24GB VRAM and the 7900 XT with 20GB – compared to 16GB for the RTX 4080 – and that the respective memory buses are faster at 384-bit and 320-bit, compared to 256-bit for the Nvidia card.
AMD also underlines the raw compute power of the 7900 XTX at 61TFlops with the 7900XT at 52TFlops, compared to 49TFlops for the RTX 4080. (Not that this metric means much for gamers). And Team Red reminds us about DisplayPort 2.1 support for its next-gen cards (with DP 1.4 for Nvidia’s new models).
Another slide details a size comparison of the 7900 XTX versus 4080, showing the AMD model as a 2.5-slot affair compared to 3-slots, and Team Red’s card is slightly shorter too (287mm versus 304mm).
And unsurprisingly, AMD points out that the 7900 XTX just requires 2 x 8-pin power connectors, as opposed to the adapter setup which the 4080 runs with (something which has caused controversy with the RTX 4090 as we’ve seen, with some incidents of melting adapter cables being reported).
While AMD doesn’t draw any direct performance comparisons to the RTX 4080 as such – though doubtless this is something that’s likely to happen down the line – Team Red does offer up some benchmarks showing that the new 7900 XTX beats out the old flagship 6950 XT by up to 67% in terms of rasterization frame rates (non-ray tracing, in other words).
That includes the 7900 XTX achieving 139 frames per second (fps) at 4K resolution (max detail settings) in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, compared to 92 fps for the 6950 XT. And in Cyberpunk 2077, the gap was 72 fps versus 43 fps.
Performance increased even more with ray-traced games, and in fact AMD noted an up to 82% boost in this case for the new RDNA 3 card.
Analysis: Gunning for the RTX 4080 in no uncertain terms
Naturally, all this needs to be regarded with some skepticism, as cherry-picked benchmarks are always going to be used for promotional materials such as this – that’s to be expected whether it’s AMD, Nvidia, or anyone else.
Still, it’s clear enough that AMD is certainly gunning for the RTX 4080 when it comes to its RDNA 3 top dogs, although the incoming graphics cards are still some way off yet. Whereas the RTX 4080 arrives tomorrow, the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT won’t debut until December 13, still almost a month away now.
That said, we’re not sure how much stock of the RTX 4080 we’ll see, as early pricing on the cusp of release is looking thin on the ground – and what we have glimpsed of those pre-release price tags is that they’re stacked up worryingly high in some cases (outside of the US, anyway). That could give AMD a big advantage in terms of being able to keep that lower pricing relative to the 4080, assuming that the RDNA 3 graphics cards themselves appear in strong enough volume, and so aren’t subject to inflation via scalpers.
All of which is to say it’s really guesswork how this battle of the next-gen GPUs is going to pan out at the end of 2022, but right now, AMD is looking ready to take some chunks out of Nvidia.
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