AMD announced the first Radeon RX 7000 GPUs at prices that beat RTX 4080

We finally have AMD’s answer to the Nvida RTX 40 series: the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the red team’s first graphics cards to be built on the RDNA 3 architecture. These are both high-end GPUs that will be priced at $899 and $999 respectively when they release on December 13, but you’ll find that these prices are quite a bit cheaper than the RTX 4080’s £1269 / $1199 and the RTX 4090 at £1679/$1599.

They’re also structurally different from current Radeon RX 6000 cards to an extent that’s quite surprising from AMD GPUs, to be honest. RDNA 3 uses a Ryzen CPU-inspired chiplet design, where the GPU is split into different sections, and the new media engine is designed for both the 4K gaming monitors of the future and current PC hardware.

Exactly how these two cards will perform in games remains to be seen (reliably), although AMD has also announced a helping hand in FSR 3. This new version of the FidelityFX Super Resolution Upscaler will not only reduce the load of rendering frames, but will likely add its own “Fluid Motion Frames”, which looks like a direct challenge to Nvidia DLSS 3 and its AI frame generation technology looks.

There’s a lot to chew on here, so let’s do just that, with all the newly announced Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX specs and availability deets.

AMD Radeon RX 7000 series prices

UK pricing is TBD, but AMD confirmed the flagship RX 7900 XTX will launch with an MSRP of $999, while the RX 7900 XT is locked in at $899. Expect pricier versions of both as board partners make additions like factory overclocks or upgraded coolers.

The fact that these are the only two official RX 7000 graphics cards might disappoint those who were hoping for cheaper 1080p/1440p-focused graphics cards, as Nvidia has also launched its latest GPU generation with luxurious 4K engines . But both the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX cost hundreds of dollars less than their new-gen GeForce competitors, while also undercutting older premium cards like the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. Ye value depends on how well they compare, but it’s at least encouraging that you don’t have to break four digits for AMD’s top tier.

AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series Release Date

Both the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX will go on sale on December 13, 2022 – there are no staggered launches here. However, it’s perhaps worth noting that FSR 3 won’t be available until early 2023. That’s in contrast to DLSS 3, which was operational – albeit with limited gaming support – when the RTX 4090 was released in October.

No word yet on future mid-range or low-end RX 7000 graphics cards, but with the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX only launching a couple of weeks out of the year, don’t expect any more additions to the RDNA 3 family until 2023 .

Specifications of the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series

If you’re just here for the core specs, here’s a chart. You can see both the RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX overflowing with VRAM, while the extra hundred dollars on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX nets you slightly higher clock speeds and a handful of additional compute units (core clusters). The Radeon RX 7900 XTX also has a significantly lower power rating than the 450W RTX 4090, I see.

There’s a lot more going on under the hood. RDNA 3 and with it the RX 7000 series represent a big change in the way AMD constructs its GPUs. Usually the GPU is monolithic, ie just one big chip. RDNA 3, which takes a page from AMD’s own Ryzen AND Epyc processors, uses a chiplet design instead: the GPU is housed in a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD) and six 6nm memory caches -This (MCDs) divided. Combined, the MCDs can apparently deliver 2.7x the peak memory bandwidth of RDNA 2, while most of the graphics magic happens on the GCD with dedicated hardware for ray tracing acceleration and AI capabilities.

Chiplet designs aren’t inherently better than monolithic GPUs, and AMD had to develop an incredibly fast 5.3 TB/s connection just to make sure the different parts could talk to each other fast enough. But there are advantages: Mainly, the GPUs can benefit from more efficient 5nm hardware, but only where it matters most, with the MCDs using a cheaper manufacturing process with better yields. In theory, this should mean next-gen performance at a low cost, with the savings being passed on to the consumer. Hopefully.

The new GCD also aims to close the gap with Nvidia in ray tracing performance, with AMD promising “1.5x more rays in flight” and improvements in RDNA 3’s processing of newly generated rays.

As for how these changes translate into actual performance, we’ll have to wait for some benchmarks outside of AMD’s own. The company says the RX 7900 XTX is between 1.5x and 1.7x faster than the RX 6950 XT in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus with ray trace, although a more important comparison is certainly against the RX 6950 XT would be RTX 4090. Or at least the RTX 4080.

Speaking of which, anyone picking up an RX 7000 series card doesn’t have to worry about needing an RTX 40 series-style power supply, as it takes your power supply’s regular 8-pin power cables as is they are. A relief perhaps considering how many RTX 4090 adapters have melted lately.

AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series Features

The RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX will be the first graphics cards to support the DisplayPort 2.1 connection standard, meaning they will be able to fully support largely theoretical gaming monitors – think 4K/480Hz and 8K /165Hz.

The DisplayPort 1.4 and 1.4a standards used by other GPUs, including the RTX 4090 and 4080, still handle up to 144Hz at 4K. And monitors with 2.1 inputs won’t be available until 2023 at the earliest. But if you’re a display fanatic and dream of gaming on some sort of fast 5K ultrawide, for example, or running multiple 4K screens simultaneously, 2.1 is the better port from a future-proof perspective.

The RX 7000 also reaches parity with the RTX 40 series in supporting AV1 encoding. This is not a gaming feature per se but could be useful for streaming or recording game footage for later editing; AV1 is miles better than other mainstream encoders when it comes to balancing high quality with low data usage.

AMD FSR 3: a new DLSS 3 rival

AMD also used their Radeon RX 7900 XT/RX 7900 XTX reveal event to tease their upcoming FSR 3 upscaler. It’s unfortunate that this won’t be ready in time for the new maps’ release day, as it sounds like it’s targeting the same massive FPS gains as DLSS 3 – and not just core temporal upscaling.

Additionally, FSR 3 will use Fluid Motion Frames technology to deliver up to twice the FPS improvements of FSR 2 (formerly known as FSR 2.0). AMD hasn’t really addressed Fluid Motion Frames and how they work, but my bet is that they are interpolated frames generated by the GPU using visual data from previous frames and inserted between the traditionally rendered frames to create the improve overall smoothness. In other words, basically what DLSS 3 does with its AI-generated frames, but with less AI. FSR 2.0 already uses data from other frames to improve its upscaling quality, so creating entirely new frames would be the next logical step.

Interestingly, AMD never indicated that RDNA 3 hardware would be essential for FSR 3, so like previous versions it could potentially be available on older cards as well – and not only on Radeon models, but also on Nvidia and Intel graphics cards . Again, just speculation at this point, but this could be a big deal when it comes to boosting the performance of aging PCs. If only in the games that add support for FSR 3 to their site, of course, and they haven’t been announced yet either.