AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs are much cheaper than the RTX 4090

Already in August, Dr. Lisa Su unveils AMD’s latest iteration of CPU technology to the world, the Ryzen 7000 series-but she didn’t stop there. We’ve had an announcement for an announcement: RDNA 3, AMD’s next generation GPU technology. Well, today is November 3rd and we now know more about AMD’s response to the RTX 40 series.

dr Su started the presentation by reflecting on the Ryzen 7000 series release and laying out AMD’s ambitious goals, similar to what she had done in the previous presentation. For RDNA3, she reiterated the company’s commitment to energy efficiency and performance.

“We focus on performance and energy efficiency. We want to make sure we continue to innovate around performance per watt to enable all gamer upgrades with fantastic performance but with reasonable performance.” – dr Lisa Su

Starting with the new chiplet design, RDNA 3 takes a modular approach with the intention of optimizing the efficiency of the entire GPU design. Similar to the Ryzen CPU family, RDNA3 will use a mixed chiplet architecture. Featuring a 5nm graphics chip processing unit (GCD) containing all shaders, display engines and updated media engine, the GCD is coupled with a 6nm memory cache die (MCD) composed of the GDDR6 controller as well as 96 MB AMDs consists of Infinity Cache – Infinity Cache of the 2nd generation, that is!

With this new design, the RNDA 3 chiplet will have a connection speed of up to 5.3 TB/s (a 2.7x increase over RDNA 2), enabling up to 61 TFLOPS of processing power. All of this is supported by up to 24GB of GDDR6 with a memory bus of up to 384-bit (not the GDDR6X we saw in the RTX 4090), and according to Dr. Su RDNA 3 GPUs allow to achieve up to 54% more performance per watt compared to the previous generation.

So what is this magic mystery GPU? Well, it’s actually two GPUs: the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX comes with 24 GB GDDR6 and the Radeon RX 7900 XT comes with 20 GB GDDR6. Designed as both 4K and 8K gaming GPUs, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT feature a number of updates over the previous generation that will help propel them into the future of gaming.

Starting with dedicated AI acceleration, RDNA 3 is said to improve GPU AI-based capabilities by 2.7x and ray tracing instructions by 1.8x over RDNA 2. When rendering applications – including ray tracing – this new architecture aims to achieve up to 50% more performance per processing unit and twice as many instructions per clock. This is a much needed leap for Radeon Graphics to compete in this particular area of ​​graphics processing!

But there is more:

AMD’s new Radiance Display is the engine that pushes all this data into the display. The engine supports 12 bits per color channel with up to 68 billion colors and higher refresh rates. Not least thanks to the introduction of DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT support refresh rates of up to 900 Hz at 1440p, 480 Hz at 4K and 165 Hz at 5K.

In addition to the Radiance Display engine, AMD also introduced a new dual-media engine for simultaneous encoding and decoding for AVC and HEVC formats. This engine also supports AV1 encoding and decoding with a maximum resolution of 8K60. Later in the presentation, AMD teased future AV1 encoding support within OBS as well as other popular video streaming and editing software. That teaser also featured a future feature called SmartAccess Video, which will leverage Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs together to reportedly deliver up to a 30% increase in 4K multi-stream encoding.

In terms of gaming performance, the RX 7900 XTX is said to perform up to 1.7x better than AMD’s previous flagship, the Radeon RX 6950 XT, in halftoning and up to 1.6x better in ray tracing games. Using FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), the charts AMD showed for the 7900 XTX showed several titles running at frame rates well in excess of 200 FPS at 4K. An outstanding one was Bravewhich showed the RX 7900 XTX running at 704 FPS! Lots of bold claims here, but we’ll have to see for ourselves once the cards are in third-party hands!

When it comes to the actual specifications, the RX 7900 XTX will have 96 processing units with a game clock of 2.3 GHz. All of this is said to run at a total board power draw of 355W. For comparison, that’s 95W less than NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 Founder’s Edition, while hovering close to the typical board power of the RX 6950 XT. The RX 7900 XT will have 84 cores with a game clock of 2 GHz and a total board power of 300 W.

Oh yes, and none of them require a special cable to power them.

However, this is just the hardware. AMD took some time to talk about the introduction of FSR, the increase in performance within FSR2, and how well RDNA 3 works with it. One example the company demonstrated was that of Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla runs at 96 frames per second at 8K. It was a short clip, but still pretty wild to watch. But AMD wanted us to know that FSR doesn’t stop at FSR2. There is a new iteration, FSR3. At the time of the announcement, AMD said that Radeon users can expect up to 2x more frames per second over FSR2 and that the technology will be available in 2023.

Continuing the software conversation, AMD’s Frank Azor shared updates to the Radeon Adrenaline software, including a new feature called AMD HYPR-RX, which will be released in the first half of 2023. This feature will be a one-button optimizer to give AMD systems the best possible performance without having to do all the adjustments yourself.

Team Red also shared its commitment to delivering the best unified CPU and GPU experience by working with system integrators to bring the AMD Advantage line to the desktop platform. This means AMD GPUs and CPUs are paired in system configurations that have been carefully curated by AMD to deliver what is believed to be the best possible AMD experience.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT will be available from 12/13/2022. And the price? $999 and $899 USD respectively. This is an amazing difference from NVIDIA’s $1599 flagship.

We look forward to seeing how these GPUs fare in the wild! Let us know what you’re most excited about from AMD’s announcement today, and if you plan to upgrade before the end of the year, in the comments below.