AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT Review: Shooting for the Top

AMD RX 7900 Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC and gaming suite in early 2022, but with the RTX 40-series launch we found more and more games were becoming CPU limited at anything below 4K. As such, we've upgraded our GPU test system… except we have a ton of existing results that were all run on our 12900K PC. AMD also wanted some testing done using its latest Ryzen 7000-series and socket AM5, and we were happy to oblige — a good way to see if there's truly a benefit to going all-in on AMD components. As such, we have three test PCs for the RX 7900 series launch.

AMD and Nvidia both recommend either the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K to get the most out of their new graphics cards. We'll still have some results from the 12900K as well, but we ran into some other snafus like changing drivers, game updates breaking features, etc.

For now, we're going to focus mostly on our test results using the 13900K. MSI provided the Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill gets the nod on memory, and Sabrent was good enough to send over a beefy 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. Games are getting awfully large these days! The AMD rig has slightly different components, like the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard, Crucial P5 Plus 2TB SSD, and G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo memory with Expo profile support for AMD systems.

Time constraints prevented us from testing every GPU on both the AMD and Intel PCs, but we did get six cards tested on the Intel PC, and both 7900 cards on the AMD as well. Going forward, we'll start running more graphics cards on the 13900K and come up with a new GPU benchmarks hierarchy test suite, but that will take a while.

Also of note is that we have PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware from Nvidia on both the AMD 7950X and Intel 13900K PCs, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We're still trying to determine the best way to present all the data, but check the power testing page if that sort of thing interests you.

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For all of our testing, we've run the latest Windows 11 updates and the latest GPU drivers from AMD and Nvidia. That means 527.56 drivers on the Nvidia GPUs, and for AMD we used 22.11.2 drivers on the previous generation 6950 XT alongside 22.40.00.57 beta drivers that only support the RX 7900 cards.

Our gaming tests now consist of a standard suite of nine games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate ray tracing suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We tested all of the GPUs at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p using "ultra" settings — basically the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling).

Note that we've dropped Fortnite from our test suite as the latest update has broken things, again. In its place, we've added Spider-Man: Miles Morales with ray tracing effects enabled, and we've also included A Plague Tale: Requiem as one more non-RT game. Forza Horizon 5 and Total War: Warhammer 3 were also retested on all of the GPUs in the charts due to some recent patches. Forza performance on Nvidia cards seems to have dropped recently, so bear in mind that scores could go back up in the future.

Besides the gaming tests, we also have a collection of professional and content creation benchmarks that can leverage the GPU. We're using SPECviewperf 2020 v3 and Blender 3.40. We'll look at what AI benchmarks we can get working on RDNA 3 in the coming days, and we'll also see about doing some video encoding tests using the updated video engines on the various GPUs.

AMD RX 7900 Series Overclocking

Time constraints prevented us from properly exploring overclocking for this launch article. Given the high performance and limited gains, it's probably not a huge omission overall. Most GPUs can improve performance by about 5% through manually tuning, and some factory overclocked cards will provide close to that out of the box. We'll update this section once we've had a bit more time for testing.

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