AMD's latest Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT graphic cards are powerful, and make for great cards if 1440p ray-traced gaming is what you desire. 4K gaming is also possible without ray tracing (RT), or you can turn on an upscaler to get somewhat playable 4K RT framerates. But there are some drawbacks, such as idle power draw that make these cards less than perfect. This, though, is likely to be fixed in future driver updates.
Quick specs
- Compute units: RX 7900 XTX (96), RX 7900 XT (84)
- Frequency: XTX (boost up to 2,500MHz, game 2,300MHz), XT (boost up to 2,400MHz, game 2,000MHz)
- Power: XTX 355W, min PSU 800W; 315W, min PSU 750W
- Memory: XTX 24GB, XT 20GB
- Connectivity: DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1, USB Type-C
The RX 7900 XTX and XT are the first GPUs to sport AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture. You get better performance-per-watt over the RDNA 2, and better ray-tracing, too. Performance-wise, the XTX is still far from matching Nvidia's flagship GeForce RTX 4090, and is also slightly behind the GeForce RTX 4080. It will outperform Nvidia's last-gen GeForce RTX 3000 series, though. The XT's performance is about 10% behind the XTX.
If you're planning to game in 4K, then you may not want to turn on ray tracing. It will severely impact performance. In games like Cyberpunk 2077, RT at Ultra gets you 18.78fps in the benchmark tests, but 65.31fps with RT turned off. In Marvel's Spider-Man, you get around 53.9fps with RT, and double that at 114.8fps with RT off. However, if you're gaming on 1440p, you will get 35.88fps for Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra with RT on. Spider-Man is also very playable at 81.1fps with RT at 1440p.
In short, if you're gaming at 1440p, you should have no issues with the highest settings for most games even with ray tracing on. Though, for some games such as Cyberpunk 2077, you'll still have to deal with less than 60fps. The 7900 XT as mentioned, delivers 10% less performance. Power draw is at 350W for the 7900 XTX at load, while the 7900 XT is around 309W. Temperatures are at 64 and 62 degrees Celsius respectively at idle, rising to around 78 and 74 degrees Celsius at load. But idle power draw is a bummer at around 100W or more when doing nothing.
At S$1,699 (RX 7900 XTX) and S$1,439 (RX 7900 XT), the AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series is priced competitively against Nvidia's pricey GeForce RTX 4080 offering. If AMD can fix the idle power draw, then it definitely makes more sense to pick up a Radeon RX 7900 card. Availability seems limited for now, but you can buy a Sapphire-branded RX 7900 XT on Shopee, or a PowerColor version on Lazada. It's cheapest on Amazon though (even below recommended retail), but you'll have to deal with Amazon for your warranty.
Note: Review units provided by AMD. Both graphic cards were tested on our Aftershock PC test rig running the Intel 13th-gen Core i9-13900K, and a Prism+ PG270 Ultra 4K monitor.
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