At the together we advance_gaming event today, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has officially announced the next generation of Radeon 7000 series graphic cards. The two top-of-the-line graphic cards introduced today are the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT, which respectively have an MSRP of $999 for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and $899 for the latter. Both graphic cards will be available for purchase on December 13.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX specification
As a flagship of this announcement, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX features an impressive specification, with an estimation of 1.7 times faster than the Radeon RX 6950 XT at 4K resolution.
- 96 unified RDNA 3 Compute Units
- 6144 Stream Processors
- 6 Shader Engines
- 58 billion transistors
- 61 TFLOPs peak single precision compute performance
- Up to 2500 MHz boost frequency
- 355W typical board power (minimum 800W PSU recommended)
- 24 GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 384-bit bus, 96 MB Infinity Cache, and up to 960 GB/s bandwidth
- Supports HDMI 2.1, Display Port 2.1, USB Type-C output, and native AV1 codec (encode, decode)
- 2.5 slots card size
- Two 8-pin power connectors input
Radeon RX 7900 XT specification
For $100 less, the Radeon 7900 XT features a competitive specification as below.
- 84 unified RDNA 3 Compute Units
- 5376 Stream Processors
- 6 Shader Engines
- 58 billion transistors
- 52 TFLOPs peak single precision compute performance
- Up to 2400 MHz boost frequency
- 300W typical board power
- 20 GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 320-bit bus, 80 MB Infinity Cache, and up to 800 GB/s bandwidth
- Supports HDMI 2.1, Display Port 2.1, USB Type-C, and native AV1 codec (encode, decode)
- 2.5 slots card size
- Two 8-pin power connectors input
What does this mean for the current market?
About 3 weeks ago, Nvidia RTX 4090 was launched at a whopping $1599 MSRP, and Nvidia RTX 4080 at $1.199 (which was unlauched shortly after, arguably due to backlash from the community, regarding Nvidia's unjust naming convention). The 4090 has been consistently out of stock since then. However, with the arrival of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at $600 less, and controversy around the 4090's 12-pin power connector, consumers may shift their eye to this very competitive card and inherently, make 4090 more widely available or even force Nvidia to lower the price. It seems AMD does not want to compete head-to-head with the 4090 in terms of technology advancement, rather, they are going after the market share this time.
As always, it is best to wait for community-trusted third-party reviews so we can correctly evaluate the price and performance of these top-end RDNA3 graphic cards. With the lower-tier Radeon cards not arriving until early 2023, there probably will not be much shift in the price of $200-$700 cards this holiday season. However, reviews of top-end cards can be a good indicator to make an educated guess about lower-tier cards. If you prefer not to wait, at $700, you should be able to purchase the most battle-tested flagships of the previous generation. Personally, I might wait for a bit to check out these RDNA cards' performance on Linux before making a purchase decision.
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