AMD’s first RDNA 3 GPUs are the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT

Now that NVIDIA has launched the latest video card wave with the insanely powerful RTX 4090, all eyes are on AMD to see how it will respond. Today, the company announced the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, two confusingly named GPUs powered by the new RDNA 3 architecture. On stage at the launch event in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the new hardware offers a 54 percent improvement in performance per watt over the previous GPUs. She also emphasized that AMD is focused on delivering complex performance with reasonable power consumption, a clear knock against NVIDIA’s power-guzzling (and PSU cable-melting) RTX 4090.

These cards aren’t just another spec bump. Su says RDNA 3 is the world’s first chiplet-based GPU, giving it a modular design that can be easily modified. Currently, those chiplets contain a 5nm GPU computer chip and a 6nm memory cache chip. It can achieve up to 61 teraflops of computing power (from a maximum of 23 TFLOPs in RDNA 2), can manage up to 24 GB of GDDR6 RAM and consists of 58 billion transistors.

Naturally, the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX gets the full 24 GB of RAM, while the 7900 XT comes with 20 GB. Both cards resemble AMD’s latest-generation hardware, albeit with larger fans and a slimmer heatsink design. AMD SVP Sam Naffziger also joked that you don’t need new power cables for these cards – you should be able to drop them into your existing system.

When it comes to ray tracing, historically one of AMD’s weaknesses, the company says the new cards have a next-generation accelerator with 50 percent more performance per unit of compute. They offer 1.5 times more rays in flight, new special instructions and improved ray box sorting. Hopefully this means we’ll see closer ray tracing parity with NVIDIA’s cards. The Radeon 7000 GPUs also feature AMD’s new Radiance Display Engine, with support for 480Hz 4K gaming and 165Hz 8K performance. (And yes, that last one sounds like a lot to us too.)

To develop…