Talking RDNA 3 and RX 7900 XTX with Dominic and Leo!

Following on from AMD’s big reveal of the RDNA 3 architecture and the new 7000 series GPUs, I sat down with Leo to go over the announcement with a fine tooth comb. We talk performance, pricing, product positioning and much more… will AMD really kick Nvidia’s ass?!

Timestamps

00:00 Start
00:42 Dom was at the Las Vegas AMD event
01:10 Is Dominic optimistic?
02:22 Scott Herkelman says ‘AMD will kick Nvidia’s F’ing A$$!’
03:35 Dom is upbeat on the pricing – against what?
06:10 5nm / 6nm – what's next?
07:38 Stacking?
08:49 Worlds fastest chiplet interconnect
11:01 Performance per watt – 7900XT/XTX
12:47 GCD/MCD / New memory cache die
14:15 Did Dominic see it working and NDAs
15:42 Leo pokes a bit more
16:44 New Graphics Compute Die
18:20 Unified Compute – dedicated AI accelerators
19:25 Next Generation raytracing?
20:35 Is Raytracing interesting for gamers? Comment!
22:25 AMD Radiance Display Engine / DisplayPort standards
25:01 New Dual Media Engine
25:45 Decoupled Clocks
28:23 Nvidia power via cables – AMD’s stance?
29:30 Leo’s questions on Herkelman comments / burning connectors
33:10 Most advanced GPU architecture
34:06 RX 7900 XTX – looking promising?
35:55 RX 7900 XT and XTX specs
36:25 Samey compared to 6950XT / Reference designs?
38:55 Next Generation Displays
39:46 600fps/833fps gaming!
41:35 High refresh 4K/8K Gaming
42:50 7900 XTX 4K Raytracing
43:13 FSR2 v FSR3
43:38 Advanced workloads – 24GB
44:43 AMD Smart Access Video
45:55 AMD Advantage Desktops
47:05 AMD Driver discussion
48:36 Closing Thoughts

We got our first look at the RX 7900 XTX at the launch event in Las Vegas. The design is fairly similar to the RX 6000 series overall, though the shroud looks slightly more aggressive now and it is almost entirely matte black. Both cards use two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

The flagship RX 7900 XTX offers 96 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 dual-issue Stream Processors per CU resulting in a total of 6144 cores. Clock speed is rated at 2.3GHz game clock, while 24GB of GDDR6 memory is fitted across a 384-bit memory interface, assisted by 96MB of 2nd-generation Infinity Cache. Total board power (TBP) is rated at 355W.

Stepping down to the RX 7900 XT reduces the number of Compute Units to 84, for a total core count of 5376. Game clock is significantly reduced however, to a rated speed of 2GHz, while 20GB of GDDR6 memory operates a 320-bit interface. As expected considering the reduced clocks and shader count, power draw drops to 300W TBP.

AMD showed only a handful of performance numbers in their keynote for the RX 7900 XTX, with no figures at all for the RX 7900 XT. No comparisons were made against the RTX 4090 either.

Further RX 7000 series coverage:

AMD RX 7900 XTX announced at $999, RX 7900 XT for $899

AMD teases FSR 3, launching in 2023

New details about AMD Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs emerge

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KitGuru says: What did you make of the RDNA 3 announcement? If you agree – or disagree! – with myself or Leo, be sure to let us know in the comments.

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