AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX buries any discernible reason for gamers to buy an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080

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PRICE £833 (£999 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk

For years, AMD's graphics cards have lagged behind Nvidia's. Competitive on value, yes, but never a genuine hit at premium prices. With the RX 7900 XTX, AMD has finally dropped a graphics card that isn't just the equal of Nvidia's rival GPU but delivers a technical knockout that no one was expecting.

Taken together, the RX 7900 XTX and Nvidia RTX 4090 (see issue 339, p56) have cut off any reason to buy the Nvidia RTX 4080 (see issue 340, p62). Frustrated gamers who have been unable to upgrade their rigs thanks to scalpers and cryptohogs are finally ready to say goodbye to their old GTX 1060s and splurge on a high-end GPU.

Price is right

AMD's reference card costs £999, and it's likely that overclocked cards from partners such as Gigabyte and XFX will cost more. But they will still be cheaper (by around £200) than the Nvidia RTX HAL 4080 it competes against.

I should also mention the RX 7900 XT, which loses an X, £100 off the price and a chunk of its specs. The 7900 XT has 5.376 stream processors to the 6,144 of the 7900 XTX, and its base frequency of 2GHz is 300MHz slower than its sibling. Until it drops in price, it isn't worth considering.

Both run on AMD's 5nm Navi 31 GPU, but rather than one chip we need to talk about chipsets: there isn't one die in the graphics card but several. This compartmentalized architecture is one way that AMD controls costs: the expensive 5nm node is reserved for the compute units that will take advantage.

Similarly, AMD uses GDDR6 RAM rather than the GDDR6X video memory found in the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, but by utilising faster interconnects on the die and interfaces with the memory chiplets, along with roughly 22MB more cache than the RTX 4080, it offers a higher memory bandwidth than its rival.