AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT & Radeon RX 7900 XTX Creator Review

[Top Ad] Following on the publishing of our look at AMD's newest RDNA3-based Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs in 4K gaming, we're going to be turning our attention here to the creator side of the market - with targets on rendering, encoding, image manipulation, photogrammetry, and of course, viewport. The RDNA3 architecture represents a major departure from previous Radeons, as AMD has pulled the trigger on moving to a chiplet design - much like it has with its desktop and server CPUs. For creators, a couple of specs on the new top-end GPUs that will grab you include 20 and 24GB frame buffer options, with much-improved bandwidth over the previous generation: 800 GB/s and 960 GB/s, respectively. Many aspects of RDNA3 improve performance in myriad workloads over the previous generation, with the updated video encoder in particular impressing us often. That's notable considering the fact we've yet to test one of its major new features: AV1 encoding. We'll be exploring that on all three vendors soon. Here's a quick look at AMD's current and last-gen Radeon lineup to help put the overall stack into perspective: If you were hoping for less-expensive top-end Radeons this generation, you're going to be disappointed - but depending on your use cases, what AMD's offering with RDNA3 could make the pricing feel justified - especially if you rely heavily on having lots of VRAM. Ongoing travel dictates that timeliness of publishing this article is of most importance, so let's quickly tackle our test PC configuration, and then dive right into the results: Techgage Workstation Test System Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16-core; 3.4GHz) Motherboard ASRock X570 TAICHI (EFI: P5.00 10/19/2022) Memory Corsair VENGEANCE (CMT64GX4M4Z3600C16) 16GB x2 Operates at DDR4-3600 16-18-18 (1.35V) AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24GB; Adrenalin 22.12.1) AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT (20GB; Adrenalin 22.12.1) AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6800 (16GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT (8GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6600 (8GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT (4GB; Adrenalin 22.11.2) Intel Graphics Intel Arc A770 (16GB; Arc 31.0.101.3959) Intel Arc A750 (8GB; Arc 31.0.101.3959) Intel Arc A380 (6GB; Arc 31.0.101.3959) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti (12GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (10GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (8GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB; GeForce 527.56) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 (8GB; GeForce 527.56) Audio Onboard Storage AMD OS: Samsung 500GB Enterprise SSD (SATA) Intel OS: Samsung 500GB Enterprise SSD (SATA) NVIDIA OS: Samsung 500GB Enterprise SSD (SATA) Shared: Corsair MP600 1TB (Premiere Pro Export) Power Supply Corsair RM850X Chassis Fractal Design Define C Mid-Tower Cooling AMD Wraith Prism Air Cooler Et cetera Windows 11 Pro build 22621 (22H2) AMD chipset driver 4.11.15.342 All product links in this table are affiliated, and help support our work. Here are some general guidelines we follow: Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc. Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver. Vsync is disabled at the driver level. OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another. We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run. Testing doesn’t begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage). All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results. Blender. In our gaming look at the 7900 XT and XTX, we gained the impression that ray tracing performance didn't increase as much from one RDNA generation to the next as we would have liked. While the XT and XTX both perform better than the top-end RDNA2 GPUs when rendering with Cycles, the gain isn't enough to shake up the overall picture. In a testament to just how far ahead NVIDIA is in the ray tracing game, its last-gen low-end GeForce RTX 3060 beats out AMD's newest top-end RX 7900 XTX in both of these Cycles renders. We're soon to begin benchmarking for our Blender 3.4 performance deep-dive, and will include the latest demo project in our testing, and see how these new RDNA3 cards fare there. So far, though, NVIDIA's OptiX is just too hard to combat against. Fortunately for the likes of AMD, the Eevee engine isn't reliant on ray tracing like Cycles, which can allow GPUs that fell behind in Cycles to have another chance at shining in Eevee. Well, that's just what we see here with RDNA3: That's more like it. It should be noted that while the Red Autumn Forest project showed no real performance difference between Blender 3.3 and 3.4, optimizations did improve performance for Splash Fox across all vendors. Whereas Red Autumn Forest is more GPU-heavy, with little CPU used during the render, Splash Fox uses the CPU for tasks in between each frame render, so it could be that area where optimizations have made a difference. It's always great to see any project render faster with Blender updates. We hoped to include performance from AMD's Radeon ProRender in Blender, but the version of the plugin we used caused RDNA3 to perform worse than RDNA2 equivalent GPUs. We believe an update is either here or on-the-way, so we'll explore testing it again soon. LuxMark. As we can see across these two tested projects, the strengths RDNA3 offers will be better highlighted in one project over the other. With the Food project, the 7900 XTX scores just 15% better than the last-gen RX 6900 XT, while the Hall Bench scene bumps that advantage to 40%. The 7900 XT also fares a lot better in the Hall Bench scene, showing a 25% advantage over the 6900 XT, vs. a meager 2% advantage against the same GPU in Food. Adobe Lightroom Classic. We're not sure at which point it happened, but while the export to JPG function in Lightroom once ignored the GPU, it uses it to great effect nowadays. Because the software relies on a whitelist to decide whether or not a GPU will have acceleration by default, you'll want to check the preferences to ensure your GPU is in fact showing "fully accelerated". The top-half of this graph offers solid performance all around, with gains measuring in mere seconds between them. RDNA2 performed great in Lightroom, and RDNA3 carries the torch forward. Agisoft Metashape. It's not just with Adobe's Lightroom where RDNA3 can perform well; it also excels in Agisoft's Metashape photogrammetry tool. Just be sure to not forget a fast CPU, as the average photogrammetry process will use the CPU at least as much as the GPU. The Build Depths Maps step happens to be one that relies almost entirely on the GPU. Adobe Premiere Pro. With our two project encodes, AMD's RDNA3 performs great - even going as far as to place on top of the YouTube video test. In the deliberately heavier effects test, both 7900 GPUs slide down a few notches, but still deliver strong performance overall. It's a little interesting to see that the RTX 4080 actually falls behind two previous-gen GeForces in the heavy effects project, and meanwhile, the RTX 4090 is working really hard to set itself apart. Let's see how things go when performing straight-forward transcodes: Overall performance here is great from both RDNA3 GPUs, with any lagging behind being measured in small deltas. Both cards manage to top a couple of charts, and it's clear that HEVC performance is RDNA3's strong suit. That said, like Intel Arc and NVIDIA Ada Lovelace before them, RDNA3 supports AV1 encoding. We're working to figure out some tests that support all three vendors to explore encoding to that format soon. BRAW Speed Test. Similar to what we saw with our real-world Premiere Pro tests, both RDNA3 show their strengths differently depending on the test. With 3:1 compression in BRAW, the 7900 GPUs sit behind a few of the last-gen top-end GeForces, while 8:1 favors them more, shooting them to the top, to sit just behind the RTX 4080. It's of course a little strange to see the RTX 4080 top a chart instead of the RTX 4090, but repeated testing delivered the same result. Overall, the top-half of each graph will be sufficient for many, while those working with the highest-resolution and highest-bitrate files should consider going with a top-end option (VRAM being plentiful is a good reason for that). HandBrake. The current state of HandBrake for performance testing is a little frustrating, as the nightly build is required for the most up-to-date support on certain architectures, and a new build can change performance either negatively or positively. If you refer to our Arc launch article, you'll notice that all three Intel models score around 150 FPS. With this newer nightly build, that performance drops to 120 FPS. We're anxious to see a new HandBrake stable release that supports all of these new architectures well, to help us feel more confident in the results. Nonetheless, there's not much to say here except that RDNA3 performs really well in HandBrake, topping not just one, but both charts. To say we're eager to explore video encoding more, especially with AV1, is an understatement. We believe the current HandBrake nightly only supports AV1 encoding on Arc, and hope this will change soon. Viewport Performance. We'll be taking a look at Blender's viewport performance in forthcoming 3.4 deep-dive, as we found some optimizations we can make that will deliver even more accurate results. We didn't have time to refine things before this launch, so for now we'll cover other viewport tests, revolving around other advanced design suites. We have to admit that some of these results impressed us more...

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT & Radeon RX 7900 XTX Creator Review

Rob Williams