AMD has announced its next generation of graphics cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, which are the first cards powered by its new architecture, RDNA 3, which uses a chiplet design similar to the company’s Ryzen processors.

Both cards will launch on December 13th, with both AMD’s reference cards, and board partner models set to ship on that date. The 7900 XTX will cost $999, and the XT is $100 cheaper at $899. That represents a significant price jump compared to the previous gen – the top-spec 6950 XT retailed for $849, while the base 6900 XT was $679. Nvidia’s RTX 4080, however, starts at $1199, while the 4090 is an eye-watering $1,599.

There’s been a lot of buzz around AMD’s next generation of cards, with people waiting to see how it would answer Nvidia’s latest RTX 4000 series GPUs, especially considering that Intel’s newly released GPUs aren’t really a high-end contender.

In terms of performance, AMD claims the top of the line 7900 XTX will be up to 1.7 times faster than its existing RX 6950 XT card at 4K. AMD appears to be focusing largely on performance per watt here. With a board power of just 350 watts, compared to the 450 watts on the RTX 4090, AMD might have an efficiency advantage here.

The company’s promising a lot with RDNA 3: up to a 54 percent jump in performance-per-watt compared to RDNA 2, which used a more traditional GPU design. AMD says it’s capable of producing up to 61 TFLOPs, compared to RDNA 2’s 23 TFLOPs, though it’s worth noting that these numbers aren’t always comparable when you’re talking about different architectures. It also means that we probably won’t be able to use just the numbers to directly compare consoles like the PS5, Xbox Series, and Steam Deck, which use RDNA 2, to the company’s new PC GPUs.

At 4K, AMD is promising 62fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with its 7900 XTX card with ray tracing and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) enabled. That’s less than what we’ve seen with the RTX 4090 at 4K with DLSS 2 or DLSS 3, so it looks like the 7900 XTX is positioned more to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4080 instead.

The RX 7900 XTX will ship with 24GB of memory, whereas the 7900 XT is a slightly lower-end version with 20GB of memory. You won’t need to use any special power connectors or adapters, as both cards will require two regular 8-pin connectors.

Interestingly, AMD has opted for DisplayPort 2.1 support on both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900. That means higher refresh rate support at 4K and 8K, compared to the old DisplayPort 1.4 port that Nvidia is using on its latest RTX 40-series cards. And just like Nvidia, AMD has simultaneous encode or decode for AV1, something that creators will be interested in.

According to AMD, RDNA 3 is the first time a chiplet architecture (where a chip’s multiple parts are broken up and talk to each other via an ultrafast interface) has been used in a gaming GPU, and it says it decided to go with the design so it can use “the right process technology for the right job.” Basically, it means it can use cutting-edge 5nm tech for its graphics processing while relying on more “mature” 6nm chips for memory caching, instead of having to use the fancy stuff for everything. AMD previously made waves with its chiplet-based Ryzen processors, and companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, ARM, and Qualcomm have all at least started looking into the concept.

The chips can talk to each other extremely fast, at around 5.3TB/s. For reference, Apple’s M1 Ultra inter-processor connection that connects two CPUs and GPUs runs at what was widely considered a blazing-fast 2.5TB/s.

Outside of raw hardware speeds, AMD was keen to stress software improvements for its latest Radeon cards. AMD is introducing a new one-click Hypr-RX overclocking solution in early 2023, which will bump frame rates and reduce latency.

AMD is also launching SmartAccess video with its Radeon 7000 series GPUs, which works paired with Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. It essentially spreads the encoding and decoding workloads across Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs, so if you’re doing batch transcoding it will greatly improve how long it takes to complete a video. AMD says this will be supported in apps like OBS, Adobe Premiere Pro, and other apps starting in December.

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