AMD is going after Nvidia by releasing next-generation graphics cards that’ll start under $1,000, making them more affordable than the current crop of RTX 4000 products.
On Thursday, AMD introduced two desktop GPUs in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT, which will start at $999 and $899, respectively, when they go on sale Dec. 13.
The cards have been built to power gaming at 4K and even 8K resolution. AMD says you can expect the Radeon RX 7900 XTX to offer up to a 70% performance increase over the $1,099 RX 6950XT when it comes to 4K gaming.
“The world’s fastest gaming card for under $1,000,” added AMD SVP Scott Herkelman during the unveiling event.
The key improvements to the products include a 5-nanometer manufacturing process to pack even more transistors on the GPU chips, and DisplayPort 2.1 to support refresh rates of up to 480Hz at 4K and 165Hz at 8K resolution.
The new products also represent AMD’s first consumer graphics cards built with a “chiplet” process. This involves packing multiple chips together, instead of relying on a traditional monolithic chip package, to build the GPU, helping AMD save on production costs.
AMD applied TSMC’s 5-nanometer manufacturing process to develop the “RDNA 3” compute units for the graphics cards. The new architecture enabled AMD to increase the transistor density on the GPUs by 165% compared to the RX 6000 series. The company then used a 6-nanometer manufacturing process for the GPUs’ memory cache and the interconnect.
The new graphics cards will also avoid the controversial 12VHPWR connector that’s been causing melting problems for Nvidia’s RTX 4090 product. AMD showed that the 7900 XTX can be hooked up to a desktop PC using two conventional 8-pin connectors.
“There’s no need to rebuild your desktop, no need to upgrade your case, and there’s no need for a new power adapter,” Herkelman said in a veiled shot at Nvidia.
The 7900 XTX features 24GB of GDDR6 memory, 96 compute units, and 2.3GHz game clock speeds, with the power requirement at 355 watts. Meanwhile, the 7900 XT will offer 20GB of video memory, 84 compute units, a 2GHz game clock speed, at 300 watts.
However, AMD refrained from comparing the cards’ performance against Nvidia’s RTX 4090 and 4080 products, which start at $1,599 and $1,199, respectively. Stay tuned for our reviews, where we can really put the GPUs to the test.