AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX review: can RDNA 3 bring the value?

Another page, another trio of games benchmarked across the high-end stack of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, with the new brace of RDNA 3 graphics cards joining the fray. Hitman 3 - even without its high-end RT features - can still fully exercise our graphics hardware, while Gears 5 and F1 22 also reach stratospheric frame-rates, albeit with the Core i9 12900K CPU in our test set-up arguably limiting results at the top-end.

Owing to the way users may be jumping around our benchmarking pages, you may be missing out on an explainer of how our benchmarking system presents. Our system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

F1 22

There's another glass half-full/half-empty scenario here as we look at non-RT performance in F1 22. The RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX sit either side of the RTX 4080, which is pretty good going when you consider how much cheaper they are than the Nvidia RTX 4080. The problem is that comparing results value-wise to the RTX 4080 is perhaps not the best idea when it's been widely written off as a bad deal. At 4K resolution, the frame-rate differential between the 7900 XT and XTX of 19 percent reminds once again that the cheaper model is actually more expensive in terms of its price/performance ratio.

Gears 5

We ran the results on this one several times but no matter how many repeat runs we did, the RX 7900 XT frame-rate average didn't shift - and neither did the RX 7900 XTX's result either. At 4K resolution, a card that costs 11 percent more is delivering 26 percent more performance. This was the point where I began to wonder if there was actually something wrong with my card, so I spun up 3DMark, ran some synthetic benches and found the results to be within margin of error of AMD's in their reviewers guide. It's not a great result up against RTX 4080, nor the new cards' predecessors - however the difference between the two RDNA 3 cards is broadly in line with the raw spec variances.

Hitman 3

This page ends with better news for the RX 7900 XT and XTX models, with one of the strongest rasterisation performances yet. While the gap between the new models is still too wide compared to their price points, even the XT model is beating the RTX 4080. The RX 7900 XTX broadly sits at a mid-point between RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, which isn't bad when you consider the fact that both of them are much more expensive.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX analysis

• Introduction, hardware and power analysis
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, F1 22
• RT benchmarks: Hitman 3, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
• RT/DLSS vs FSR2 benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
• Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal
• Game benchmarks: F1 22, Gears 5, Hitman 3
• Game benchmarks: Forza Horizon, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX: the Digital Foundry verdict