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

Rasterisation tests - and include the bulk of our entire benchmarking - comes to a conclusion on this final page of tests. In terms of the titles we've got lined up for you, we have three very different games and engines on display. Forza Horizon 5 screams on higher-end GPUs like these to the point where even at 4K, the RTX 4090 is GPU-limited. Red Dead Redemption 2? It's not often that we get a new Rockstar game and the tech on display in this one is still exceptional. Finally, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the benchmarker's friend. Just so we're clear, all of the cards featured here are good for 4K gaming, so that is the focus of our commentary - but 1440p results are also provided.

Once again, if you're jumping straight to this page without looking at prior results, we should stress that our benchmarking 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.

Forza Horizon 5

Playground Games' best title yet recently received an update that improved RT support and added in DLSS and FSR2 features. We're not using any of them though! The extreme preset is paired with 2x MSAA here, but ray tracing is disabled. Looking at the AMD cards, there are iterative jumps in performance as we move from RX 6800 XT to 6900 XT, then onto the new RDNA 3 cards. It reminds me that the pricing gap between the RDNA 2 offers was substantial, but it's not any more with RDNA 3. Gen-on-gen improvements are lacklustre, and there's the sense that the XRX is underperforming in only matching RTX 4080 performance in this case.

Red Dead Redemption 2

This title didn't serve the Nvidia RTX 4080 well in its review, offering sub-par gains compared to the last-gen RTX 3090 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti. The top-end RDNA 3 card doesn't provide a huge gen-on-gen bump up against the RX 6900 XT but it's enough to take it several points clear of the 4080. However, the story is far less flattering to the RX 7900 XT, which only offers 82 percent of the performance of its counterpart while AMD charges 90 percent of the price. The unspoken rule of checking benchmarks results is that if something looks wrong, it likely is wrong. However, no matter how many times the bench was run on both cards, very similar results came in - and once again, synthetic benchmarks tested at the same time matched AMD's results.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

This page has seen results for the RDNA 3 cards that feel somewhat disappointing and the final benchmark in the entire review sees us end with another downer. Here, the RX 7900 XTX falls just short of the RTX 4080 when we went into this review hoping to see consistently better results. An increase of 46 percent over the RX 6900 XT also seems off-pace when AMD was promising us 1.5x to 1.7x performance multipliers over the faster RX 6950 XT. At the same time, the RX 7900 XTX once again delivers a performance improvement north of 20 percent compared to its improperly priced counterpart - doubling the differential compared to RX 6900 XT vs 6800 XT where the pricing gap was much wider.

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