AMD has been talking about upcoming RDNA 3 graphics cards while casting a shadow over Nvidia’s upcoming RTX 4080 GPU.
This is all part of a set of presentation materials about AMD Advantage PCs and their various add-ons, which are systems that use the latest Ryzen CPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs to great effect, as noted Tom’s gear (opens in a new tab) (by Wccftech (opens in a new tab)).
The really interesting bits are with the GPUs, which are the incoming AMD RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, which are compared to the RTX 4080 in terms of their core specs. Presentation slides show that the 7900 XTX loads with 24GB of VRAM and the 7900 XT with 20GB – compared to 16GB for the RTX 4080 – and that the respective memory buses are faster at 384-bit and 320-bit, compared to 256-bit for the Nvidia card.
AMD also highlights the raw processing power of the 7900 XTX at 61 TFlops with the 7900XT at 52 TFlops, compared to 49 TFlops for the RTX 4080. (Not that this metric means much to gamers). And Team Red reminds us of DisplayPort 2.1 support for their next-gen cards (with DP 1.4 for new Nvidia models).
The next slide shows a size comparison of the 7900 XTX vs. 4080, showing the AMD model as 2.5 slot vs 3 slot, and the Team Red card is also slightly shorter (287mm vs 304mm).
And it’s not surprising that AMD points out that the 7900 XTX only requires 2 x 8-pin power connectors as opposed to the adapter configuration the 4080 works with (something that caused controversy with the RTX 4090 as we’ve seen with some meltdown incidents transition cables).
While AMD isn’t doing any head-to-head performance comparisons with the RTX 4080 per se – though it’s no doubt something that’s likely to happen – Team Red offers some benchmarks showing the new 7900 XTX beating the old flagship 6950 XT by up to 67% in terms of speed frames of rasterization (in other words, no ray tracing).
This includes the 7900 XTX reaching 139 frames per second (fps) at 4K resolution (maximum detail settings) in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, compared to 92 fps for the 6950 XT. In Cyberpunk 2077, the difference was 72 fps compared to 43 fps.
Performance increased even further in ray-traced gaming, with AMD seeing an increase of up to 82% in this case for the new RDNA 3 card.
Analysis: The hunt for the RTX 4080 without any doubts
Of course, all of this is to be taken with some skepticism, as promotional material like this will always use curated benchmarks – that’s to be expected, whether it’s AMD, Nvidia or anyone else.
Still, it’s clear enough that AMD is certainly hunting the RTX 4080 when it comes to its best RDNA 3 dogs, although upcoming graphics cards are still a long way off. While the RTX 4080 arrives tomorrow, the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT won’t debut until December 13, which is almost a month away.
That said, we’re not sure how much stock of the RTX 4080 we’ll see, as early launch prices look poor on the ground – and what we’ve seen from these pre-order prices is that they’re alarmingly high in some cases (outside the US, anyway States). This could give AMD a big advantage in terms of being able to keep their prices down over the 4080, assuming the RDNA 3 graphics cards themselves come out in large enough numbers and so are not subject to inflation by scalpers.
All of which means it’s really a guess on how this battle of next-gen GPUs will play out in late 2022, but right now AMD looks set to pick up a few chunks from Nvidia.