This video will not age well... - AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Review
amd's RX 6950xt is almost a totally different class of GPU compared to when it first launched to tepid reviews earlier this year and with recent price adjustments it is such a good deal now that its green opponent no longer makes any sense and neither does its predecessor the 6900 XT but why am I talking about the 6000 series because however the RX 7900 series performs today and it's good I want you to also keep in mind amd's track record for dramatically improving the performance of their gpus through new features and Driver optimizations personally I'm counting on it because now that I have publicly committed to skipping nvidia's latest 40 series cards AMD is my only hope for an upgrade this generation just like my only hope of paying our production team is our sponsor PDQ automate patch management and software updates with PDQ search their library of over 200 ready to deploy applications and install software zero touch from your desk start your free trial at pdq.com LTT [Music] right out of the gate the 7900 series is full of upgrades it features amd's brand new rdna 3 architecture up to 24 gigabytes of much higher bandwidth gddr6 memory substantially boosted core clocks across the board and this is great the step down 7900 XT comes with as many compute units as amd's previous Flagship with the beefier XTX rocking even more despite having more and faster cores though one of amd's boldest claims is that they've managed to improve efficiency by 54 this is thanks in large part to amd's high bandwidth chiplet design the first of its kind in a modern GPU what's more they've beefed up their Ray accelerator cores for real-time Ray traced Lighting in supported games and finally included AI accelerator cores to bring Radeon to feature parody with Nvidia and Intel's offerings unlike those offerings however the Radeon RX 7900 series cards we're looking at today come equipped with DisplayPort 2.1 which enables support for up to 8K 165 Hertz displays is that even necessary who cares it's awesome and it's something that nvidia's top-end GPU the RTX 4090 cannot do in spite of its staggering sixteen hundred dollar sticker price all of this is while actually fitting in your case and costing 900 and a thousand dollars for the XT and the XTX respectively that is 200 to 300 less than the RTX 4080 that AMD says they should be able to compete with for Speed Of course we won't be taking their word for that AMD has been known to be optimistic at 4K it's clear out of the gate and Shadow of the Tomb Raider that whatever team red fans might have hoped for the RX 7900 XTX is not amd's answer to the RTX 4090 it's got performance that is realistically more in line with the 4080 though that is what AMD said and this pattern continues in Hitman cyberpunk 2077 and Modern Warfare 2. well great right I mean why did I spend all that time talking about the importance of amd's ongoing driver developments keep that in mind well there's this for one thing Forza Horizon 5 is a clear loss for team red thanks to those subpar one percent and five percent low frame rates but also this for another reason that right there is a one thousand dollar GPU beating a sixteen hundred dollar GPU in F1 2022 and if the results I'm looking at right now are any indication of the kind of raw power that amd's driver team has on tap here there is some serious aging like fine wine potential on the table of course you should never buy a promise though and today amd's best Trails nvidia's best by about 17 which sounds bad Until you realize that nvidia's card costs 60 percent more compared to the 4080 the XTX is a no-brainer at nine percent faster and 20 cheaper and the 7900 XT does even better I mean sure the 4080 is seven percent faster but costs 33 percent more 1440p doesn't always show us a difference compared to 4K but here we do see some strange behavior in Forza that we retested several times the 7000 series is actually slower than amd's older 6000 series cards we think this could be a problem with the game as it's the only one out of our suite that does it and when we went to test for it says Ray tracing performance we saw that it was in fact pretty broken we also see the RTX 4080 pull ahead of even the XTX in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Red Dead Redemption which is especially surprising considering that virtually every other game shows AMD closing the Gap instead the biggest example is in Modern Warfare 2 where the minimum frame rates aren't quite up to the level of the RTX 4090 but the average frame rates are which again can set some potential for optimization in total these numbers put the 7900 Series in a very good position to compete with nvidia's 40 series to the point where if traditional rasterized gaming was all that existed Nvidia would need to lower their prices but it isn't all that exists and Ray tracing is sadly still not amd's strong suit while substantially better in cyberpunk than the rx6000 series these 7000 series gpus are behind Nvidia by at least a factor of two at 4K at 1440p AMD at least manages to break the 30 FPS minimum Mark making the game playable and you can use FSR to render at a lower resolution and upscale for smooth gameplay but at that point we could also do the same thing for Team Green and the overall story would still be the same F1 2022 fares slightly better for AMD at least with the 7900 XTX pulling up to within 16 of the RTX 4080 in minimum frame rates and actually near parity on average which again gives me hope that some of amd's woes with Ray tracing are a matter of optimization and that feeling only grows with shadow of the Tomb Raider where even at 4K it's within about 12 percent of the 4090 and turning out nearly 60 FPS it is an older game but that's not bad it's just that a good race ran when the other guy ran faster is still an l and ultimately the RX 7900 XTX just couldn't even come close to the RTX 4080s level of performance with Ray tracing enabled I suspect that most people myself included still don't use Ray tracing often and won't really be affected but given that these things do still cost a thousand flipping dollars it's definitely a skid mark on what has otherwise been a pretty good showing so far and I'm afraid there's more where that came from the professionals who have need of this kind of graphical horsepower will be well disappointed isn't quite the right word but looking at these numbers they're not going to be excited either yes blender runs a good eight to twenty percent faster on the 7000 versus the 6000 series but Nvidia walks all over amd's entire stack at between three to four times the performance thankfully amd's new encoding engine helps them push ahead of the RTX 4080 in DaVinci Resolve in both h.264 and especially h.265 which their encoding engine seems to favor that's a good 20 more speed for the XTX there not bad though the 49d does remain on top procyon video and photo are also pretty good for AMD with performance that I would call comparable it's within a few percentage points either way you look at it and rounding out the video editing Suite is topaz AI which despite the name is using GPU compute here rather than any AI course and wow even the 7900 XT outperforms the RTX 4090 here this workload seems to heavily favor amd's Infinity cache as the 6000 series cards aren't too shabby either specview perf brings AMD about as many wins as losses but the degree to which the 7000 series wins over the competition is often much lower than the losses that they suffer with especially poor results in 3ds Max Maya and SolidWorks which even dip under the performance of the 6000 series that's pretty rough those are kind of important applications they pull off major wins in Catia Creo energy medical and especially Siemens NX though as we've said in the past this is because the version in specview perf doesn't support Hardware acceleration on Nvidia and actually this is just going to be excluded from our averages when we calculate it later on spec workstation Paints the radoms in a significantly better light though with product development life sciences and energy all pushing well past Team Green but media and entertainment as well as GPU compute still stay with Nvidia likely thanks to opencl's relative obscurity next to Cuda despite the blows the 7900 series cards took though their beefed up media engines and GPU compute horsepower placed them with an average of two to ten percent of Team Green given the wide performance spread we saw depending on the workload potential prospective professional people will want to think long and hard about which capabilities are most important to them before making a final decision changing gears a little we found something interesting when we were testing resizable bar on both Intel and AMD platforms it seems like the performance improvements regardless of whether you have a team blue or team red CPU can be expected to be pretty similar despite AMD heavily marketing smart access memory as a selling point for the ryzen plus Radeon ecosystem bear in mind that this is a sample size of just two games but without resizable bar we're figuring you can expect anywhere from a 10 to 35 reduction in performance regardless of which side you swing for as for amd's updated video encoder there's a lot to be excited about here av1 support and baked in machine learning to improve quality at the top of my list but despite receiving our cards early we actually only had a few days to test these things prior to embargo because we didn't have a driver so we were forced to push our image quality comparisons to a separate video that you can expect to see in the next couple of weeks one of amd's other selling points is its smaller footprint compared to nvidia's 40 series gpus and I was concerned that this would come at the expense of thermals so I was extremely pleased to see that amd's new cooler design has the 7000 series actually performing better than the 6000 series with that said though AMD does not have the luxury of only competing with themselves and Nvidia is clearly in the better position here though with that said both of the Nvidia cards we tested have substantially larger heatsinks with fan off modes while amd's new cards always ran their fans it's probable that designs from the likes of Asus or power color will run much cooler and hopefully quieter now we need to talk about core clocks because they're a little different this generation thanks to the decoupling of the front end and the Shader clocks the idea here is that the front end will benefit more from higher clocks while the more numerous Shader units crunch data in parallel at a lower clock speed resulting in a better balance of performance and efficiency and you can see that in action here where both the 7900 XTX and XT have a consistent 200 megahertz gap between the two clocks and even in a power virus like MSI combustor these clocks remained higher than the previous generation clock stability in game is similar to the 6000 series cards but nvidia's 40 series manages flatter lines throughout the Run suggesting that AMD is trying to be pretty aggressive with managing power consumption which makes sense because AMD talked a lot about performance per watt in their marketing and looking at these in-game paragraphs no that seems to suggest that their self-congratulations are well Justified the Radeon RX 7900 XTX Drew comparable power to the 4080 and this held even when we hit it with MSI combustor the XT was even better still staying in line with its predecessor but what's interesting is when we take a magnifying glass to how many watts the 7000 series poles per frame in this example while the raw wattage drops much closer to the RTX 4080 when we capped the frame rate to 100 the total watts per frame increases substantially this suggests that while the RTX 4080 is able to throttle itself effectively AMD is actually having some trouble with power management and amd's idle power consumption numbers seem to corroborate this where the RTX 4080 idles at around 15 to 20 watts the 7900 XTX regularly sucks Back 40 and sometimes over 50 Watts while doing nothing at all what's even more baffling is that we noticed what seems like a major bug during our testing depending on the monitor that we plugged into the GPU we saw a wildly different total system power at the wall from a respectable 52 Watts with nothing plugged in to a whopping 171 Watts with our 27 inch Rog Swift bench display using some other monitors even caused performance to drop now given that I have a high-end display and I live in Vancouver Canada where energy is the one thing that is still cheap none of this is a deal breaker for me but if I was in Europe where Energy prices had surged pun intended it would give me pause before I was willing to look at team red adding insult to injury this high idle power draw means that the fans are spinning at all times kicking that heat out into your room even if you're just scrolling Reddit meaning that the 7900 series is gonna be a little less comfortable to live with maybe if you go team red you could pick up a blank T rather than a retropolar fleece from ltdstore.com space heater
one possible explanation for this high idle power consumption could be that this is a similar situation to the ryzen 7 5800 X 3D that cpu's use of 3D V cash limited its stability if voltages weren't dialed in just right and we could be witnessing similar teething issues with this new chiplet architecture and supporting that theory is the fact that the driver straight up locks out power adjustments below 90 percent of total board power when we asked them about this AMD played pretty Coy with us which tells us either we're right or that they're not sure either now it's time to talk about what this data means for the GPU Market first of all anyone who was hoping that the 7900 series would come in and compete head to head against the RTX 4090 will be sorely disappointed at least for today we saw a brief glimpses of Glory but the RTX 490 remains on its Throne making it tough to dislodge its price from that TI Titan perch that it currently occupies as a Halo product but while AMD doesn't have a direct competitor to it I still think the 7900 XTX is a much better value as for the RTX 4080 well the comparison gets a little more complicated even the XT model comes really close in traditional rendering and the value proposition of either 7900 GPU is a damning indictment of nvidia's pricing but AMD does remain on the back foot in Ray tracing performance and that's something that Nvidia can point to and claim makes up the difference even if nobody seriously cares it'll take people like me running out and buying 7900 series cards instead of 40 series to make Nvidia realize that they're out to lunch but wait why are we saying this now you might think we took a lot of flack for covering for nvidia's pricing in the RTX 4080 review didn't we well not so much first off we compared it to cards that were available at the time it released and we ended the video with a message to wait for our dna3 and we're reviewing the 7900 Series in much the same way second it had already been made known that the RX 7900 XTX was not going to compete with the 4090 which depending on how you look at it means that either the RTX 4080 is actually a 90 class card and priced accordingly with the 490 being a TI or something or the 7900 XT and XTX are the current gen equivalent of the 6800 and 6800 XT and are themselves overpriced basically it's kind of a game of pick your Villain at this point because the reality is that 600 top of the line gpus are a thing of the past and that was an assumption that our review made but did not fully explain it's worth pointing out by the way since I'm being a downer right now anyway that while AMD supports DisplayPort 2.1 and nvidia's 40 series does not AMD went with a half measure by supporting only the uhbr 13.5 spec what this means is that it can only achieve its lofty resolution and frame rate support through display stream compression DSC allows up to three times more bandwidth than is both near zero latency and Visually lossless though that doesn't mean that there is no quality loss practically speaking this won't be a problem even if it were noticeable given that these gpus aren't really capable of pushing those resolutions and frame rates anyway but we brought it up with the RTX 40 series so we're bringing it up here for the sake of completeness it means that those new 8K ultrawide displays being shown up at CES will just barely be able to run at 85 Hertz without DSC but I would never expect that to be a problem for an actual user one slightly problematic thing that I do need to address is that we've taken a very glass half full approach today and I can understand why some of you might be frustrated by it we've gone and spun amd's potential future driver improvements as a good thing when actually they're kind of bad another perspective is that it means that AMD is releasing these products even though they haven't really finished optimizing them and if you've kind of felt that way up to this point I totally get where you're coming from we ran into some kind of bizarre no really bizarre crashes and there are certainly features that could be added or refined but In fairness to our charitable approach today AMD is pricing these gpus according to what they are now and their track record for fixing these things is actually pretty good even if sometimes it takes a while as they focus on new features like FSR r3.0 and the hyper RX performance Optimizer that have yet to Launch and if this is where performance is now with some of what broken certainly unoptimized drivers AMD clearly has some great Hardware on their hands here they even brought back the USBC Port something that is great for hooking up a monitor via a single cable and a godsend for enthusiasts like myself I'm still mad that Nvidia removed it after the 20 Series so the RX 7900 XTX is going into my gaming rig and I'm officially switching to team red for the first time since the 3870. goodness gracious the performance is good enough the price is good enough well at least compared to the competition and the downsides are small enough that I am comfortable making the leap just like I'm gonna comfortably leap to this Segway from our sponsor MSI and their recently released mag z790 Tomahawk Wi-Fi motherboard the mag 790 Tomahawk is a gaming oriented ATX motherboard that balances value with premium Hardware it's built around the latest Intel z790 chipset which supports 12th and 13th gen Intel core processors with dual 8-pin power connectors and core boost technology is able to sustain heavy CPU power loads to better support demanding game settings it also features m.2 Shield frozer msi's Advanced thermal solution which offers great protection for maximum SSD transfer speed performance with integrated options for multiple cooling methods the z790 tomahawk ensures Optimal Performance when you need it the most make sure to check it out at the link in the video description if you enjoyed this and you're looking for something else to watch maybe go check out that Arc 30 day challenge video I mentioned Intel's doing some really good things over there but they also have a lot of work to do
2022-12-16 13:48
