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On November 3rd, AMD announced its RDNA 3-based RX 7900 series cards built on the Navi 31 die. The duo of cards in the form of the RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT come in at $999 and $100 less, respectively, to take on Nvidia's $1,199 RTX 4080 16GB model, which is now simply called RTX 4080 as Nvidia killed or rather "unlaunched" the 12GB variant. The lesser 4080 is allegedly becoming the RTX 4070 according to tipsters.
A few days ago, the first benchmarks for the RX 7900 XTX leaked, and to the surprise and shock of many, it was found to be performing extremely poorly as the benchmark scores were nowhere close to what we had estimated using AMD's own benchmark data. Thankfully, we soon learned that things weren't as bad as they seemed at first as fresh benchmark scores for the 7900 XT put it almost exactly where we had estimated, and in one of the cases, there was nearly a 100% improvement.
While that was a good thing for the $999 RX 7900 XTX, its smaller sibling, the $899 RX 7900 XT, however, is expected to be a poor value product, and the benchmark leaks for its seems to prove that the suspicions were right.
Although the 7900 XT performs close to where the estimates had put it, the pricing is what makes it a not-so-good performance/$ product. Once again, its Geekbench, and the RX 7900 XT is found to be 16% slower than the XTX, as it has scored 191,822 in the OpenCL test. Conversely, the 7900 XTX is 19.2% faster than the 7900 XT.
Interestingly, the score here is worse than one may expect just by looking at the Stream Processor (SP) count of the 7900 XT, which comes with 5,376 SP or 84 Compute Units (CUs). This is 12.5% lower than the CUs on the flagship XTX model. However, as we saw in the leak today, the difference in their scores is bigger than that.
One of the big changes AMD has made with this generation's flagship tier SKUs is that the memory bandwidth and capacity have also been cut down alongside the CU count. The XT packs 20GB memory and 800GB/s bandwidth, meanwhile, the XTX has 24GB memory and 960GB/s bandwidth.
In previous gen cards, however, the SKU just below the flagship was only limited by CU count, and hence actually performed better than the CU count suggested, as it had the same bandwidth and VRAM capacity as the top product. Pricewise though, the XT is only 10% cheaper, meaning you are possibly going to get around 16% lower performance, and 4GB less VRAM. Keep in mind though that this is only the OpenCL test which is compute-heavy. The more gaming-oriented Vulkan benchmark scores may have been a bit more favorable.
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