AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT: Penultimate RDNA 3 graphics card unveiled for US$899

The focus of AMD's grand RDNA 3 reveal was understandably the top-of-the-line Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Its younger sibling, the Radeon RX 7900 XT didn't get nearly as much attention. A leak from earlier predicted that it would get a hefty VRAM upgrade over its RDNA 2 counterpart, and it turned out to be true. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT will be available for purchase on December 13 starting at US$899.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT uses the same Navi 31 GPU as its sibling but cuts the number of CUs to 84 (from 96) and TGP to 300 Watts. Its base/boost clock is set at 1.5/2.4 GHz. It features 20 GB of 20 Gbps video memory on a 320-bit bus and 80 MB of Infinity cache. Other features, such as DP 2.1 support and AV1 encode/decode, are identical across both SKUs.

Unfortunately, AMD didn't specify how the Radeon RX 7900 XT compares to its predecessor. If its older sibling is anything to go by, a 1.5x performance uplift seems likely, well short of the 2x figure quoted by an earlier leak. Whether or not it will be able to compete with the GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB remains to be seen. While both cards could trade blows in rasterization, the raytracing crown will almost certainly go to Nvidia once again.