Frank Azor: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX meant to take on RTX 4080 and not the 60% pricier RTX 4090, FSR 3 headed for non-RDNA 3 GPUs as well
AMD's recent RDNA 3 launch event evoked more questions than answers, primarily due to the manner in which the company did the performance comparisons. While some preliminary data extrapolation based on AMD's arbitrary figures showed that the RX 7900 XTX may not be very far behind the RTX 4090, the company itself did not showcase any comparison with the competition during the RDNA 3 keynote. However, it looks like AMD is actually aiming for the RTX 4080 and not the RTX 4090 with RDNA 3 cards.
Speaking to PCWorld, AMD's Frank Azor clarified that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX indeed targets the RTX 4080 and not Nvidia's BFGPU. He said that the reason AMD didn't have any performance comparisons is because the RTX 4080 is not launched yet.
[RX 7900 XTX] is designed to go against 4080 and we don’t have benchmarks numbers on 4080. That’s the primary reason why you didnt see any NVIDIA compares... $999 card is not a 4090 competitor, which costs 60% more, this is a 4080 competitor."
Azor also confirmed that FSR 3 will be coming to non-RDNA 3 architectures as well. This is unlike Nvidia's DLSS 3, whose frame generation features explicitly require an RTX 40 series GPU. AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions also said that FSR 3 isn't a knee-jerk reaction to DLSS 3.
[FSR 3] is not a reaction or a quick thing [to DLSS 3], it is absolutely something we have been working on for a while. Why is it taking a little bit longer for it come out, that you’d probably hoped for? The key thing to remember about FSR is the FSR philosophy and FSR until now did not just work on RDNA 2 or RDNA 1 they work on other generations of AMD graphics cards. They also work on competitors' graphics cards. It is exponentially harder than if we just made it work on RDNA 3. […] We really do want to work on more than just RDNA 3."
While that can be construed as AMD's intent, FSR 3 is still in development. We will have to see how the upscaler's features such as frame interpolation contribute to overall latency. DLSS 3's frame generation increases latency significantly, which is why Nvidia requires RTX Reflex to be turned on to mitigate some of the latency side effects.
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