NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 vs AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT vs AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 is high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 8,704 shaders and 10 GB GDDR6X graphics memory.

The gaming performance in 4k is clearly better than the old GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (approximately 15% faster). Therefore, even demanding games should run with maximum detail settings in 4k. Enabling raytracing will however reduce the framerate and therefore maximum details won't be playable. 

The RTX3080 is produced in 8nm at Samsung and rated at 320 Watt but the power efficiency is still quite good.

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is a mid-range desktop GPU and is primarily designed for gaming in 1440p. This makes the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT the fourth-fastest model of the current Radeon generation and places it directly behind the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The graphics chip is manufactured using the 5 nm process at TSMC. The chiplet design is also used in the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, although there are only four MCDs here. Nevertheless, the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT has 16 GB of VRAM, beating the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 in terms of technical data.

Features

RDNA 3 continues to serve as the basis for the Navi 32 graphics chip. The already established features such as SAM (Smart Access Memory) and the Infinity Cache are also available in the new mid-range model aka Radeon RX 7800 XT. Compared to the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT the ray tracing part has been revised and AI support has been implemented on the hardware side. The media engine has been updated and videos can be decoded/encoded with a resolution of up to 8K. The modern DisplayPort connection is also available on the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, as version 2.1 is currently only available from AMD. AMD's answer to DLSS is FSR 2.0 and offers a significant increase in performance in games with the upscaling option. With FSR 3, there will be another feature in the near future which, like DLSS 3.0, promises even better frame rates thanks to frame generation.

Performance

The performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT in games without ray tracing is well ahead of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is out of reach for the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. In the in-house duel, the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT can be compared with an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT can be compared.

Power consumption

The power consumption of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is estimated by the manufacturer at 263 watts (TBP) and is therefore significantly more efficient than an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (300 watts). Compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT requires 63 watts more. Also an AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is also more economical at 260 watts.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the RDNA 3 architecture. It utilizes the Navi 31 Chip, which comprises a Graphics Compute Die (GCD) manufactured in 5nm and all six Memory Cache Die (MCD) chiplets in 6nm. The 7900 XT offers 6.144 cores clocked at up to 2.5 GHz (max., 2.3 GHz average game clock), 98 MB Infinity Cache (L3 cache), and 24 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 384-bit memory bus and 20 Gbps effective speed.

Architecture

The integrated video decoders support AV1, H.264, and HEVC videos with up to 8K resolution. The display ports are a big advantage of the new chip, supporting DisplayPort 2.1 with UHBR13.5 for up to 54 Gbps bandwidth (up to 8K 165 Hz with DSC possible).

The average gaming performance is between a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and therefore well suited for 4K gaming of 2022 games (see benchmarks below). Raytracing performance is still a bit lower than with Nvidia cards, but a big step up from the previous generation.

Power consumption

The power consumption is rated at 355 watts, which is similar to an RTX 4090 (but on different platforms).