AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is a high end desktop graphics card based on the RDNA 3 architecture. It uses the Navi 31 Chip with consists out of a Graphics Compute Die (GCD) manufactured in 5nm and five (out of six) Memory Cache Dies (MCD chiplets) in 6nm. The 7900 XT offers 5.376 cores clocked at up to 2.4 GHz (max, 2 GHz game average), 80 MB Infinity Cache (L3 cache) and 20 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 320 Bit memory bus and 20 Gbps effective speed.

The average gaming performance is slightly below the GeForce RTX 4080 in games (without raytracing). Therefore, the RX 7900 XT is best suited for QHD (for higher frame rates) up to 4K resolution and maximum detail settings of 2022 games. Raytracing performance is still a bit lower than with Nvidia cards, but a big step up from the previous generation.

The integrated video en- and decoders support AV1, H.264, and HEVC videos wit 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 power consumption is rated 315 Watt and in our tests similar to the RTX 4080.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 is a fast desktop graphics card based on the Ampere architecture. It uses the big GA104 chip and offers 5,888 cores and 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. 

The performance in games and 4k resolution is slightly below a RTX 2080 Ti but clearly faster then the old RTX 2080 Super. For most games, the performance is sufficient for 4k and maximum details. Enabling raytracing however (without DLSS) will lead to a significant lower performance (although the RTX performance was clearly improved compared to the RTX 2000 series).

The GA104 chip is produced in 8nm at Samsung and the power consumption of the RT 3070 is specified with 220 Watt (RTX 2070 Super - 215 Watt).