Radeon RX 7900 XTX plagued by strange bugs, AMD to work on driver improvements over the holidays

The first independent reviews for AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship GPUs are out, and there seems to be a consensus that Team Red overhyped this product but under-delivered. The cards are not terrible by any means since they are mostly on par with the RTX 4080 and cost $200 less, but the initial 1.5X to 1.7X performance estimations over the RX 6950 XT advertised in November turned out to be close to 1.4X on average, while some surprising power draw bugs just sour the overall experience. Hopefully these problems can be corrected via driver improvements, and it looks like such fixes could come sooner than expected, as sources close to Moore’s Law Is Dead suggest that AMD’s driver team is expected to put in extra hours over the holidays to rush a solution to consumers.

Apart from the underwhelming performance caused by what Tom from MLID believes could be explained by compute unit bugs, the most glaring problem with AMD’s latest flagship GPU appears to be the unexplained high power draws in specific scenarios despite claims of 50% perf/Watt improvements.

TechPowerUp reveals that the RX 7900 XTX draws around 100 W while connected to multiple monitors, while the RTX 4080 and 4090 cards draw 5 times less. Similarly, Optimum Tech points out that a system powered by the new AMD card may draw 150 more Watts in Overwatch 2 1440p compared to an RTX 4080 system, while idle figures for the Radeon GPU reach close to 100 W even after a restart. Some reviewers believe that these problems may be caused by monitors with high refresh rates. More examples can be found in our own RX 7900 XTX review.

Can AMD deliver 10 to 20% raster performance improvements with future driver versions? Probably not, at least not with the reference cards. However, AIB partners are preparing quite a few models with boosted clocks that may be able to reduce the gap between the 7900 XTX and the RTX 4090. It remains to be seen at what cost.

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