There is no doubt that AMD caused great anticipation with Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX. The company promised significant performance improvements in rasterization and ray tracing, and also talked about a huge leap in efficiency over the previous generation. However, official TBP data already indicated that these they won’t consume less than GeForce RTX 4080and personally I had serious doubts about its actual performance.

In the end, not only did those expectations not come true, but in addition, the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX have significant problems that They move on what we told you a few days ago. Information listed on GitHub suggests that AMD used Navi 31 GFX1100 (A0) graphics cores, an early version that was not properly completed and It has a broken hardware shader preinstallation system.

This problem is not nearly as severe from a performance perspective as the problem that affects the power profile and frequency scaling of the graphics card, causing its frequencies to oscillate wildly and its performance to vary dramatically, but it can end up having a significant impact on the gaming experience and they produce stuttering and very long image rendering times.

This can be compensated for by preloading at the software level, the source says, but it’s clear that this system is not that efficient and that it’s a major problem as a result. AMD may fix this in future revisions of the Navi 31 silicon, but it will not have a solution in graphics cards that are sold with the Navi 31 A0 core, because this is something that affects the hardware level.

All this makes me think a lot. AMD seems to have opted for an accelerated release to don’t leave NVIDIA alone in the Christmas campaignand that Sunnyvale did not hesitate to use early GPUs to offer a good level of supply.

On the other hand, I can’t help but relate all this to the fact that assembler MSI has confirmed that it will not release its custom Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX by the first quarter of 2023. You may have been aware of the issue and preferred to wait for it to be resolved before releasing models with a partially defective GPU.

As I said at the beginning of the article, the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX did not live up to expectations either in terms of performance or efficiency. Both have in-game consumption 321 watts and 358 watts, values ​​that exceed the peak peak of 312 watts I noted the GeForce RTX 4080 in my review, and the difference in performance gives the NVIDIA solution a clear victory in terms of efficiency. in 4K, Radeon RX 7900 XT is 14% slower than GeForce RTX 4080and that’s only 5% slower than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, all without factoring in the difference DLSS 3 would make.

If we talk about ray tracing, the difference is even greater, as we can see in the attached graph. Radeon RX 7900 XT is 36% slower than GeForce RTX 4080 and loses to GeForce RTX 3090. Radeon RX 7900 XTX is 19% slower than GeForce RTX 4080 and 64% slower than. GeForce RTX 4090. I think the graphics speak for themselves and again you have to keep in mind that we didn’t bring DLSS 3 into the equation, if we did the differences would be even bigger.

When you consider what the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX offer, their price, and what NVIDIA offers today, do you think AMD succeeded with this launch and positioning at the price level (1109 euros and 1229.95 euros)? Read in the comments.