AMD's latest high-performance and energy-efficient RDNA 3 architecture is the foundation for both GPUs. AMD conducted its Together We Advance Gaming announcement event for its new Radeon 7000 series GPUs built on the RDNA 3 architecture. The Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 XT are two of AMD's most advanced GPUs. These GPUs will compete against NVIDIA's latest Ada Lovelace models, the GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080, but perhaps not in the way some would have anticipated. AMD asserts that it is devoted to competing in the "sub-$1000 GPU area" and is prepared to do so on price rather than just sheer power. While AMD has provided some internal performance data today, we won't be able to fully judge how accurate this message is until we have independent testing from HH and other sources.
The First Chiplet-Based Gaming GPU Architecture Is AMD RDNA 3.
The AMD RDNA 3 architecture is the foundation for the Radeon 7000 series. The company claims that its objectives for RDNA 3 are to usher in next-gen gaming experiences, increase the standard for high-resolution and high-framerate gaming, and accelerate performance-per-watt leadership. To achieve these objectives, AMD used a chiplet design, a first for gaming GPUs.
Up to six 6nm memory and cache dice flank a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD) on top and bottom of the chipset complex (MCD).
The RX 7900 XTX employs all six MCDs, resulting in a 384-bit memory bus (64 bits per die) and 20 Gbps of GDDR6 memory speed. A 320-bit bus and 5 MCDs are used in the RX 7900 XT. According to AMD, the RX 7900 XT will still have six MCDs attached, but one of them is a fake die that is inactive for stability and assembly purposes.
The MCD dice weigh in at 58 billion transistors and are each 37 mm2 in size (roughly 222 mm2), while the GCD die is 300 mm2. The reader can estimate the GCD and MCD's respective transistor counts, as AMD has not yet made those numbers public. Insofar as these numbers are comparable, this falls considerably short of the GeForce RTX 4090's 76.3 billion transistor count, surpassing the GeForce RTX 4080 16GB's 45.9 billion transistor total.
Features & Specs
- It will enable AMD to combine and match appropriate parts for various configurations, lowering production costs. The tiny details are joined together to form a single big die.
- The new GPUs have an upgraded display engine and dual media engine based on the RDNA 3 architecture.
- Each computes unit has a 1.5x Vector General Purpose Register (VGPR), 64 stream processors, twice as many AI accelerators, and a second-generation ray tracing accelerator that AMD claims are 50% faster than the first generation.
- The Radeon RX 7900 XTX includes 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM with 96MB Infinity Cache, and 96 compute units operating at 2.3 GHz.
- It can use 355W of power and be powered by two 8-pin connections.
- Its cousin, the 7900 XT, features 20GB of GDDR6 VRAM with an 80MB infinite cache and 84 compute units with a base clock of 2 GHz. It has a 300W power consumption rating.
Pricing
The suggested retail price for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is $999, while the 7900 XT will cost $899. From December 13, both cards will be available. Beginning in mid-December, renowned board partners will offer models, including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, Vastarmor, XFX, and Yeston.
