The 3 GHz barrier is broken by AMD RX 7900 XTX OC, but only in non-gaming workloads.

According to a ComputerBase.de article comparing the overclocking experiences of the RX 7000-series RDNA3 and NVIDIA RTX 40-series “Ada” architectures, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX RDNA3 graphics card does surpass the 3 GHz engine frequency barrier, but not in gaming use-cases. It was discovered that the RX 7900 XTX could handle the Blender rendering test at engine clock speeds as high as 3455 MHz, but not typical gaming workloads.

The paper says that the GPU could even be pushed to 3548 MHz with a power requirement of about 400 W, but it wasn’t reliable. With gaming workloads, the GPUs could reach their maximum speeds of 2.90 GHz. The GPU’s hardware resources, such as memory controllers, caches, and other specialized SIMD tasks, may be using up more of their power with games. This could be affecting the GPU’s engine clock boosting headroom. In their tests, ComputerBase.de employed a Sapphire RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ custom graphics card, which has three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and more overclocking headroom than reference-design cards.