Performance claims for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX have been extrapolated; it competes favorably with the RTX 4090.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT RDNA3 graphics cards were introduced by AMD on Thursday. With these, the company asserts that it has once again increased performance per Watt by more than 50% compared to the previous generation, a feat that allowed the RX 6000-series to compete with NVIDIA’s quickest RTX 30-series SKUs. When tested at 4K UHD resolution, AMD’s performance claims for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX place the card somewhere between 50% and 70% quicker than the company’s current flagship, the RX 6950 XT. HXL was able to extrapolate a performance comparison between the RX 7900 XTX, the RTX 4090 that was put to the test in the real world, and the flagship models from the previous generation, the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT, by digging through these claims and piecing together pertinent information from the Endnotes.

The graphs show how dangerously close the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is to the GeForce RTX 4090. The RTX 4090 is 6.4% quicker in Watch Dogs Legion than the RX 7900 XTX. The two cards are evenly balanced in Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus, with a differential of less than 1%. With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, the RTX 4090 is 4.4% quicker (2022). If launch-date first-party performance claims were taken with a grain of salt, the RX 7900 XTX would ultimately finish within 5–10% of the RTX 4090, but cost changes everything. The RX 7900 XTX costs $999, but the RTX 4090 costs $1,599 (MSRP). The major competition for this generation will be between the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX, assuming the upcoming RTX 4080 (16 GB) is just about 10% slower than the RTX 4090. Even in this area, AMD outperforms Nvidia in terms of cost, since the RTX 4080 was introduced with an MSRP of $1,199 (exactly 20% more expensive than the RX 7900 XTX). With the announcement of FSR 3.0 Fluid Motion, AMD also lessened the performance advantage of NVIDIA’s DLSS 3 Frame Generation.