AMD throws shade at Nvidia RTX 4080 while boasting about beastly RDNA 3 GPUs
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AMD has been discussing its incoming RDNA 3 graphics cards as it throws some shade at Nvidia’s impending RTX 4080 GPU.
This is all part of a bunch of presentation material about AMD Advantage PCs and their various advantages these are systems that use the latest Ryzen processors and RDNA 3 GPUs to great effect as noted by Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) (through WCftech (opens in new tab)).
The really interesting bits relate to the GPUs, which are AMD’s incoming RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, and these are compared to the RTX 4080 in terms of their base specs. The presentation slides show that the 7900 XTX comes loaded with 24 GB of VRAM and the 7900 XT with 20 GB – compared to 16 GB for the RTX 4080 – and that the respective memory buses are faster at 384-bit and 320-bit, compared to 256 bit for the Nvidia card.
AMD also underlines the raw processing power of the 7900 XTX at 61TFlops with the 7900XT at 52TFlops, compared to 49TFlops for the RTX 4080. (Not that this statistic means much to gamers). And Team Red reminds us of DisplayPort 2.1 support for its next-gen cards (with DP 1.4 for Nvidia’s new models).
Another slide shows a size comparison of the 7900 XTX vs. 4080, showing the AMD model as a 2.5-slot affair compared to 3-slots, and Team Red’s card is also slightly shorter ( 287mm vs 304mm).
And unsurprisingly, AMD points out that the 7900 XTX only needs 2 x 8-pin power connectors, unlike the adapter configuration that the 4080 works with (something that has caused controversy with the RTX 4090, as we’ve seen, with some reports of melting adapter cables).
While AMD doesn’t make direct performance comparisons to the RTX 4080 as such – though this is undoubtedly something that will probably happen over time – Team Red does provide some benchmarks showing that the new 7900 XTX beats the old flagship 6950 XT by up to as much as 67% in terms of frame rates for rasterization (in other words, non-ray tracing).
That includes the 7900 XTX achieving 139 frames per second (fps) at 4K resolution (maximum detail settings) in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, compared to 92 fps for the 6950 XT. And in Cyberpunk 2077, the difference was 72 fps versus 43 fps.
Performance improved even more with ray-traced games, and in fact AMD recorded a boost of up to 82% for the new RDNA 3 card in this case.
Analysis: Aiming for the RTX 4080 in no uncertain terms
All this should be viewed with some skepticism, of course, as brand new benchmarks will always be used for promotional material like this – that’s to be expected, be it AMD, Nvidia or whoever.
Still, it’s clear enough that AMD is definitely eyeing the RTX 4080 when it comes to its RDNA 3 top dogs, though the incoming graphics cards are still a long way off. While the RTX 4080 arrives tomorrow, the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT won’t debut until December 13, now nearly a month away.
That said, we’re not sure how much stock of the RTX 4080 we’ll see, as early pricing at the point of release looks thin – and what we’ve gleaned from those pre-release price tags is that they’re worrying in some cases piled high (at least outside the US). That could give AMD a big advantage in terms of being able to maintain that lower price point over the 4080, assuming the RDNA 3 graphics cards themselves appear in sufficient volume and so aren’t subject to inflation via scalpers.
All this is to say that it’s really anyone’s guess as to how this battle for next-gen GPUs will play out in late 2022, but at this point AMD seems poised to take some chunks out of Nvidia.