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In a rather mind-blowing move, TechPowerUp has managed to overclock an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX to match the Nvidia RTX 4090 in the demanding Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark.
Now, let’s not get carried away: on paper, a $999 GPU that goes toe-to-toe with a $1,599 card in gaming performance on paper is a huge loss to Nvidia. But this is just one test; TechPowerUp also found that their overclocked RX 7900 XTX could not achieve the same performance as the RTX 4090 in other benchmarks, although the performance was dramatically improved.
Still, it’s very impressive – and not entirely unexpected. There have reportedly been clock speed issues with the Navi 31 chip powering the RX 7900 XTX, which reportedly limits performance somewhat – something AMD could fix with future driver updates. It still won’t quite eclipse the 4090 (which will get its own new drivers), but it’s worth bearing in mind that AMD’s flagship GPU isn’t currently using 100% of its available power. TechPowerUp’s mighty 3.2 GHz overclock gets a lot more graphic grunt out of the card.
Analysis: More trouble for Nvidia
Nvidia has been plagued with problems around the launch of its next-gen Lovelace graphics cards – from the meltdown of 4090 power adapters to the hasty unlaunch of the RTX 4080 12GB – and this feels like just another problem for Team Green.
TechPowerUp used a factory overclocked Asus TUF card for their tests, which was already slightly faster than the original AMD RX 7900 XTX we tested in our review. Taking into account the manual overclocking (which required a complex undervolting process to squeeze as much power out of the GPU as possible), it was 23.1% faster than the competing RTX 4080 16GB.
Sure, this is comparing an overclocked card to one running at reference clocks, but it’s still troubling news for Nvidia. The RTX 4080 16GB has been criticized by many for being underpowered for its hefty $1,199 price, and this lends even more credence to that argument: AMD’s new flagship GPU is $200 cheaper and comfortably outperforms it in most areas.
Note that we said “most” – the Nvidia card, in particular, still wins in Blender and other software that favors CUDA cores for performance. If you’re looking for a GPU for professional creative work, Nvidia is still the way to go. However, these numbers confirm AMD’s repeated claims that Radeon is the best choice for gamers.
This isn’t likely to change until Nvidia offers more affordable cards, whether that be new RTX 4070 and 4060 models or through a price cut for the existing RTX 4080 16GB. Even then, Team Green is likely to fall behind: AMD’s price curve gives it the edge here, so we can expect Team Red’s midrange and budget RX 7000 GPUs to be very competitively priced. In short: Nvidia has a tough battle ahead of it. A lot of goodwill among gamers has been squandered by the mess surrounding the new Lovelace cards, and AMD has been quick to capitalize on the situation.