Launching the RDNA 3 architecture with Radeon RX 7900 XTX/XT cards in December 2022, much was made of AMD’s claims of GPUs exceeding 3GHz frequency. That turned out to not be the case in traditional gaming workloads, however, as even Sapphire’s impressive Nitro+ remained south of that seminal figure. Turns out RDNA 3 does indeed scale way past 3GHz, albeit in compute-centric workloads such as Blender which, unlike gaming, don’t overly tax other parts of the GPU such as memory controller and caches.
The folks over at ComputerBase have recorded said Sapphire Nitro+ XTX card running Blender at close to 3.5GHz when set to a manual 500W power limit, helped on by having three 8-pin connectors and some of the best cooling we’ve seen on an AMD-based graphics card to date.
An average 3,466MHz is some way higher than what’s achieved by other cards, including an overclocked RTX 4080 from Asus, so AMD’s engine clock certainly appears to be robust in handling sky-high MHz. It’s just a shame the rest of the pipeline isn’t able to keep up, as having everything operating at 3.5GHz would certainly put RX 7900 XTX closer to the fabled RTX 4090.
Perhaps we’ll see a Radeon RX 7950 XTX in the not-too-distant future, equipped with an in-game boost clock of 3GHz.
