AMD has shared some gaming benchmarks showcasing the capabilities of its upcoming top-of-the-line Radeon RX 7900 Series graphics cards in rasterised and ray-traced games.
Via some new slides, the red team unveiled more details about the power of next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs. Unlike last time, these couple of slides include both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT plus the RX 6950 XT which serves as a comparison point.
In rasterised tests, the former achieved from 47 per cent to 67 per cent performance uplift compared to the previous-generation top dog RX 6950 XT, while the latter brought from 25 per cent to 39 per cent in the same scenarios. When it comes to traditional rendering methods AMD may give Nvidia a run for its money thanks to its aggressive $999 and $899 price targets.
Moving to ray tracing, RX 7900 XTX offers between 37 and 84 per cent increase over the RX 6950 XT, leaving the RX 7900 XT a bit behind, at between 17 and 64 per cent.
While these FPS numbers are completely fine for ray-traced games, they are not rendered at native 4K resolution. With FSR off, Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 both dropped by 66 per cent, to 24FPS and 21FPS, respectively. Numbers that are not enough for a pleasant experience, even for story-driven games like these, showing AMD still needs to improve its ray-tracing acceleration.
Assuming testing is done in a similar manner to our own Cyberpunk results – RX 6950 XT achieves 13FPS in both AMD slides and our 4K test – Nvidia still bosses it; the RTX 4080 achieves 31FPS compared to RX 7900 XTX’s 21FPS.
With that said, not every game has RT features, meaning that in those using only rasterisation performance will be excellent even at native high resolutions. This generation seems to be the beginning of true high-refresh 4K gaming – until Unreal Engine 5-powered titles start sweating our hardware.
Even though these games may be specifically cherry-picked to show the nascent GPUs at their best, it’s a good start in getting an idea of what to expect, from this limited game sample at least. We should see more tests the closer we get to the release date, and as always, we will keep you informed. Exciting times.
