Synthetic Benchmarks

As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. In this, I am curious how the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX compares to the reference RTX 7900 XTX. As far as competition from Nvidia, the 3080Ti and the RTX 4080 both sell for more and the RTX 4070 Ti sells for less, so it will be interesting to see how the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX compares to them as well.

The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is second in our chart with just the RTX 4090 ahead of it. The overclock on the Hellhound which isn’t very large as well as the cooling did make a noticeable difference between it and the reference 7900 XTX here as well with a big gap in all three tests.

The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. This is a DX12-focused test and the Nvidia cards overall do a little better here but even with that, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX is still second in our charts once again to the RTX 4090 outperforming the RTX 4080 in both tests and once again with a good margin between it and the reference 7900 XTX as well.

For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX dropped down to third in the chart behind the RTX 4080 with the Nvidia cards performing better here, the RTX 3090 Ti being the next card after the two 7900 XTXs.

The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the Hellhound RX 7900 XTX scored a 17109 to the reference cards 16825 which are both sitting up above the RTX 4080 and with the RTX 4090 still way out in front. This was even more the case on the 4K optimized test as well with the 4090 way out ahead.