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. For this time around with the 7900 XTX being the first of AMD's newest cards I don’t have any matching GPUs to compare against so my focus is going to be its performance compared to the RTX 4080 which is the closest competitor.
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. AMD has always done better on these Fire Strike benchmarks compared to any of the Nvidia RTX cards and this is no different, in fact, the 7900 XTX is up at the top running not far behind the big dog RTX 4090, especially in the Fire Strike performance test. On these older DX11 tests the 7900 XTX is well ahead of the RTX 4080.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark and I have also included the latest DX12 test, Speed Way. Time Spy has two detail settings, the standard test, and the extreme test. In the standard Time Spy test the 7900 XTX comes in just over the overclocked RTX 4080 and on the more demanding extreme test it is again ahead of both the stock and overclocked RTX 4080s by a few points. The new Speed Way test on the other hand shows a different picture with the 7900 XTX running down below the 3090 Ti and 1500 points below either of the RTX 4080s. This test includes ray tracing which gives us a little glimpse at ray tracing performance as well.
I also tested 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 7900 XTX came in just a hair above both RTX 4080 again in this benchmark.
Because I don’t have a full ray tracing section I did also test using the 3DMark Port Royal test which takes a look at ray tracing performance. AMD has made huge improvements here with the new 2nd gen ray tracing cores. The 7900 XTX came out in front of the 3090 Ti here but is still a little behind the 4080 on this test. These results are very similar to the Speed Way test which also includes Ray Tracing and is a good look at performance in the future as tech like ray tracing is included more across the board.
