Introduction

Team Red knocked on our doors with the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics cards, upon which ride the company’s hopes to maintain competitiveness with NVIDIA in the high-end PC graphics segment. AMD claims that these have what it take to firmly offer a great alternative, and the new cards will be able to power 4K Ultra HD maxed-out gaming, much like NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 do, but AMD will offer this capability at a much lower price. We can’t wait to tell you how fast these are, but you’ll have to wait until December 12 for our full performance review, in which we’ll give you a technical breakdown of the new RDNA3 graphics architecture, and the two cards. Today we’re allowed to show you the boxes these cards came in, and what these cards look like in the flesh.

AMD has a more traditional approach to reference-design graphics cards than NVIDIA. Team Green technically does not sell its reference-design graphics cards anymore, and those are handed out to OEMs as engineering samples that they can use as templates. The Founders Edition cards are not reference-design, but rather a first-party custom-design by NVIDIA engineers, which the company sells exclusively under the NVIDIA brand (partners aren’t allowed to sell them with their branding). AMD, on the other hand, never changed its reference-design marketing model. The cards you see in this article are reference-design by the classical definition of the term, and what the company likes to call “made by AMD” (MBA).

AMD sells these cards both directly under its own brand on the AMD website, and through its AIB (add-in board) partners. These AIBs basically take MBA cards out of a tray and place them in retail packaging of their own design, with their own branding, and with inclusions specific to the brand. Also, the tech-support and product warranty service of AIB-branded MBA cards are handled by the AIBs themselves (which for example means that a GIGABYTE-branded MBA card can give you an extended warranty with online-registration that the company is known for). The boxes you see in this article are from the MBA cards that AMD will directly retail on its website.

The RDNA2-based Radeon RX 6000-series marked AMD’s return to the high-end segment after a very long time (about seven years, when many lost all hope of an AMD comeback to this segment ever again). The higher-end RX 6000 series had scope for improvements with the SKU naming. The card that maxed out the “Navi 21” silicon was branded RX 6900 XT, while a slightly cut-down version of it was called the RX 6800 XT, and a third, further cut-down SKU was sold as the RX 6800, with thinner margins. This time, the company makes it easier to identify its two fastest SKUs, by branding the one that maxes out the “Navi 31” GPU as the RX 7900 XTX, and its slightly cut-down sibling as the RX 7900 XT, marking the return of the “XTX” brand-extension after about 16 years.

You’ll get a detailed technical breakdown of RDNA3 in our main reviews, but put briefly, this generation heralds the chiplet architecture for consumer GPUs in the same way as AMD did for CPUs, with the Ryzen 3000 “Zen 2.” The key number-crunching components of the GPU are built on the advanced 5 nm EUV silicon fabrication process, while the components that don’t benefit greatly from the node switch, are built on the older 6 nm node, as chiplets. AMD has generationally increased the shader counts and their IPC, making them much more capable, improved the ray tracing machinery, added AI accelerators not unlike NVIDIA’s Tensor cores, and most importantly, widened the memory bus to 384-bit, enabling memory sizes of up to 24 GB. It all comes together in two slick reference designs which we’ll talk a little more about in this article.