AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX review: can RDNA 3 bring the value?

A trio of excellent ray tracing experiences are put through their paces on this second battery of ray tracing tests. Hitman 3 looks great even without RT, but IO Interactive pushes realism to the next level with a range of ultra-demanding ray tracing features. Meanwhile, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition remains the first - and only - triple-A gaming experience to be released requiring a GPU capable of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Marvel's Spider-Man - this one is interesting in that not only does it push CPU and GPU hard, but VRAM allocation is of crucial important at 4K max settings... though that's not really an issue when the new AMD cards pack 20GB and 24GB of framebuffer memory into their designs.

To reiterate if you're jumping straight to this page without looking at prior results, our benchmarking system offers a number of ways to get to the data you want, the presentation varying according to the device you're using. You'll get a basic overview of our findings on mobile, with metadata from the video capture of each GPU being translated into simple bar charts with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements for easy comparisons.

On a desktop-class browser, you'll get the full-fat DF experience with embedded YouTube videos of each test scene and live performance metrics. Play the video, and you'll see exactly how each card handled the scene as it progresses. Below the real-time metrics is an interactive bar chart, which you can mouse over to see different measurements and click to switch between actual frame-rates and percentage differences. All the data here is derived from video captured directly from each GPU, ensuring an accurate replay of real performance.

Hitman 3

The Glacier engine from IO Interactive takes no prisoners with its ray tracing implementation, and those lowest one percent and five percent scores show just how demanding it is at its worst, producing single-digit frame-rates on RX 6000-class AMD hardware. This is a title you'll be using DLSS, FSR2 or even XeSS to run effectively but as things stand it's a tough workout for our test cards, but there are some nice gen-on-gen gains from RDNA 3, in line with other RT results.

The RTX 4080 can once again only offer a 21-22 percent point lead over the RX 7900 XTX - though as you'll see from the lowest one percent scores, when frame-rate drops, it drops much harder than its Nvidia rival. Still, a decent result overall that once again brings the XTX closely into line with the RTX 3090 Ti. As the title supports FSR2, you can push frame-rates much higher and still this game nicely on a 1440p or 2160p display. RX 7900 XT? Bearing in mind the gap between 6800 XT and 6900 XT in terms of both price and performance, it still seems too expensive - even if the gap closes between it and XTX compared to other titles.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

The revised 4A Engine is built around ray tracing as a foundational concept for its stunning real-time global illumination system. A showcase technological achievement for the current generation of consoles only gets better on PC, where 4A doubles down on further visual fidelity - tessellation, hybrid RT reflections and more. The game works fine on RDNA 2, but delivers vast improvements to performance on Nvidia GPUs... so how do the new AMD cards fare?

Curiously the gen-on-gen gains aren't quite so pronounced this time, with the RX 7900 XTX falling just short of matching the RTX 3090, while the cut-down XT doesn't even match the RTX 3080 - a notional $699 card back in 2020. I probably don't need to mention at this point that the XT still doesn't offer the performance expected from its price-point.

Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

We spent a lot of time looking at Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC, with our very own Alex Battaglia even suggesting improvements to the suite of ray tracing features that ensured PC users got a range of upgrades that scale way beyond the PlayStation 5 version of the game. This game is also exceptional in supporting DLSS, FSR2 and XeSS upscalers, in addition to Insomniac's own temporal injection system designed for consoles. While city-swinging can cause performance problems, this scene from FEAST HQ is very heavy on the GPU, but not quite as taxing in terms of CPU as outdoor scenes, making it a good test for graphics hardware.

As you can see from legacy card comparisons, AMD's RDNA 2 cards work relatively well with Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, so it's perhaps not surprising to see that the latest cards also perform well - in this scene at least, we're looking at XTX performance that gets close to the RTX 4080. It's actually around 16 percent better than 3090 Ti - not bad. That meansd the 7900 XT is up there with the RTX 3090 Ti in this test too.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX analysis

• Introduction, hardware and power analysis
• RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Control, F1 22
• RT benchmarks: Hitman 3, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
• RT/DLSS vs FSR2 benchmarks: Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
• Game benchmarks: Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal
• Game benchmarks: F1 22, Gears 5, Hitman 3
• Game benchmarks: Forza Horizon, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX: the Digital Foundry verdict