AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics cards are looming, and we’ve just seen leaked benchmarks that underscore what Team Red is claiming in their pre-release marketing — that the flagship will rival Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
The results themselves show that in 3DMark Time Spy at 4K resolution (Extreme preset), the RX 7900 XTX hit 13,729, while the 7900 XT recorded a score of 13,687, hot on the heels of the flagship. Compared to the RTX 4080 at 14,005, both AMD graphics cards come very close to Nvidia’s offerings.
At Time Spy’s 1440p resolution, the RTX 4080 leads with 28,050, compared to the RX 7900 XTX’s 25,473 and the 7900 XT’s 23,897.
Switching over to 3DMark FireStrike, the 7900 XTX outpaced the RTX 4080 with a score of 18,853, while the Nvidia GPU came in at 17,294, with the 7900 XT trailing behind at 16,915.
In FireStrike’s 1440p, the 7900 XTX graphics card again beat the Nvidia card with a score of 37,702, the RTX 4080 was slightly behind at 33,932, and the 7900 XT was not far behind at 33,497.
Analysis: Driver shaky?
If these benchmarks are accurate, this means that the RX 7900 XTX is actually 9% and 13% faster than the RTX 4080 in FireStrike (4K and 1440p respectively), while the RTX 4080 is 2% and 10% faster in TimeSpy. So , the idea that these two cards are very close in terms of performance – which is the line AMD has been pushing, or at least that its flagship RDNA 3 product is competing with the RTX 4080 instead of the 4090 – seems very solid money (with This is broadly consistent with other leaks we’ve seen recently).
Of course, aside from the fact that the leaked nature of these scores calls for skepticism, we have to remember that these are synthetic benchmarks. It really takes a set of real-world gaming results to judge the performance of the AMD RDNA 3 GPU relative to the RTX 4080.
And the RTX 4090 for that matter, in case you’re wondering, is included in the results table provided by VideoCardz and unsurprisingly takes the lead. In fact, it’s anywhere from 20% to 40% faster than AMD’s 7900 XTX, depending on which benchmark and resolution you’re looking at.
While there are some oddities here, we should note that the Time Spy results show the 7900 XT to be very close to the flagship XTX model, and actually comparable at 4K resolution. Seems like something is amiss here, so if the leak isn’t buggy then it could be a case of an unstable early graphics driver, maybe? Hopefully any wrinkles here will be ironed out at launch.
These benchmarks have drawn some disappointed reactions online, with people basically hoping that the 7900 XTX will be faster – but given AMD’s positioning of the flagship as a rival to the RTX 4080, we don’t see any element of surprise due to this leak And show up, really. (Aside from the anomaly of possibly unstable drivers, this could mean faster XTX results than shown here.)
Another potential concern is that if, as rumored, third-party custom models are significantly more expensive for RDNA 3 GPUs – and not just a little more, which is to be expected – this could affect the value proposition of the 7900 XTX Relative to the RTX 4080 (at least in these cases) it’s not as compelling as we’d like it to be. The same is true if the stock on the ground is scarce, and as the grapevine has recently suggested, scalpers have also stepped in to drive up prices. Don’t forget that there are rumors that Nvidia may drop the price of the RTX 4080, possibly in part in response to the RDNA 3 launch.
We’ll see how it all plays out soon…
