AMD certainly thinks that its upcoming RX 7900 line of GPUs is better than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4080. The company released several slides comparing both cards showing its own card coming up on top.
AMD makes some interesting equivalences in the slides. It equates its RDNA3 compute units with Nvidia’s Streaming Multiprocessors (SM). RDNA3 packs 64 shading units in one compute unit, meanwhile, Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture has 128 CUDA cores per SM. This means that AMD equates one of its shader units with two CUDA cores.
Onboard video memory is another metric that AMD compares, pointing out that its cars feature 20 and 24 GB of GDDR6 memory respectively (for the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX) compared to only 16 GB of GDDR6X on the RTX 4080. In addition, AMD points out that its cards also feature higher memory bus widths at 320 bits and 384 bits compared to Nvidia’s 256 bits. That said, the comparison doesn’t account for Nvidia’s use of newer GDDR6X, which offers lower power consumption per transferred bit while also being faster.
In terms of performance, AMD claims 52 shader TFLOPs on both the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX compared to the RTX 4080’s 49 TFLOPS. These performance claims are backed up by slides showing its cards beating Nvidia’s in terms of framerate in a number of games including, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Resident Evil Village and Cyberpunk 2077, all in different settings.
Beyond performance metrics, AMD also takes shots at some of the features Nvidia’s latest cards are lacking, namely the lack of DisplayPort 2.1 support. This new version has more bandwidth than the DisplayPort 1.4 in the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090. In theory, DisplayPort 2.1’s increased bandwidth allows for gaming at 8K resolutions refresh rates higher than 60Hz—Nvidia’s cards max out at 60Hz—and even better image quality at lower resolutions.
AMD also points out that the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are not using the 12VHPWR connector found in the RTX 4080. Nvidia’s implementation of this connector came under fire—figuratively and literally—after it was identified to be behind a spate of RTX 4090s catching fire following the card’s launch. Instead, AMD will be using the standard dual 8-pin PCI-E power connectors that have been the standard for discrete graphics cards for years.
Finally, they also compared the cards’ prices. As previously confirmed, the Radeon RX 7900 XT will retail for $899 (Php 52,000) while the flagship RX 7900 XTX will sell for $999 (Php 59,000), undercutting the GeForce RTX 4080’s $1,199 (Php 69,000) SRP.
The price comparison is arguably the most important one that AMD makes. Nvidia has come under fire as of late for massively increasing the pricing of its cards—for comparison, a previous-generation RTX 3080 had an SRP of only $699 (Php 40,000)—and CEO Jensen Huang’s comments about high GPU prices being “here to stay”.
Indeed, early reviews for the RTX 4080 from outlets such as Gamers Nexus have criticized the card for its terrible value.
With these slides, AMD looks to show gamers that not only do they have a cheaper alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs but that they won’t have to sacrifice performance should they go with its own offerings.
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