AMD’s 7900 XTX is a tremendously impressive GPU, largely because it’s able to maintain such high frame rates with ray tracing and DLSS disabled. This makes it a very different proposition to Nvidia’s RTX 4090, and in fact, the 7900 XTX is actually one of the better value options when looking at current pricing (and remember that if you want to take advantage of the full ray tracing performance you’ll need a faster CPU too).
When testing with Cyberpunk 2077 we saw 91 fps with ray tracing enabled, which is far more playable than the 60 fps it could manage on RDNA 2. With both DLSS and FSR disabled the gap narrowed but it’s still an exceptionally strong result.
Across our other tests we saw the same pattern; the 7900 XTX was a lot stronger than last generation and is a very compelling choice for 1440p gaming, especially considering how much cheaper it is than the RTX 4090. In 4K gaming, the gap widened slightly but not as significantly as you might have expected based on its performance with ray tracing.
As for ray tracing, it’s important to remember that the 7900 XTX is a generation behind Nvidia in this area and while AMD has made some great strides on this front, it’s not yet ready to take on Nvidia in a direct battle. In our test with Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, we saw the 7900 XTX trail the RTX 3090 Ti by 11% when using ray tracing and upscaling, and by a smaller margin when running it at native resolution.