AMD RDNA 3 Release Date, Price, And Specs

2020 was an exciting time in both the PC and console worlds. We saw brand-new CPU and GPU releases from AMD and NVIDIA, but we also got the long-awaited next-gen consoles from Xbox and Sony.

These releases enjoyed significant performance improvements from their predecessors, generally thanks to the transition to a smaller (7nm) fabrication process from TSMC and Samsung.

To push the GPU technology folder, AMD based its RDNA 3 architecture on TSMC’s 5nm process. But is this new architecture enough to beat NVIDIA and satisfy customers?

Let’s see what RDNA 3 GPUs have to offer!

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Release Date

The two flagships RX 7000 Series GPUs, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT officially released for sale on December 13, 2022.

NVIDIA’s contenders, the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, are the direct competitors of these two AMD flagship cards.

However, all four cards are priced near $1,000 or over $1,000, so if you’re looking for a better value product, it’s probably best to wait for mid-range RTX 4000 and RX 7000 cards.

Unfortunately, multiple sources mention that AMD’s mid-range cards like the RX 7800, RX 7700, and RX 7600 might not come until mid-2023.

MyDrivers mentions that AMD might be holding out on these GPUs for 618 (June 18th), one of the largest shopping festivals in China.

Recently, AMD’s EVP (Rick Bergman) and SVP (David Wang) expanded on the idea of an RTX 4090 competitor during an ITMedia interview.

In short, they renounced the concept of a 4090 equivalent simply because its cost and efficiency are outside of the standards of PC gaming.

A GPU that needs 600W, a premium power supply, and a case big enough to fit it did not seem like a good game plan for AMD.

In short, AMD probably won’t release any competition for the RTX 4090 with RDNA 3.

If RDNA 3 and RTX 4000 do not draw your interest, consider holding out for AMD’s RDNA 4 Series.

Price

Here is the official pricing for the RX 7000 GPUs:

• Radeon RX 7900 XTX – $999
• Radeon RX 7900 XT– $899

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a direct competitor to the $1200 RTX 4080, but it is $200 cheaper. On the other hand, the Radeon RX 7900 XT, at $899, doesn’t have a competitor (for now).

Here’s a helpful FPS-per-dollar chart by Hardware Unboxed based on Newegg prices:

So, even though the 7900 XTX is $1000, it offers a pretty reasonable cost per frame, especially when compared to the RTX 4080.

The RX 7900 XT offers much worse value because of its high $900 price tag. Recently though, the RX 7900 XT is often discounted to as low as $799.

It probably isn’t selling well, which makes sense considering that its bigger brother offers much better value.

The rest of the lineups’ pricing is still unknown, so here are our estimates based on leaks/rumors:

• Radeon RX 7800/XT – $699
• Radeon RX 7700/XT – $599
• Radeon RX 7600 – $350
• Radeon RX 7500 – $250

Architecture

Navi 3 or RDNA 3 GPUs have a chiplet design. The first ever gaming GPUs to have multiple chiplets fused into one. We’ve seen this same approach in AMD’s Ryzen processors which brought a lot of success to the company over the years.

The Navi 31 die has 1 GCD (Graphics Complex Die) graphics paired with 6 MCD (Multi-cache Die) which sums up to 96 CUs.

Thanks to those MCDs and second-generation Infinity Cache, AMD managed to boost the GPU’s peak bandwidth by 2.7X (up to 5.3 TB/s.)

Next-generation ray tracing accelerators are also added to the chip, so naturally, RX 7000 GPUs offer better ray tracing performance.

This new multi-die setup (and 5nm process node) allowed AMD to cram 165% more transistors-per-mm2.

Specifications

A new generation of the RDNA architecture on a 5nm fabrication process (from TSMC) is what makes the RX 7000 a solid upgrade over RX 6000.

The RDNA 3 architecture allows higher boost frequencies, more VRAM memory, higher bandwidth, and a lot more.

Here are the exact specifications of the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, in addition with rumored specifications for mid-range RX 7000 GPUs:

Lisa Su first announced two GPUs on the Navi 31 die, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and Radeon RX 7900 XT.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s flagship with 96 CUs, a boost clock clock frequency of 2.5 GHz, a whopping 24GB of GDDR6 memory, and all of that at a total board power of 355W.

That’s a 15% increase in frequency over the RX 6950XT and a 20% increase in CUs (Compute Units.)

The flagship’s little brother, the RX 7900 XT is cut down to 84 CUs, 2.0 GHz game clock, 20GB GDDR6 VRAM, and maxed out power draw at 315W.

Another addition to the RDNA 3 lineup will be DisplayPort 2.1. With DP 2.1, users can get 8K@165Hz and 4K@480Hz. NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 4090 is still stuck with DP 1.4a which is limited to 8K@60Hz or 4K@120Hz.

Now, finally, let’s look at performance!

Performance

During AMD’s event, the company shared various slides, showing performance increases up to 1.7x compared to the RX 6950 XT.

However, companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel like to nitpick the games to show their products in the best possible light.

Unfortunately, there seem to be some significant variances compared to third-party benchmarks.

Nevertheless, let’s first look at the performance of the 7900 XTX compared to current-gen and last-gen cards.

RX 7900 XTX

In most games, the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX offer similar performance, while only a couple of games, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II favor AMD’s Radeon cards.

In Hardware Unboxed’s 16-game testing, the RX 7900 XTX is 3.5% faster than the RTX 4080 in 4K resolution. In 1440p, both cards offer practically the same performance. In 1080p, the Radeon GPU is just under 3% faster than the 4080.

Compared to last-gen, the RX 7900 XTX is 20% faster than the RX 6950 XT and 3090 Ti. So, the generational jump is significantly lower than the 1.7x claimed by AMD.

RX 7900 XT

For $900, the RX 7900 XT is naturally behind the RTX 4080 and its bigger brother, RX 7900 XTX.

In Hardware Unboxed’s testing, the RX 7900 XTX is 20% faster than the RX 7900 XT. This kind of performance difference makes the RX 7900 XT obsolete, considering that the flagship is only $100 more expensive.

It’s also only 10% faster than the RX 6950 XT.

Its performance and pricing leads to a much worse price-per-performance than the XTX.

Ray Tracing Performance

With more capable GPUs, ray tracing acceleration, and upscaling technologies like FSR and DLSS, ray tracing is becoming much more usable and popular.

RDNA 3 comes with new ray-tracing accelerators, so here’s how that helps with in-game performance:

Unfortunately, even with the ray tracing accelerators, performance is still behind NVIDIA. The RTX 4080 is about 60% faster in Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled and on Ultra than the RX 7900 XTX.

The gap reduces when you pair the Radeon cards with FSR upscaling vs. NVIDIA cards with DLSS.

Efficiency And Power Draw

AMD’s RDNA architecture brought huge efficiency improvements over the previous GCN architecture. Then, AMD achieved another monumental 50% performance-per-watt leap from RDNA 1 to RDNA 2.

Again, AMD claimed a 54% better performance-per-watt compared to RDNA 2.

Based on the testing done by Hilbert from Guru3D, performance-per-watt is doubled compared to the RX 6950 XT.

Although keep in mind that the RX 7900 XTX will still draw more power than the RTX 4080.

Features

With RDNA 3 we are also getting a couple of new and updated technologies. Most notable are FSR 3.0 and Hypr-RX.

FSR 3.0

Supposedly, it can deliver up to two times more FPS compared to FSR 2. It won’t release until 2023 though. That’s all the information we got for now.

Of course, Radeon Super Resolution will also be available for RX 7000 users.

Now, this is where things get interesting.

Hypr-RX

AMD also announced a new technology named “Hypr-RX” which should also release in the first half of 2023. Hypr-RX should improve FPS and lower latency by a considerable amount.

When AMD first announced Hypr-RX, it seemed as though it was a brand new way to boost FPS, and we hoped it would be something similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS 3/Frame Generation.

However, it turns out that Hypr-RX is a feature that enables Radeon Super Resolution, Radeon Boost, and Radeon Anti-Lag with a single push of a button.

All of these features that are enabled with Hypr-RX are already part of Radeon Software, and you can enable them individually at any time.

Still, Hypr-RX will boost your FPS, so we can appreciate this kind of quality-of-life addition.

AMD claims that enabling Hypr-RX can boost performance by up to 85% in Dying Light 2.

Encoding And Decoding

With a new media engine, AMD has also improved media encoding, decoding, and stream transcoding, which has been a problem for AMD GPUs for years. NVIDIA’s NVENC was always miles ahead.

With AV1 coding, the quality of videos and streams is improved considerably.

EpoxVox tested AMD’s AV1 implementation with the RX 7900 XT, and from what we can see, the quality comes pretty close to NVIDIA.

Here’s the video so you can see for yourself:

Furthermore, AMD announces SmartAccess Video, which can be used to pair Ryzen and Radeon together for a 30% uplift in 4K multi-stream transcoding. This will probably introduce more uplifts in other similar workloads.

RDNA 3 In APUs And Mobile CPUs

RDNA 3 graphics cards will also be available in future Zen 4 mobile CPUs. During CES 2023, AMD announced its RX 7000 mobile lineup.

For now, there are only four GPUs, RX 7600M XT, RX 7600M, RX 7700S, and RX 7600S, but we might see more in the future.

AMD claims that the RX 7600 XT can even be faster than the desktop RTX 3060 in certain video game titles.

The chart above shows that the RX 7600M XT is 27% faster than RTX 3060 12GB in The Witcher 3. Not bad for a laptop GPU!

Compared to its predecessor, RX 6600M 8GB, it can be up to 30% faster in most games.

There is also the RX 7700S, but the specification, power draw, and performance seem to be identical to the RX 7600M XT, so we don’t really see the purpose of it.

It could be that the RX 7700S and RX 7600S are more suited for ultra-light/thinner laptops.

For now, that’s all there is to share on RDNA 3, but we’ll be sure to provide you with the necessary updates as soon as news is available!