RDNA 3 GPUs are ‘competing at $1,000 or below’ leaving the RTX 4090 to ‘a segment of its own’
AMD’s Scott Herkelman says the company is not focusing on the RTX 4090 with its first RDNA 3 graphics cards.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AMD has just announced its first RDNA 3 graphics cards, theRX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. These two cards boast an impressive spec, and an impressive uplift in gaming, ray tracing, and compute performance. However, AMD has suggested that it doesn’t really see Nvidia’s recentRTX 4090as the main competition for its two new high-end cards.
There was a notable lack of comparison to Nvidia’s RTX 4090 during AMD’s announcement live stream for RDNA 3, which would suggest it’s not a comparison the red team would care to make.
That was further alluded to by comments from Radeon top brass Scott Herkelman in a Q&A after the show when he was asked about the lack of benchmarks versus the RTX 4090.
“What I would say is we’re competing at a thousand dollars and below,” Herkelman said. “I think that chip was in a segment of its own, and we’re really after than $1,000 segment. We don’t know what their 4080/4070 really is, but I would assume it’s somewhere in that range in terms of class, but I believe in the performance and what we’re offering in terms of price.”
The RX 7900 XTX will be priced at $999, the same as theRX 6900 XTat launch, and the RX 7900 XT will start at $899. I suspect we’ll see some card partners break the $1,000 barrier with one, or perhaps both, of the cards, but AMD is essentially saying it’s the RTX 4080.4070 that these cards are competing with.
Best chair for gaming: the top gaming chairs aroundBest gaming desk: the ultimate PC podiumsBest PC controller: sit back, relax, and get your game on
With theRTX 4080 16GBlaunch still over a week away, we don’t have much to go on by way of comparison between it and AMD’s RDNA 3 chips. That card also starts out at $1,199, which still puts it notably pricier than AMD’s top card. As for a cheaper card built on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace GPU, we were originally expecting the RTX 4080 12GB at $899, but that hassince been canned.
All of which means we have one Nvidia GPU for comparison today, the RTX 4090. But since AMD doesn’t want to make that comparison due to its $1,599 price tag, we’re actually still looking at performance between AMD and Nvidia in isolation for this generation so far.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
For a rough idea of raw compute performance, which I should note isn’t the be all and end all of gaming performance, the RX 7900 XTX delivers 61 TFLOPs, while the RTX 4090 manages 82.58 TFLOPs. That’s a 31% increase in raw compute performance for the RTX 4090, for a 60% increase in price.
Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer’s top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you’ll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.
Nvidia’s upgrading GeForce Now’s $10 tier with 1440p and Ultrawide resolutions, but the only extra Ultimate users get is a new 100-hour play limit
Intel CEO sees ‘less need for discrete graphics’ and now we’re really worried about its upcoming Battlemage gaming GPU and the rest of Intel’s graphics roadmap
All Genshin Impact 5.2 livestream codes
