AMD Reveals More Details Around The Radeon RX 7900 Series / RDNA3

Earlier this month AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX with availability set for 13 December. Meanwhile today the embargo lifts on more details surrounding the RDNA3 architecture and these new graphics cards.

In advance of the reviews, today is just the embargo lift for more details on RDNA3 / RX 7900 series that AMD shared with the analysts and reviewers at their Las Vegas event two weeks ago. Here are some of the highlights from the event... Of course, I'll forego sharing all of the Windows-specific information and focus on some of the key highlights and commentary from the Linux perspective. No Linux-specific information was shared at the event so you'll need to wait for my reviews to find out about these RDNA3 graphics cards on the open-source driver.

AMD repeatedly brought up their "plug and game" philosophy with the Radeon RX 7900 series as a jab at NVIDIA with their high-end GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards with much higher power requirements and a physically massive graphics card for the GeForce RTX 4090... With the Radeon RX 7000 series, there is no inflated power requirements or much larger graphics card to worry about accommodating in your chassis. The Radeon RX 7900 XT as a reminder has a 300 Watt total board power and the RX 7900 XTX has a 355 Watt board power, so just the two eight-pin PCIe power connectors are required.

The RDNA3 graphics cards do support HDMI 2.1a and DisplayPort 2.1 along with USB Type-C. From the HDMI 2.1 perspective it does appear there still is legal challenges around implementing all modern HDMI 2.x functionality within the open-source AMDGPU driver, but at least that isn't an issue with DisplayPort 2.1.

AMD's presentation does confirm that the Radeon RX 7900 series is primarily aimed at battling the GeForce RTX 4080 but not necessarily the GeForce RTX 4090... Though given the strong open-source AMD Linux driver performance we've seen with RDNA2, it will be interesting to see how the competition between these new GPUs are under Linux.

Generationally there is huge uplift from RDNA2 to RDNA3... Of course, these are Windows numbers. Next month I'll be able to comment on the Linux performance using the newest open-source driver code.

The ray-tracing performance especially should be much better off with RDNA3 over RDNA2.

As a reminder, the RX 7900 XT will be launching for around $899 USD and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship for around $999.

Next, let's learn more about RDNA3...