AMD RX 7900 XTX leak hints at a GPU that threatens Nvidia’s RTX 4080
AMD’s incoming RX 7900 XTX graphics card has been spotted in leaked benchmarks that put the performance of the RDNA 3 flagship in the same ballpark as the RTX 4080 – and since Team Red’s GPU is a lot cheaper, Nvidia might be concerned.
As Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) spotted, Benchleaks – a regular source of benchmark spills on Twitter – picked up Geekbench results for the RX 7900 XTX (add your own spice, as with all leaks).
[GB5 GPU] Unknown GPUCPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X (8C 16T)Min/Max/Avg: 5245/5443/5417 MHzCodename: RaphaelCPUID: A60F12 (AuthenticAMD)GPU: Radeon RX 7900 XTXAPI: VulkanScore: 179579, +71.5% vs RTX 3070https: // t.co/mkOspAbgFCDecember 5, 2022
As you can see above, in the Vulkan performance test for Geekbench 5, the 7900 XTX achieved a result of 179,579. That’s only slightly faster than the RTX 4080, which, as Tom points out, averages 178,105 from a number of user scores found by our sister site.
The other shared result is for the OpenCL test (opens in new tab)where the 7900 XTX hits 228,647, but in this case the RTX 4080 somehow tops that with an average result of 264,482.
Analysis: Nvidia counterattack is in the cards?
Looking at these results, the Vulkan score certainly seems to support the claim AMD made in its prelaunch marketing – namely that the 7900 XTX is equal to the RTX 4080. In fact, it’s definitely neck-and-neck by that benchmark (technically the RDNA 3 flagship is just under a percentage point faster, but that’s hardly going to make any difference).
On the other hand, the OpenCL benchmark sees Nvidia’s RTX 4080 open a 15% lead, which is definitely more noticeable. Not that we should get carried away with pre-release benchmarking, of course – however it leans – and speaking of pre-release, the AMD drivers aren’t done yet either. And Geekbench is far from the strongest benchmark player when it comes to gaming, so we have to take that into consideration on top of everything else.
Still, this is a clear suggestion that the RX 7900 XTX will be able to successfully compete with the RTX 4080 and take on Nvidia’s more expensive second-tier Lovelace GPU.
This is where it gets really interesting, delving into the rumor world elsewhere, where we’ve heard reports that Nvidia might lower the price of the RTX 4080 in mid-December, when the 7900 XTX (and 7900 XT) go on sale. As we recently discussed, that looks very much like a counter-attack to AMD’s RDNA 3 launch, as the 7900 XTX is quite a bit cheaper than the RTX 4080 (MSRP is $999 in the US, compared to $1,199).
The sources of the RTX 4080 price cut rumor claim that Nvidia isn’t responding to AMD, but purely wants to tweak the overall value proposition – that crucial price/performance ratio of the 4080 – to fuel lackluster sales, and there’s no doubt there’s truth to that . Certainly, the RTX 4080 has underperformed in terms of sales from the leaked numbers we’ve seen (the RTX 4090 sold far more units), and the 4080 was met with an unpopular reception, to say the least.
So Nvidia has to act, but the timing of the price cut, which coincides almost directly with AMD releasing its new RDNA 3 GPUs, is certainly no coincidence. It’s not a huge leap to theorize that in light of all this, Nvidia might be serious about AMD’s next-generation flagship as a full-fledged rival to the RTX 4080.
Be that as it may, we can only hope for a more competitively priced RTX 4080 battling it out with the 7900 XTX, as that would obviously be good news for enthusiast consumers looking to drop a big price on a graphics card.
