This video will not age well - AMD Radeon RX 7900 Series Review

[Vishera]

7 minutes ago, DeerDK said:

Seems like a good call. 

I might upgrade, mostly because my 3060 doesn't fit in my mITX case. Waiting to see what the 7600 xt brings to the table, though 

It will probably perform like a 6700 XT and will cost the same amount of money as the 6700 XT...

[DeerDK]

5 minutes ago, Vishera said:

It will probably perform like a 6700 XT and will cost the same amount of money as the 6700 XT...

I'm hoping more in line of the 6800, and with better RT, but we will have to wait and see. 

Otherwise the 6700 is also a good deal now.

[Spotty]

20 minutes ago, Vishera said:

The RTX 3080 costs $550 in my country...

It's significantly cheaper than the 7900 XT and the performance difference is just 12%.

That chart I posted only shows relative performance of ray tracing performance that has been averaged over several games, with ray tracing being an area the AMD cards have been behind the competition in. It does not tell the full story. The cards perform vastly differently depending on the game with RT due to the different ways games implement RT features. In ray tracing the 3080 beats the 7900xt in some games (cyberpunk, control) and the 7900xt performs better in others. 

You need to read the full review and look at traditional rasterisation performance, as well as things like thermals and power consumption, to get the full picture.

 

But, yeah. If the price is right then buying last generation cards - or used cards - might be the better option, depending what it is you want. If you are looking for something cheaper it might also be worthwhile waiting for the RX 7800 XT or RTX 4070 (Ti?) and seeing how much they cost and how they compare.

[Ubersonic]

Meh, screw the USB-C port, triple DP on AIB cards please, don't want to have to use a dongle to hook up three screens or downgrade to HDMI.

[StephanTW]

depending on local pricing and how the encoding turns out to be I will get one of these, kinda need an upgrade from my r9 290's, even if people in this topic are saying it isnt a great upgrade from last gen, it is way way way better than what i currently have and i want to have an AV1 encoding card and seeing how long i keep hardware its a need to have to last to the future

[DarkSwordsman]

Re: Blender performance

I have a feeling the Blender performance difference is due to OptiX specifically taking advantage of the RT cores. My 2080 Super can render literally twice as fast using OptiX than just CUDA. I am not sure if the AMD HiP integration supports the RT features of the AMD cards, so it is likely just using it's raw compute through HiP like usual. There is a good chance we will see significant performance jumps in Blender. Not matching, but probably twice as fast as its base speed. I am also a little sad that wasn't mentioned (if it is the case) because it could have been yet another "aged like fine wine" point, lol.

 

I am certain that if AMD is able to push more raw RT performance in their cards (just like how they're pushing more VRAM at a lower cost), they will be an incredibly compelling option for workstation users, which is a market that AMD has yet to capture.

Heck, we might even see cloud render farms offering a cheaper option through AMD cards, similar to how AWS is able to offer significantly cheaper VPS solutions by offering EPYC-based VMs rather than Intel Xeon Scalable VMs.

Edit: I found meeting notes from the Blender dev team:

Quote

AMD HIP-RT: AMD have hardware ray-tracing working internally, but stability and performance are still being worked on and driver support for this still needs to become part of an official release. A patch will be sent to Brecht for early design review.

Also, in the Cycles AMD HIP device feedback forum post from Brecht:

Quote

See the last meeting notes for updates on HIP-RT, an initial implementation is being reviewed by me. And the goal is of course for that to be an API other renderers use as well.
 

We decided to drop OpenCL because it was holding back Cycles development, driver issues and other limitations were making it very hard to add new features. If we were still using OpenCL we’d struggle to support these older architectures as well when there is no official AMD support for them anymore.
 

Already now when adding for example many lights sampling I’ve had to spend time doing workarounds. But at least with HIP we can ensure that the one compiler version we use works, rather than dealing with a range of OpenCL driver versions and implementations that each have their own bugs and limitations.

So based on this, it seems like AMD RT accelerated rendering is definitely going to be a thing, pending some bugs and issues.

Edit 2: They have a tracker which includes "hardware ray tracing" as a task:

https://developer.blender.org/T91571

[Just that Mario]

2 hours ago, Spotty said:

The downside to showing the results this way is you'll need to view the separate charts for the 7900xt and 7900xtx. I think the reason LTT did the chart their way was to condense both cards info on to one chart

They could've still achieved it by essentially comparing 6900 XT and 4080/4090 to the 7900 XT/XTX not the other way around. Usually when you take something as reference point, you compare other values to that reference point, not compare reference point to other values. Like, that's entire point of a "reference" point, haha.

6900 XT - -60% (compared to reference)
7900 XT - reference perf.

4090 - +50% (compared to reference)

[LapsedMemory]

If I switch from an NVIDIA to an AMD, will Steam Link still work on my NVIDIA Shield TV Pro?  I know I'll lose NVIDIA's game stream setup, but will Steam's at least still function or does NVIDIA lock that to NVIDIA cards as well?

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

Way too expensive, not that fast. Easy skip. They can only get away with this pricing because Nvidia's pricing is beyond ridiculous this gen

[Quackers101]

1 hour ago, LapsedMemory said:

If I switch from an NVIDIA to an AMD, will Steam Link still work on my NVIDIA Shield TV Pro?  I know I'll lose NVIDIA's game stream setup, but will Steam's at least still function or does NVIDIA lock that to NVIDIA cards as well?

steam link would use steam, and mostly any GPU? If it's through the shield itself or through nvidia's streaming service that would likely be different.

 

Also dam, quite the price difference and performance difference between 7900xt and xtx.

[xg32]

need a new build just for a 4090, not planning on that atm, the xtx is...ok over the 6950xt, need some AIB cards, oc testing and driver updates, and it's not worth 1k if the 4080 is 1200, probably need to drop another 100bucks in price.

[dogwitch]

wait 3 to 6 months and see what uptake,

on blender lvl work with amd. unless its hpc cards and software stack. not worth it.

[VinLAURiA]

14 hours ago, Ubersonic said:

Meh, screw the USB-C port, triple DP on AIB cards please, don't want to have to use a dongle to hook up three screens or downgrade to HDMI.

It's DisplayPort, you can just daisy-chain the displays...

[Vishera]

GPU prices continue to drop in my country...

The 6700 XT just dropped to $300 in the local shops here.

[SolarNova]

AMD have turned disappointing people into an art form.

 

Seriously, both the XT and XTX are massive disappointments.

Instead of seeing 20-30% gains over the 4080, we see next to nothing. Neck and neck, or less.

Sure its cheaper than the 4080 ..but a Jag is cheaper than a Bugatti ...its still fking expensive !

 

The prices are insane, no amount of performance can justify it. The 7900XTX and 4080 are ...XX80 tier ..not even xx80ti ..and they are at the £/$1,000 mark.

Its stupid, and those with so little self control who buy them are only hurting themselves, and the consumer tech community in general, in the long run as they signal to these manufacturers that these prices are OK.

 

[DarkSwordsman]

37 minutes ago, SolarNova said:

AMD have turned disappointing people into an art form.

I think you missed the point Linus made of: the last generation AMD cards have gotten better with software + it is clear that the 7900XT/X are trading blows in certain games with inconsistent results, i.e: probably a software issue.

I wouldn't be surprised if 3-6 months after today, these cards will do way better (especially with third-party cards).

[James]

A note about the graph at 12:11 - while our data was correct, the manner in which it was displayed was not. This graph should have been broken into two, with one showing Total Graphics Power and one showing Total Board Power (as seen below). Our video's power conclusions remain unchanged, but we wanted to be sure that you had all of the data for yourself.