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AMD today announced its new Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX GPUs, unfortunately deviating from what was otherwise an incredibly clean announcement to rely on disingenuous marketing claims about “8K” “gaming” on the new RX 7900 XT & XTX GPUs. Other than steamrolling itself with its own misleading claims and statements, AMD did have some actual news to discuss. Primarily, it talked about the specs for the RX 7900 XT and XTX RDNA3 GPUs, and it also announced the 7900 XT & XTX release date as December 13th. The cards will have an MSRP of $1000 for the 7900 XTX and $900 for the 7900 XT.
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – AMD RX 7900 XT & 7900 XTX Announced
01:38 – Specs of RX 7900 XT & XTX
03:08 – GPU Die & Chiplet Approach
06:05 – Marketing BS Ruining Otherwise Good Announcement
12:33 – TDP, Coolers, & Power
15:03 – FSR3, Smart Access Video, & Hyper-RX
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Host, Writing: Steve Burke
Video: Andrew Coleman
Here are some up close die shots of the New AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the 7900 XT that AMD announced today these are The first consumer chiplet based gpus or MCM designs coming out and they have six Mcds or memory cache dies and one gcd or Graphics compute diet except the 79 XD Has one dummy MCD we'll talk about that Later now these are going to come out December 13th to get straight into the Core details they're priced at 900 for The cheaper of the two the XT and a Thousand for the XTX and for the most Part the presentation was pretty good I Had a lot of technical details we'll go Over it also unfortunately fell into a Gigantic marketing trap it was The same trap that Nvidia fell into About 8K gaming for the 3090 and Apparently AMD has learned absolutely Nothing from its competitor other than To take shots at it for adapter cables Because this house isn't glass and Cannot possibly break but we're going to Start with the specs and then we'll get Into the bad marketing and stuff before That this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our Own GN store and juggle complex Multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll Out new products with detailed Pages Full of galleries videos and descriptors It's also useful for your own resume
Sites for a photographer or projects Portfolios or for starting your new Small business idea there's never been a Better time to try and start your new Business than right now and we can vouch That Squarespace makes it easy visit Squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 Off your first purchase with Squarespace What's up gamers Sorry that's what the AMD guy said on Stage and it feels kind of weird I don't Know why I said that anyway we're going To talk about the key specs and pricing As fast as we can get through it and I Will look at the rest so the cards are The RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX and again That's 900 and a thousand dollars for Them release date is December 13th as we Just said both cards have DisplayPort 2.1 support they have av1 encode decode Support and the reference models that AMD showed us have two DisplayPort one HDMI one USBC on the i o the Radeon 7900 XTX runs 24 gigabytes of dddr6 memory Not gddr6x and not hbm even though There's chiplets on the MTM that you Were looking at look like HBO those are The memory cache dies the 7900 XTX is Using a 384-bit memory bus and the cards Also use a chiplet interconnect at 5.3 Terabytes per second the company claims A 54 increase in performance per watt Over our DNA 2 and the 7900 XTX runs 96 Compute units or cus at 2.3 gigahertz
However AMD now runs decoupled clocks With front end and Shader clock speeds Operating at different frequencies we're Assuming the clock they're presenting Here is the usual boost clock or what AMD calls game clock as for the 7900 XT Non-second X that has an 84 CU layout And it has a 2 gigahertz boost clock and 20 Gigabytes of gddr6 for total board Power the spec is 355 Watts for the XTX And 300 watts for the 7900 XT now as far As the chiplet layout our understanding Is that 7900 XT has a dummy die on it For one of the mcds so one of those six Does not work it's just there to help Balance with stability of the cooler Poly distribution of weight so they Don't have to re-engineer the mechanical Spec or something on those lines and They look completely the same it's just That one difference all of these Chiplets are packaged on top of an inner Poser similar to how Vega was built and That inner poser then sits on the usual Green substrate inner posers add Non-trivial cost to manufacturing but Chiplets reduce cost and interposer Packages usually have that coating to Cover and protect the Silicon which you Can see here and AMD had issues in the Past with that coating that basically Resin layer or diffusion barrier over All the the hbm plus the GPU core in Vega where it had a few different
Suppliers so I had some issues with Keeping the coolers all mounted the same Way we'll see if that happens here we Haven't gotten an answer yet as to how They're approaching the coating around The multi-chip approach as for why you Would go chiplet based it's really just Down to cost monolithic dies are far More expensive to make especially at Larger die sizes for the bigger gpus Because monolithic dies have a higher Chance of failure in manufacturing so The yields are down and that gets baked Into the price of the ones that are good And that they can sell to you so that's Really all there is to it it's just like When AMD moved to chiplets for ryzen for Die sizes they're 300 millimeters Squared for the five nanometer process Gcd and then six of the MCS those are All 37 millimeters squared and that is The other reason that costs are down on Because you can use different process Nodes where if one of them doesn't need The absolute newest most expensive node You can run something cheaper instead That still gets the job done now the Decoupled clocks are also really Interesting but we don't have enough Information yet to talk about how it Really works so one of amd's tactical Fellows went up on stage to talk about The 2.3 gigahertz Shader clock versus 2.5 gigahertz for the front end clock
Maximum but as for which one is Presenting to the end user and say gpu-z We'd assume it's just whatever the Boost Clock manifests itself as and how they Dictate boosted on either of the 2D Couple clocks we're not sure but the Reason you would decouple them is for Power savings and that's really where AMD is trying to get a lot of its gains This generation for DisplayPort 2.1 the Bandwidth on amd's new display engine Which it calls radians is 54 gigabits Per second or 12 bit per Channel color For up to 68 billion colors that means Their support technically for 8K 165 Displays or 4K 480 displays I'll be Obviously that doesn't mean you're Actually going to run games at 8K 165 or 4K 480 just because technically the Interface can support it and you would Be foolish to think that Unless apparently your amd's Chief Debater that's that's jabater because he Said debated on Twitter a couple years Ago about Nvidia prices anyway He went on stage to do the marketing Thing which is twist the truth heavily Now we get into the fun part about Marketing and it's a really Echoey hotel room and I'm going to be Animated so sorry for the echo so AMD Scott herkelman after he got on stage And said what's up fellow Gamers he then Talked about how these are the cards to
Get to go 4K and Beyond Beyond is a pretty big range spanning From 4K to apparently Infinity so he Later clarified that he meant 8K also Pretty pretty high big difference from 4K so a couple things here Nvidia did This a couple years ago and it went over Exceptionally poorly for NVIDIA because It is very very misleading to talk about 8K in the way that these companies have Been some really simple math to get Everyone up on the same page so first of All 8K normally for resolution means 76.80 by 4320 pixels that is 33.2 Million pixels you have to multiply them And that's going to be important later 4K is 38.40 by 2160 pixels that's Somewhere around eight plus or minus a Little bit million pixels so it's about Four times the pixel count to go from 4K To 8K very big difference in how heavily The GPU is going to be loaded so going From saying this is good for 4K it's a Saying this is good for for a crisp Actual quote 8K gaming is a massive jump And you start to question why would you Talk about 4K at all if you can play Crisp 8K And the answer is because we just cut One of the dimensions in half and then We multiply it that way instead and we Absolutely blasted Nvidia for this a few Years ago so AMD gets the same treatment Because we're Fair 8K Ultra wide when
AMD was talking about that is actually a Resolution that they used anyway of 7680 By 2160 that's in the footnotes that is Half the actual pixel count of actual 8K Or not even close to 8K that's only two Times the pixel count of 4K we Understand that in Radeon Marketing Group the reality Distortion field is so Strong that all they know is 8 is 2 Times 4 but when there's two Dimensions You're multiplying eight is not two Times four eight K becomes four times Four K I know it's confusing apparently But that's a very big difference to mark It on this is 16 million pixels instead Of 33. now AMD qualified Ultra wide once Or twice and then they kind of drop the Qualifier and just kept and 8K uh as if It was all free and clear but it doesn't Change the fact that even with that Qualifier there it is disingenuous and Misleading and bordering online to keep Saying 8K when you know that most people In the audience don't understand that You're talking about something half the Pixel count and then the biggest misstep Was when they said it could pull off a Crisp 96 FPS at 8K but FSR is enabled in That Benchmark that's again that's not 8K that's faked 8K FSR might be good Just like dlss might be good but it's Incredibly misleading to call 8K with FSR 8K and even though AMD technically Disclosed that it was using fsar let's
Zoom in real tight to show just how Small that disclosure was this is Horribly misleading confusingly they Also said that for 4K gaming that's the Card to get and then slipped in a sneaky Qualifier about if you turn off Max Settings which is just kind of a weird Thing to say out of nowhere Uh and pointed to some of these other Issues now we'd have to know more Explicit details about what version of FSR they were using and what quality Setting but you're looking at potential Literal multiples to get up to 8K as was Presented amd's representative also put On a big show about actually see the Frames you're paying for direct quote And he said that quote if you are paying That much money for a new gaming card You should demand a GPU that can allow You to game into the future and only the 7900 series can do that for this AMD was Referring to 8K 165 and 4K 480 support As we talked about earlier and Realistically uh even if you can't Literally see every single frame that Your device is putting out to your Display is once again misleading to Suggest that it somehow it doesn't Benefit you at all because it still does It's just it's for things like latency Instead and on the competitive side you Do still get some additional information With those frames coming through even if
They're chopped up and finally AMD took A lot of necessary Digs at Nvidia it Went off about how there's quote no need To rebuild your desktop no need to Upgrade your case and no need for a Power adapter and they also said quote It's as easy as pulling out your old Card and putting in a new one which okay We get it the power adapter thing is a Hot Topic right now we know pretty well Just spend a lot of time researching it But To suggest that you can't also pull a Video card out of a case and put in an Nvidia one Is misleading because you can The only difference may be the case Changes but the power adapter is not a Big hurdle and uh you can also use a Native Gen 5 Card end to Type 4 like Corsair power supply cable for example And you still don't need the adapter and You don't have to update your power Supply so really weird to frame it that Way it leaves out a lot of information And it just becomes purely misleading And finally this is especially weird Because we get where AMD is coming from They could have just said look Fortunately by pure chance we decided to Build these cards with eight pins Because they don't pull that much power Compared to Nvidia and so we used eight Pins and fortunately we inadvertently
Dodged the controversy around 12 volt High power adapters but to treat it like It was some sort of engineering feat and Like they have this Clairvoyance about What controversies are going to emerge a Year from when they start designing and Is just not how it actually works so It's a situation where it ends up Looking defensive instead of like actual Marketing like instead of combating Nvidia on performance they're fighting Them on all of these other things uh and It just the whole thing came across as Slimy but fortunately there was only Like 30 of the 40 of the presentation so Let's get back to the other discussion On the cooler side we have some unique Information that you're probably not Going to hear elsewhere and we'll give You the basics now but we have another Video coming up with more information on This later so the specific AMD reference Card the cooler has built into it a Thermistor at the fan Inlet for the 7900 XTX which takes the effect of ambient Temperature as air goes into the GPU so AMD in theory is exposing this to users To manipulate that fan curve as well We're not sure that software side Details of it but what this would allow You to do actually there's one key Advantage which is if you're running a Low load scenario or idle and the GPU Isn't running hot enough to demand high
Pressure or speed active cooling then You run into scenarios where the memory Or the fats or any other components Might run unnecessarily warm and there's No real way to work around this unless You have decoupled fan speeds and one of The ways you can do that is by running Different fan curves for a thermistor For ambient temperature in the case Versus GPU core but we'll talk more About that in the future and partners Won't necessarily have this either just For the record so given the unique 12 Volt high power circumstances right now One of the unexpectedly and accidentally Major pieces of news is that AMD is Sticking with simple eight pins for this They're using two of them there's some Discussion earlier in the last couple Weeks that Andy was switching to eight Pin because of the 12 volt high power Issues that happened within uh the last 30 days or so that's not how Manufacturing works that's not how any Of this works they were already using Eight pins and it does certainly Simplify things but it wasn't a change That was made just because of the 12 Volt high power adapter issues for power Capability is at most you might see an Extra 50 Watts or so from Custom vbioses From Partners but AMD already gave the Max tbp as 355 watts and then for the Fin stack to more traditional vertical
Design it's just top to bottom Orientation on the fins it has a three Fan design for both cards and the Shroud Extends past the standard pcie slot Height only at the sides so the center Area has some extra fins sticking up the Card Bears a three fin BMW style red Mark on it and otherwise it's using a Vapor chamber on both the XT and the XTX For the AMD reference design it has a Larger pin out for the fins for that Thermistor feature and it has a Secondary pin out with just two pins for LED lighting externally which is useful For us but not for most people and That's because you would basically just Use it to turn the cards LEDs on and That's all it would do so last thing Here AMD has a couple of features that Are coming out next year so in 2023 They're gonna be launching FSR 3.0 not a Lot of details on it yet uh other than It's useful for making the presentation Look like you can play things at 8K Which isn't really 8K anyway FSR 3.0 They are also going to have hyper RX Mode So hyper RX uh not something you get at The pharmacy actually what it is is a Single click toggle that turns on a Bunch of AMD software features like Anti-lag FSR whatever else is baked in There rather than individually toggling Them on and off based on the game so
That's supposed to be something that Makes it easier to basically leverage in These software solutions that probably Not that many people use because there's A lot of them and they're too Complicated at this point and they also Talked about a new smart access video Solution which is for video content Creators I guess it claims a 30 uplift In 4k multi-stream transcoding and it Does so by Distributing the encode and Decode across ryzen CPUs and Radeon gpus That are in the same system there's a Lot more to talk about soon but that's Gonna be it for this one because we just Need to get this news video up and Recapped for you and give you our take On some of the marketing thanks for Watching as always subscribe for more go To store.gamersnexus.net to help us out Directly or patreon.com Gamers Nexus to Help fund our reporting and independent Cover average at events subscribe for More we'll see you all next time
