October Prime Day (or as Mr Bezos prefers to call it, Prime Big Deal Days) is upon us and the discounts have started already. Well, apart from graphics cards, as their prices seem to have barely changed for most models.
The main exceptions to this are AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs and specific versions are sporting a very welcome price drop. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, and 7800 XT have all had $60 to $80 snipped off, making them all a very tasty purchase. I don’t think they’ll come down any more over the course of this week but you never know!
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Radeon RX 7900 XTX
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is AMD’s flagship graphics card and it’s a seriously powerful thing—in games where ray tracing isn’t heavily used, it’s as good as anything that Nvidia has to offer and only the painfully expensive RTX 4090 is always faster.
Underneath the huge cooler, you’ve got a chiplet-based GPU with the main slab of silicon housing all of the shaders. It’s surrounded by six tiny chips, comprising slices of L3 cache and a memory interface.
All of the relevant numbers are more than big enough: 6,144 shaders, 2,525 MHz boost clock, and 24 GB of fast GDDR6 VRAM. Those first two aspects combine to offer up to 61 TFLOPS of processing power so it’s more than just a gaming GPU with that kind of number-crunching ability.
It’s not a perfect GPU, though. As mentioned above, AMD’s RDNA 3 design trails Nvidia’s best chips when it comes to ray tracing, and by some margin. Its upscaling and frame generation technology (FidelityFX Super Resolution, FSR 3.1) is really good but not quite as good as DLSS.
The RX 7900 XTX is also power thirsty with a TDP of 355 W and it regularly hits that limit in gaming. But at $820, it’s not only massively cheaper than the $999 launch MSRP but a good deal lower than the RTX 4080 Super which is generally around the $990 mark.
In fact, it’s almost bordering on RTX 4070 Ti Super territory, which makes this deal very tempting. Before you make the plunge, though, there are two more cards to consider…
Radeon RX 7900 XT
Coming in almost $200 cheaper than the RX 7900 XTX, is its nearest sibling, the RX 7900 XT. Losing 576 shaders, 4 GB of VRAM, and a little bit of clock speed, the cut-down GPU is no slouch.
Collating the 1440p gaming results from our reviews, you can see that the 7900 XT is just as good as the 7900 XTX. In some cases, it seems to be even better but that’s down to early drivers for the RDNA 3 architecture being a bit on the rubbish side (it’s all a lot better now). If 1440p is your preferred gaming resolution, then the 7900 XT is clearly the better choice, as you’re saving a whole chunk of cash for very similar performance.
It’s only when you move to 4K gaming that the XTX variant becomes relevant and if you’re looking to step into the world of ultra-high resolution, then it’s worth seeing what 4K monitor deals are doing the rounds in the Prime Day sales event.
Radeon RX 7800 XT
Last but by no means least, it’s the RX 7800 XT. Like the above two, it’s a chiplet GPU but only has four MCDs (Memory Cache Dies) and 16 GB of VRAM. On paper, it seems like it’s worse than its predecessor, the RX 6800 XT, as it has 768 fewer shaders but thanks to the RDNA 3 architecture, it’s generally faster.
You can see that it’s slower than the RX 7900 XT but at just $430, it’s really good value for money. Taking the performance results for Far Cry 6, the RX 7900 XTX gets 0.16 fps per dollar, the RX 7900 XT gets 0.21 fps per dollar, and the RX 7800 XT pulls an impressive 0.28 fps per dollar.
This doesn’t mean the 7800 XT is the best card of the three, the figure just tells you that you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck at 1440p in this particular game.
I only play at 4K these days, so my money would go on the 7900 XTX but if I was gaming at 1440p or 1080p, the smart choice is the 7800 XT. It’s relatively light on power too (263 W TDP compared to the 7900 XT’s 315 W) so your gaming den won’t get blasted with heat.
Three great GPUs, three great deals. Nice to have some decent graphics cards at semi-sensible prices, at long last.
