AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT & 7900 XTX Review

Ray Tracing & DLSS

Now rasterisation is one area that AMD have always had a strong position in, with the likes of the 6900 XT and 6950 XT, and that’s clear to see that it’s carried over onto the RDNA 3 based cards, but an area where NVIDIA have always had the upper hand is in Ray Tracing, so it’s only fitting that we look at how the 7900 series have moved on because the last generation didn’t exactly see great things from team red in terms of Ray Tracing.

So starting off with Cyberpunk, where both the 7900 XT and XTX fall behind the RTX 4080. While FSR does gain some performance back, the RTX 4080 with DLSS , and especially DLSS 3, is just too much to contend with.

In Control, the 7900 XT offers up similar performance to the RTX 4080 with Ray Tracing turned on, but as FSR isn’t supported in this game and DLSS is, NVIDIA manages to claw back a lot of performance when enabled. Meanwhile, the Ray Tracing performance has still stepped up quite a bit when compared to last generation’s flagship, especially considering how demanding Control is with Ray Tracing enabled.

In Spider-Man, the 7900 XT and XTX both give strong performance, which is quite a large step up from the 6950 XT and sees the XTX only sitting a few frames per second behind the RTX 4080. With each card’s respective upscaling technologies enabled, we see the fight again, only a few frames per second between them, but with DLSS 3, the Ada Lovelace GPUs still have an upper hand here.

Lastly in Watch Dogs: Legion, we again see a large step up in Ray Tracing performance of around 50% when comparing the 6950 XT and 7900 XTX. This also puts it around 11% behind the RTX 4080, which is pretty impressive, though the upscaling technology of DLSS more than makes up for it and gives a win to team green.