The last few years have been difficult for those of us who build our own PCs and eagerly await the next set of graphics cards to be announced so we can get our pre-orders in. The price of graphics card has shot up and they've been difficult to get hold of even if you've had the spare money floating around, waiting to be spent on the latest upgrades. Now that AMD's latest RX 7900 XTX card is here, how does it fare against the competition?
AMD has now revealed its latest next-generation graphics cards set to compete with Nvidia's RTX 4080 and 4090 series, and we have both good news and bad news for consumers. The good news is that they will be less expensive and more user-friendly to install in builds than Nvidia's latest RTX cards; the bad news is that they're still objectively expensive in a time when the state of the world is uncertain.
The flagship AMD RX 7900 XTX will retail for $999, while the 7900 XT can be had for $899. That's up compared to the current 6000-series price, but lower than the Nvidia RTX 4090, which is an eye-watering $1599. Both cards will be available on December 12, 2022.
While the AMD cards won't have the same cutting-edge features of the RTX GPUs (GDDR6 rather than GDDR6X), this also makes them far more user-friendly. For example, the RX 7900 XTX - AMD's flagship - is powered by two regular 8-pin connectors that can be found on any PSU. Whereas Nvidia opted for the 12VHPWR connector on its 4090 - a new connector type that has reportedly been melting in people's PCs, which Nvidia is investigating.
AMD has been working on upgrading its FSR technology too, which competes with Nvidia's DLSS, and its latest GPUs also sport DisplayPort 2.1 - something even the flagship Nvidia RTX 4090 doesn't have. This allows games to run at 8K and 165hz. And AMD claims that the the 7900 XTX can indeed hit around 93 FPS in 8K playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla with FSR enabled.
When you add in the new features that allow AMD GPUs and CPUs to transcode more efficiently (dubbed SmartAccess and particularly beneficial to streamers, content creators, and productivity-hounds), then it's clear to see AMD is providing a very compelling package for the average user, who isn't willing to take out a loan to pay for Nvidia's latest cutting-edge tech - especially when it might melt the connectors inside your build.