I gave my thoughts on Nvidia’s announcement, so now it’s time for AMD’s. A few weeks ago AMD announced their two highest end GPUs: the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. After the fairly controversial launch of the RTX 4000 series, people in general were divided into two thought camps:
- The pessimistic view: AMD will price gouge similarly to Nvidia
- The hopium view: AMD will be aggressive and have competitive performance at lower costs
What we got was neither. The announcement went better than my expectations, but there are some concerns I have regarding the announcement and implications for lower end SKUs. The concerns can be derived from three facts from the announcement.
- The 7900 XTX competes with the 4080, the XT seems to compete more with the cancelled 4080
- The XT is a cut down chip
- The XTX is “only” $1K USD, and the XT is $900 USD
Competing with the 4080
AMD officially said that the 4080 is the competitor of the new cards, not the 4090. Review outlets did some quick performance extrapolation using AMD’s own numbers to see how the 7900 XTX would perform. The consensus seems to be faster than the 4080 in raster performance and on par with the 3080/3090 for RT. Of course, waiting for 3rd party reviews is obviously the only way to really judge the real performance.
So AMD’s flagship competes with Nvidia’s mid-high range (I don’t really consider AD 103 to be a high end chip). That by itself doesn’t really mean any problems, but the next two points lead to some.
$900 for the 7900 XT
Now here is where the discussion becomes more interesting. I don’t have a big problem with the 7900 XTX except for its price. It’s supposed to compete with the $1200 4080 but is $200 cheaper, predicted to be faster in raster, and decently behind in RT.
The story is different for the 7900 XT. To get some context, the previous flagship 6900/6950 XT used the full flagship Navi 21 die. The next SKU down was the 6800 XT, which used a slightly cut down Navi 21. This time, the 7900 XTX has the full die and XT is slightly cut down. So by die comparison alone, the 6900 XT became the 7900 XTX. Does this mean that the 6800 XT became the 7900 XT with a $250 price hike instead of a 7800 XT? Did AMD create a new XTX tier and move everything up one level? In other words, did AMD shift their product stack like this image?
The image above is simplified. It omits some SKUs like the 6800 and 6700 to make the lineup cleaner for just comparing XT SKUs. However, the 6800 uses Navi 21 part and the 6700 uses Navi 22 anyways, so just add them into the red and blue boxes. I’m skeptical of the 7700 XT using Navi 33 because that die is significantly cut down from Navi 32, so the performance cap of both dies would be fairly different.
Some more support comes from the TechPowerUp GPU Database for the 7800 XT. Going with the data, the 7800 XT is expected to use the Navi 32 die, whereas Navi 22 was used by the lower tier 6700 XT. If the 7800 XT really does use Navi 32 instead of 31, its performance gains over the 6800 XT doesn’t seem to be substantial. And because it shares the same X800 name, the price will likely be the same, if not higher.
The 7900 XTX is conservatively about 50% faster than the 6950 XT, and the cut down 7900 XT is about 20-30% faster than the 6950 XT. That’s good gain in the high end, but where does this put the 7800 and lower SKUs? The 6800 XT and 6900 XT were basically 10% apart from each other and the 6950 XT was an overclocked 6900 XT. If the 7800 XT is using Navi 32, it loses about 25% more compute units vs the 7900 XT. The 7800 XT could end up being just slightly faster than the 6800 XT, and that’s not exciting.
The 7900 XT could just be a dummy product to upsell to the XTX and the rest of the product stack has better value, but seeing the potential for all products below the flagship have poor value is concerning. Especially true in today’s market where you can easily buy a 6600 XT or equivalent for good value.
Of course, all of this assumes that the 7800 XT uses Navi 32; it could be revealed to be nonsense in a few months. Who knows, maybe the 7800 XT does use Navi 31 in the end. The 6800 used a substantially cut down Navi 21; the 7800 XT could be sold like that. There are easy counterarguments too: the XTX retains the $1000 price tag of the previous flagship, the 7900 XT is less of a cut chip than the 4080 is to the 4090, and so on. I would like to see how my thoughts age in a few months when lower end SKUs are announced.
The summary of my tin foil hat argument can be summarized to this:
- The 7900 XT could be a 6800 XT successor in disguise with a $250 price increase
- Point 1 means that all non-flagship products were shifted up one tier
- The 6800 XT became the 7900 XT
- The 6700 XT becomes the 7800 XT
“Only” $1000 for the flagship
Perhaps not a surprising argument to make against a GPU launch: the pricing.
Some people were cheering after the RDNA 3 announcement that AMD’s flagship is “only” $1000 USD. In one way, sure. The value is certainly better than last generation products. But $1000 is still objectively a lot of money, and there’s no guarantee that the “low” price of that 7900 XTX will trickle to the cheaper SKUs. The 6600 XT’s MSRP was nearly $400 during the mining days, which plummeted to about half only after the Ethereum crash and the approaching new generation.
The mining frenzy have undoubtedly proven that people are capable of paying significantly more than MSRP for GPUs. That’s why Nvidia is still trying to sell remaining RTX 3000 cards above or at MSRP, 2 years after their release. The higher prices have also normalized enough that people are calling the 4090 a “good value”. Expensive GPUs have been around for ages, but prices for everything else are also significantly higher today than they were a few months or years ago.
Then there’s also the price/performance ratio becoming favourable to the high end. Typically for any product or market, the budget or mid range products provide greatest value. You tend to get less in return the more you spend, this should intuitively make sense. The RTX 3090 was a great example of this with its $1500 initial MSRP. It had about 10-15% more performance over the 3080 for more than double the price.
Yet here we are in a market where the new 4090 is said to have good value at $1600. Sure, this is caused by Nvidia trying to manipulate the value perception, but the point still stands. The GPU market is basically the only market I’ve ever seen where the product value improves at the high end. You’ll get more per money spent by buying the $1600 product over the $1200 one, and there is nothing new under $900. AMD seem to be following this tactic with the 7900 XT.
Unclear fate of the mid range products
I don’t really know why I wrote this rant. I’m not the target audience for high end GPUs, my price ceiling is around the 6700 XT or the 6800 XT if lucky. These are just my thoughts on what the high end parts look like.
People are cheering for a $1000 flagship and the high end products seem to have the best value. The only hopes for the market are the overall economic conditions and (hopefully eternal) end of GPU mining. If things don’t look great for lower end cards, I’ll just go get a used one from someone else.