AMD recently announced its first RDNA 3 graphics cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT (opens in new tab). The two cards boast impressive specs and deliver impressive gains in gaming, ray tracing, and compute performance. However, AMD has indicated that it does not view Nvidia's recent RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) as the main competitor to the two new high-end cards.

AMD's RDNA 3 launch livestream is notably lacking in comparisons to Nvidia's RTX 4090, suggesting that this is not the kind of comparison the Red Team cares about.

This was further suggested by comments made by Radeon head Scott Herkelman during the post-show Q&A when asked about the lack of benchmarks against the RTX 4090.

"My point is we're competing at under $1,000. I think those chips were in a segment all their own." I don't know how much their 4080/4070 actually is, but I think it's somewhere in that range class-wise.

The RX 7900 XTX will be priced at $999 at launch, the same as the RX 6900 XT (open in new tab), with the RX 7900 XT starting at $899. I think we will see some card partners break the $1,000 barrier with one or perhaps both of these cards, but AMD is essentially saying that it is the RTX 4080.4070 that these cards will be competing against. [Since the RTX 4080 16GB (open in new tab) is still over a week away, we can't really compare it to AMD's RDNA 3 chip. The card also starts at $1,199, which is considerably more expensive than AMD's top card; for a less expensive card built on Nvidia's Ada Lovelace GPU, we were initially expecting the $899 RTX 4080 12GB, which has since been discontinued (opens in new tab).

This means that today's comparison is with one of the Nvidia GPUs, the RTX 4090. However, since AMD does not want to make that comparison due to its $1,599 price tag, we are actually still looking at performance between AMD and Nvidia in this generation alone, so far.

The RX 7900 XTX has 61 TFLOPs while the RTX 4090 has 82.58 TFLOPs. This translates to a 31% increase in raw computing performance while the RTX 4090's price has increased by 60%.