The RX 7900 XTX is the most ridiculously high-end graphics card AMD has ever made, and though it didn’t compete with Nvidia’s absolute best in its generation, it’s still a powerhouse GPU. But it now resides in the shadow of its younger sibling, the RX 9070 XT. Although not designed to replace the last-gen king, this new AMD powerhouse is very capable and far more affordable.
But can the 7900 XTX hold its own even with all of the new cards’ advancements? Let’s take a look.
The RX 7900 XTX launched in December 2022 with a price tag of $1,000. That made it the most expensive graphics card AMD had ever released. Its price came down over the ensuing years to around $800 at its lowest. However, after the recent GPU price spikes, it’s now back at around the $1,000 mark.
The RX 9070 XT launched in March 2025 with a suggested retail price of $600. However, due to extreme popularity and GPU shortages across the board, that price has now risen to at least $700, with some listings getting close to $1,000. It goes for even more on second-hand auction sites.
This should normalise in the coming months and the price should come down, but the 7900 XTX is unlikely to see any major price drops before its stock is exhausted.
It’s clear from the spec sheet that the 7900 XTX is designed to be the more high-end graphics card. It has 50% more compute units and ray accelerators, 50% more memory, a wider memory busy, and many more shader cores. That comes at a much higher power draw, though, and despite all its strengths, the 7900 XTX’s boost clock is far lower than the newer 9070 XT.
It’s also notable that the newer card has a similar number of transistors, but in a much smaller die size, showing the advances AMD made with its new RDNA 4 architecture, and new process, even if it’s not a smaller one.
Even though the 9070 XT is the newer card, the additional memory of the 7900 XTX is going to give it some extra future proofing for games and applications down the line, particularly running local AI.
We haven’t had a chance to pit these graphics cards head to head yet, but others have, so we can look to their results to see how capable the new 9070 XT is and how well it takes on the last-generation king.
TechPowerup shows the two cards trading blows in different games. The 9070 XT holds a surprisingly strong lead over the 7900 XTX in Cyberpunk 2077, for example, but falls far behind in The Last of Us Part One. The average across all tested games had the 7900 XTX as being a few percent faster than the 9070 XT overall — though the newer RDNA4 card dominates in ray traced games.
DigitalFoundry’s results were similar, showing the the 7900 XTX holding a slight lead in most games, though there are some where the 9070 XT pulls ahead. When raytracing is brought into the picture, too, the 9070 XT is by far the faster option. It might have fewer RT cores, but AMD has made big leaps this generation on ray tracing performance, making the newer card the more capable option.
It’s also important to remember that the frame generation abilities it has with FSR4 can have a dramatic effect in supporting games. While the list of them is small, it’s growing all the time and that will continue to give the 9070 XT a big advantage in the years to come. On the flip side, the 7900 XTX’s additional memory may let it continue to use new visual and AI features that require additional VRAM, where the 16GB on the 9070 XT falls short (though that’s not likely to happen for several years).
We mustn’t forget overclocking, either. As der8auer showed in his overclocking and undervolting efforts with the RX 9070 XT, it’s possible to make the card not only faster than the 7900 XTX, but faster even than the RTX 5080 — the second fastest GPU ever made. If you’re able and willing to play with the settings of your 9070 XT, you can make it far more capable than the 7900 XTX.
I love the 7900 XTX. I have one in my PC paired up with a 7950 X3D and it’s more than enough to play Kerbal Space Program and Tabletop Simulator. But if I were buying new today, I wouldn’t hesitate. The 9070 XT is by far the better card. Its native performance might not quite match that of the 7900 XTX — it’s still the fastest GPU AMD has ever made. But it’s close. And in many places it’s far better than that.
The 9070 XT dominates in ray tracing, and in any game with frame generation support. It can be overclocked to be faster still, and it uses less power. Its AI accelerators are more capable and will be able to support new AI features in the years to come, and although it doesn’t have as much VRAM, 16GB is more than enough for the next few years.
The 7900 XTX is still the king, but its princeling is on the rise and will sit on the throne in the years to come.
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