All About Interwebz: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU proves mixed bag for content creators

Content creators eyeing up the new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX could be in for a disappointment.

Benchmarking the GPU across popular content creation apps, Puget Systems found AMD’s latest offering lagged below the standards set by rival Nvidia.

The results chime with our own tests, where the graphic card remains a great option for gaming PCs, but creative workload performance could best be described as “just ok”.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX: Benchmarking

The team over at Puget put the GPU through its paces, running a range of video editing software, VFX software, and 3D modeling software on Team Red’s most powerful graphics card.

DaVinci Resolve was first up. The free video editing software is well-equipped to take advantage of high-end GPUs, and it’s here where the graphics card shone.

According to Puget the 7900 XTX showed more than a 30% overall performance boost compared to the older Radeon 6900 XT. It even edged out the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 to hit the top spot.

It also achieved high marks in the H.264/HEVC and RAW debayering tests, outperforming the 6900 XT and about on par with the RTX 4090.

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Next, the custom PC builder tried out Adobe Premiere Pro, which doesn’t make much use of GPUs as a whole. Overall, it increased performance by 22% over past AMD GPUs. However, it failed to beat the RTX 4090 or 4080, with Puget noting it was “more in line with the RTX 3080 and 3090 models.”

In Adobe After Effects, the 7900 XTX was found to be a mid-table performer. As in other tests, performance was overall superior to the 6900 XT, but couldn’t keep up with the GeForce 4080, 3090, or 4090.

Nor did the card perform well in Unreal Engine with mixed results when used alongside the top game development tool. The team found “in rasterized workloads, the 7900 XTX performs quite well, in one test nearly matching the slightly more expensive RTX 4080. But in the other rasterized test, the 7900 XTX had the lowest score of all cards tested.”

Finally, the 7900 XTX was used for 3D rendering software Blender. And it makes grim reading, with the GPU “unable to match the rendering power of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX series.” While GPU rendering showed a 70% performance increase compared to AMD’s RX 6900 XT, Nvidia’s RTX 4080 proved to be almost three times faster.

In the final analysis, Puget Systems suggested that while certain content creation workloads would benefit from the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, Nvidia’s line-up remained its top choice for creators.