AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

The RX 7900 XTX's strongest measured trait is 4K retention at 70% of 1440p, which puts it in the 92nd percentile — that metric describes how much of its 1440p frame rate survives the jump to 4K. Its weakest is ray tracing retention at 41% of raster (31st percentile). That is a wide spread for a single card: it is specialised rather than balanced, and whether it suits you depends on which of the two you actually load.

The RX 7900 XTX turns a 355W board power budget into 135.3 fps at 1440p, or 0.38 fps/W against a pool median of 0.32 fps/W. Power, not transistor count, is the binding constraint on a modern GPU — Dennard scaling stopped holding around 2005, and Esmaeilzadeh and colleagues showed at ISCA 2011 that the fraction of a chip that can be powered at full speed shrinks with every node (“dark silicon”). Frames per watt is the shortest honest summary of what an architecture is doing with that budget.

For scale: the closest AMD card from an earlier generation is the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (2020), at 102.1 fps and 300W. The RX 7900 XTX is 33% faster and draws 55W more.

Every rendered pixel has to be fed from memory. At 1440p the RX 7900 XTX has 1,925 B/px of memory bandwidth available per pixel it draws, against a median of 1,808 B/px — comfortably fed, so its shaders are the limit before its memory is. This is the roofline model applied to a game frame: Williams, Waterman and Patterson (Communications of the ACM, 2009) showed that any workload runs into either a compute ceiling or a memory-bandwidth ceiling, and that the ratio of the two is what decides which one you hit.

On memory capacity, the RX 7900 XTX carries 24GB against a median of 16GB across the 9 other cards within 10% of its 1440p frame rate. It carries more memory than its performance class typically ships with, which mostly matters for high-resolution textures, local AI models, and viewport-heavy creative work rather than frame rate.

Method: percentiles are computed over the 77 non-legacy cards with a 1440p figure. Frame rates come from Tom's Hardware GPU hierarchy; specifications from manufacturer datasheets. Theoretical FP32 TFLOPS is deliberately not used as a cross-vendor comparison — RDNA 3 and 4 dual-issue FP32 doubles the paper figure without doubling game performance, and AMD itself declined to count it as extra shaders. The measured Steel Nomad score is used as the compute proxy instead. GPURanker does not run its own benchmarks.