AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Video Card – Thoughts on performance and stability (Fast Review)

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX video cards have been out long enough to have a solid opinion about their stability and performance. Any issues troubling a series should have been ironed out by now (typically) and anything left over can pretty much be decided as something you are stuck with. So this makes for a perfect moment to reflect on this one and discuss our thoughts thus far.

Specifically, we will be focusing on the XFX Speedster MERC310 AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Black edition, as we’ve had the most experience with it and it strives to be the best in the series. Showing what these cards are truly capable of. Keep in mind that all of these thoughts are based on an “out-of-the-box” experience (no overclocking, undervolting, or any other modifications).

The 7900 XTX has been the company’s flagship in the series and has mostly been compared to the NVIDIA 4080 line. Giving it quite the position to live up to when NVIDIA seems to have been dominating the scene for quite some time now (despite weighing in at a much higher price usually).

AMD has been well-known for trying to underbid the competition price-wise, thus it has strived to be more affordable than NVIDIA. It has been successful in this, even as the prices of NVIDIA cards come crashing down in preparation for the release of the new 50-series generation.

This specific AMD card has been out for almost two years now, so I think we have waited long enough to share our thoughts on it since the company has had more than enough time to iron any issues out. I should also mention that we are approaching these opinions with a neutral bias. Coming into everything with the expectation that AMD is more than capable of developing a solid video card. So here goes our fast review of it!

The Pros

So what do we like about this card? For one, it has 24GB GDDR6, which matches up to the NVIDIA 4090 series (although only in RAM). All other specs are what balanced it out to match best with the 4080 series. This just doesn’t have what it takes to go head-to-head with the 4090. But, it still has a few other tricks up its sleeve, like the fact that it supports DP 2.1 (DisplayPort), allowing it to take on higher refresh rates while displaying 4K. This is something that none of the NVIDIA cards (currently) have to offer and won’t offer until the 50-series launch.

Currently, on one of the systems using this card, we have the Samsung 57″ Odyssey Neo G9 Dual 4K Mini-LED Curved Gaming Monitor attached to the card, and it has been able to drive it up to 4K@240Hz. Again, this is thanks to the benefits of using DP 2.1. However, we typically keep it at 60 or 120Hz for an unfortunate reason. This monitor seems to suffer from a high-pitched buzz, coming from somewhere on the left side of it when pushed to the limit. Dial the refresh back and the buzz goes down (at 60, it completely vanishes). Thankfully, this isn’t an issue with the video card, so it doesn’t count. What counts, is that the card can indeed deliver 240Hz at 4K.

It is one hell of a card coming from AMD. A heavy hitter, for sure. Capable of delivering any modern game with exceptional quality. There is no doubt that AMD put a lot of work into this, establishing some ground to compete with.

There appears to be no trouble in keeping it cool when compared side-by-side with an NVIDIA 4080. It can indeed get pretty hot when playing certain titles with all graphic quality set to “ultra” settings.

The Cons

Nothing is perfect, therefor nothing comes without a con or two (or sometimes plenty). In this case, sadly, there seems to be plenty. Despite having a lot going for it when it comes to competing with NVIDIA, there have been a significant amount of issues we have run into that seem to still linger.

Video games can be a hit or miss with this card. Some of the more modern and complex titles can sometimes suffer many crashes caused by driver troubles. At least, it appears to be driver troubles. It could easily be a hardware issue as well that plays out as a driver crash or conflict, but it’s difficult to prove this. Certain titles from developers who are known for throwing fists with AMD products (like EA Games) can sometimes result in numerous crashes, where you can expect at least one or two crashes during each gaming session. An example of this would be Star Wars Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi Survivor. Both of these games suffer through so many crashes during play on this card.

Another good example is Hogwarts Legacy. All of these are fantastic games, but suffer so many issues with this card despite the various scenarios you put the settings through. Making gaming a little difficult at times, and forcing us to switch to could gaming to get away from some of these conflicts (at the sacrifice of quality/performance due to cloud limitations).

Then there is graphics rendering through applications like Blender or Adobe After Effects. We took a project that had only 600 frames within Blender and attempted to render it as both video and as an image sequence. In both situations, the graphics drivers crash into safe mode every single time. On average, we reached around 8-11% rendered before it would completely crash out into the driver’s safe mode each time. Killing access to the monitor and forcing us to use a remote desktop solution to log into a very tiny resolution of an image so that we can properly restart Windows 11 without having to do a forced shutdown.

As for After Effects, the results were all over the place, but many times led to a crash as well. All of this is despite having a 1200W PSU in these systems, so it isn’t a power concern. It simply appears to be poorly written drivers. These drivers have been reloaded a number of times, with the proper disposal of any drivers/software related to older cards (one system has never had another card in it before this model).

At times, we’ve seen things like Adobe Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve crash on us, although these titles generally rely more on the processor than they do the video card, so these crashes aren’t nearly as common.

Conclusion

As powerful and feature-rich as this card is, it is littered with bugs and potential hardware issues. The issues with both video games and rendering animations and effects continue to pile up to the point where we don’t even bother using titles like Blender on those systems. We also don’t game much on them for the same reason. It would seem AMD has found itself with a lack of ability to stabilize the 7900 XTX.

Thankfully, for regular day to day use, it makes for an amazing card that can feed multiple monitors, or even the top flagship out there (the Samsung 57″) when it comes to specs. It it very powerful and seeks to heavily pressure NVIDIA. Sadly though, it seeks this but doesn’t quite accomplish it due to the many stability issues.

It does require a 1000W or better PSU despite what some stores and users may tell you. Else pushing it with something like 850W on a reputable system will result in troubles. So unless you are running 1080p@60 with a single monitor or two, you will 1000W or greater.