Technologies

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX Review: Faster, but Is It Enough?

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AMD’s latest top-end, next-gen gaming GPUs, which are based on its new RDNA 3 architecture, show marked improvement over the last generation. But the $899 Radeon RX 7900 XT and $999 Radeon RX 7900 XTX may only stand out at the moment because they’re cheaper than Nvidia’s latest top-end models, the GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090. And the XTX only occasionally hits the same level of performance in 4K as the RTX 4080 (or in some cases the RTX 3080 Ti).

That price gap looks a lot more enticing in reality than on paper, however, because Nvidia’s RTX 4080 isn’t selling at its nominal price of $1,200. Cards at that price aren’t in stock, with most of the available models running closer to $1,500 or more.

On the other hand, we won’t know what price AMD’s RX 7900 cards will settle on in reality until they’ve been out a while, making a price-to-performance comparison more difficult. If the gap sticks at $500, then dialing back your settings in order to get «good enough» 4K performance with the XTX in the games where it lags may be worth it. Both cards can handle 4K 1440p maxed out with ray tracing pretty well. But until we see the price and performance of whatever Nvidia turns its «unlaunched» lower-end model of the RTX 4080 into, it’s hard to determine the relative value of the 7900 XT for 4K or even 1440p.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

Like

DisplayPort 2.1 support
USB-C connector

Don’t Like

Big for its performance level
Disappointing raytracing performance
Some driver issues

At least the two AMD-branded models are more similar than they are different. They have different specs and therefore different levels of performance, with concomitant physical differences to support that. Third-party cards will likely have a lot more variations.

The XTX does have an extra temperature sensor for monitoring the air intake temperature of the case, which is intended to facilitate dynamic power allocation based on cooling. AMD hasn’t yet made the data collected by the sensor available for anyone to use, though.

Both cards are relatively big and heavy. In fact, the XTX is the first card I’ve tried to install where I’ve worried it might do some damage to the slot before I got it screwed in. It was fine once locked in, though.

Although they can work with eight-pin power connectors and fit into the same slot widths as before, the cards are higher than their predecessors, rising 5.3 inches (135 millimeters) above the motherboard (compared to 4.7 in. or 120 mm for the RX 6950 XT). So depending on your case size, they may be a snug fit. They do retain the USB-C port, which I like since desktops never have enough of them. But if you need a third full-size DisplayPort connector, you’ll have to join team Nvidia.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Like

DisplayPort 2.1 support
USB-C connector

Don’t Like

Big for its performance level and very heavy
Disappointing ray tracing performance
Some driver issues

RDNA 3 and performance

Among other things, RDNA 3 adds support for DisplayPort 2.1, which has the necessarybandwidth to support 165Hz at 8K and 12 bits per color (up from 10 bits) for HDR, and to enable full gamut coverage of Rec.2020, or up to 480Hz in 4K. That’s a link bandwidth of up to 54Gbps, up from 20Gbps in DP 1.4a, which Nvidia’s cards still use. I can’t imagine trying to play in 8K with one of these, but more bandwidth for HDR is always welcome.

RDNA 3 architecture improves on RDNA 2 in several ways. It’s the first GPU built from chiplets, the modular building blocks of modern processor design. That allows AMD to use different process sizes on the same die, in this case, a 5nm graphics core and 6nm memory cache die. This can theoretically result in the ability to optimize the performance of the two separately, to squeeze in more power or speed where it does the most good, and ultimately fit a better processor in the same space and power envelope as earlier models.

It also enables AMD to add dedicated AI acceleration and improved raytracing accelerators — unfortunately, not enough to catch up to Nvidia’s RTX and Tensor cores — and to decouple the memory clock speeds from the compute unit speeds to help conserve power draw.

AMD says the GPU gets better DirectX raytracing performance, and it does. But AMD continues to seriously lag Nvidia in this respect. Neither card seems fast enough for 4K with maxed-out ray tracing like the RTX 4080, much less the RTX 4090. The XTX does match the RTX 4080 in 4K on some games without ray tracing, but for the most part, it varies across games and graphics applications.

When you stick one of these cards into a late-generation AMD-based motherboard, SmartAccess Video joins the company’s other «smart» technologies, which include Smart Access Memory. In this case, when you have a system equipped with a Ryzen 7000 CPU and RX 7000 GPU, it can distribute encoding and decoding tasks between the two for better performance. (My current testbed is Intel. I’m building out an additional AMD testbed, but it’s not yet ready for benchmarking duties.)

It’s possible that AMD’s next generation of its upscaling and performance optimization technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution 3, will bump either or both the GPUs over the performance line without losing much detail, but that won’t be available for a while. FSR 2.2 has barely arrived — it’s only available in two games thus far, Forza Horizon 5 and Need for Speed Unbound — and I haven’t been overly impressed with FSR 2.1 when I’ve tried it.

In Cyberpunk 2077, for example, unless I dropped the settings down to Balanced, I got no significant performance improvements. Even then it looked softer than I expect from 4K. Radeon Super Resolution, AMD’s in-driver equivalent that doesn’t require developer support, seemed to randomly fail to kick in, or at least fail to indicate it had, making it hard to judge.

Another still-to-come Adrenalin driver capability is Hyper-RX mode, a one-click optimizer for performance and latency that takes into account all the settings you’d normally have to hunt down and tweak individually. That capability is due in June, and it might make a notable difference, but I only occasionally saw a marked improvement using Rage mode, its current automatic overclocking feature.

I also encountered some type rendering issues in Microsoft Word and Outlook (although it’s probably the same bug for both), with characters disappearing and reappearing as I typed subsequent letters. Your mileage may vary, but it’s unbelievably annoying if you encounter it and use those applications a lot.

It’s hard to slot the AMD Radeon RX 7900 cards into any particular recommendation niche, at least until we’ve got more information on upcoming competitors, not only from Nvidia, but from AMD’s own line. So like a Magic 8 Ball I’m forced to settle on «Cannot predict now.»

Relative performance of recent GPUs

Technologies

Lemon8 and TikTok Could Be Banned. Here’s How the Apps Are Different

TikTok and Lemon8 are owned by the same parent company, but they offer different experiences.

TikTok faces another sale deadline Saturday, and unless a US buyer intervenes — or President Donald Trump extends the deadline again — the app could disappear for US users. If the ban goes into effect, TikTok wouldn’t be the only app to disappear: TikTok’s sister app, Lemon8, could be caught in the crossfire.

Read more: A VPN Alone Probably Won’t Bypass TikTok Bans. Here’s Why

Lemon8 is owned by ByteDance, the same parent company that owns TikTok. It’s one of the top Lifestyle apps in Apple’s App Store, and it has more than 10 million downloads in the Google Play store.

«Lemon8 is a lifestyle community focused app powered by TikTok, where you can discover and share authentic content on a variety of topics such as beauty, fashion, travel, food, and more,» the app’s description reads in both stores.

Here’s what you need to know about Lemon8.

Note: I reached out to ByteDance for this story, and the company did not respond for comment.

What is Lemon8?

Lemon8 is a video- and photo-sharing platform that eschews the vertical-scrolling format of TikTok in favor of a Pinterest board-style format. But what Lemon8 and TikTok do have in common is that both have Following and For You tabs to show you posts from creators you follow and posts the app thinks you will like.

Lemon8’s content is split into six topic tabs, plus a seventh tab called All. The other tabs are Fashion, Beauty, Food, Wellness, Travel and Home. These tabs can be found across the top of your screen, and tapping into these tabs shows you recommended and suggested posts.

Posts can be swipeable photo collections like in Instagram, or TikTok-style videos. Some creators add text to their photos to label clothing or a product. Some will also include the price of the item in the text.

How is Lemon8 different from TikTok and other apps?

Lemon8 is different from other apps in terms of what is posted and how it’s presented.

Lemon8 has a lot of influencer ads and product recommendations. It’s difficult to tell what is and isn’t sponsored content, and this appears to be the norm across the app. TikTok also has sponsored content, but usually these are marked as such in the bottom-left corner.

There aren’t a lot of memes or jokes on Lemon8 compared to other apps, either. You can find memes on Lemon8, but various hashtags associated with «memes,» like «funnymemes» and «catmemes,» have fewer than 1 million views (as opposed to hundreds of millions on Instagram). This could be because Lemon8 is still catching on in the US, but my suspicion is Lemon8 isn’t meant for memes. It’s meant to be more of a guidebook to help you achieve a certain lifestyle or aesthetic.

There’s also a lot of writing in Lemon8. For example, post captions might include instructions for a recipe or a deeper breakdown of an outfit. TikTok captions can have useful information, but those captions are more about connecting posts to hashtags to get more views and don’t necessarily add new information to the TikTok post. Lemon8 uses captions in a similar way to Instagram posts, but Lemon8 captions have one key difference from Instagram: templates.

Lemon8 lets you use templates for your posts to help you quickly format and to give you an idea of what to caption your post. There are caption templates for fashion, shopping finds, beauty, food and travel.

Lemon8 reminds me of a mashup between the magazines Martha Stewart Living, Muscle & Fitness and Travel + Leisure. You can find some useful tips in Lemon8 to help you achieve a desired aesthetic or find some vacation inspiration, but it’s not clear what is and isn’t an ad.

What are people saying about Lemon8?

People’s reaction to Lemon8 is seemingly positive so far. One TikTok creator posted a video calling Lemon8 «Pinterest, but interactive.» Another said Lemon8 is a combination of Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok.

However, this positivity could be artificially inflated. ZDNet reports that many TikTok posts about Lemon8 have described the app with similar language, making some believe ByteDance paid these creators.

And some Lemon8 creators’ claims make this theory sound more viable. One Lemon8 creator told Insider that ByteDance paid them to post on the app. Two other Lemon8 creators showed Insider emails that outlined the app’s payment structure.

Who owns Lemon8?

ByteDance, the Chinese tech company that owns TikTok, also owns Lemon8. According to ZDNet, ByteDance is positioning Lemon8 to be an Instagram rival as more users stop using, or abandon, Meta’s app.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a leaked internal memo from Meta showed that Instagram engagement was declining. ByteDance executives could be hoping to capitalize on this by giving Instagram users an alternative app in the form of Lemon8. And while Lemon8 was released globally in 2020, the app’s recent growth might show ByteDance’s gamble is paying off.

Will Lemon8 be banned alongside TikTok?

Since Lemon8 is owned by ByteDance, which also owns TikTok, it’s possible that the app will be banned alongside TikTok on April 5.

The law requiring the sale of TikTok could be applied generally to other apps that are owned and operated by ByteDance and its subsidiaries. When TikTok shutdown operations in the US in January, Lemon8 was shutdown alongside the app. If TikTok shuts down again, Lemon8 likely will as well.

Should you download Lemon8?

Even with a shutdown looming, Lemon8 is free, so you can download and try the app now before the sale deadline. Just know the app’s posts resemble instructional guides more than memes to share, and many posts feel like advertisements.

What’s Lemon8’s privacy policy?

Most of Lemon8’s privacy policy seems standard for social media apps. It states Lemon8 collects personal and location information to provide you with a better app experience. Some collected information includes your IP address and browsing history. But part of the app’s privacy policy might raise eyebrows.

«The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live,» the policy reads. The company has servers around the world, according to the policy, so your information could be stored in any of them.

This is different from how Lemon8’s sister app TikTok stores some user’s data. The company stores US-based user data in Oracle servers. TikTok CEO Shou Chew said ByteDance employees in China can access this data, but with «robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval» overseen by a US-based security team.

For more on the TikTok ban, here’s what to know about the Supreme Court’s decision, here’s what could happen next and here are other apps users are flocking to.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for April 4, #193

Three of the four categories are especially tough today. Here are hints and the answers, for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 193, for April 4.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

I only solved one of the four categories for today’s Connections: Sports Edition on my own, so if you need help, you’re not alone.

The yellow category was pretty simple, but after that I couldn’t make any connections. It might help if you know a lot about a certain NBA player’s resume. Read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Do better.

Green group hint: March Madness.

Blue group hint: Six-time all-star.

Purple group hint: Think Wimbledon.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Not meeting expectations.

Green group: Teams in the Women’s Final Four.

Blue group: Teams Kawhi Leonard has played for.

Purple group: Ends in a piece of tennis equipment.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is not meeting expectations. The four answers are bust, disappointment, dud and failure.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is teams in the Women’s Final Four. The four answers are Bruins, Gamecocks, Huskies and Longhorns.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is teams Kawhi Leonard has played for. The four answers are Aztecs, Clippers, Raptors and Spurs.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ends in a piece of tennis equipment. The four answers are bracket, eyeball, horseshoes and internet.

Quick tips for Connections: Sports Edition

#1: Don’t grab for the easiest group. For each word, think about other sports categories it might fit in – is this a word that can be used in football, or to describe scoring options?

#2: Second meanings are important. The puzzle loves to use last names and even college names that mean other things, to fool you into thinking they are words, not names.

#3: And the opposite is also true. Words like HURTS might seem like a regular word, but it’s also the last name of at least one pro athlete.

Technologies

Skip Your iPhone’s Lockscreen: Here’s the Hidden Flashlight Trick You Need to Know

A couple of taps can really make a difference on your iPhone.

Not long ago, your iPhone’s lockscreen would only allow two app shortcuts that you couldn’t change: camera controls and a flashlight toggle. However, iOS 18.2 allows you to customize these shortcuts to almost anything you might want. This small but impactful change is one of many ways iOS 18 supercharges customization for iPhone and iPad users. But what if you still want an easy-to-access way to toggle your flashlight without unlocking your phone?

Apple introduced an accessibility feature in iOS 14 that, once enabled, allows you to perform actions by just tapping on the back of your phone. The feature is called Tap Back and it remains a sleeper feature that’s sneakily hidden away in your settings menu. Enabling Tap Back essentially allows you to create a button on the back of your iPhone to perform an action without needing to take up any space.

Once you have Tap Back enabled, it doesn’t take long to see how much of a game-changer it can be with its added convenience. Below, we’ll show you how to set it up so a couple of taps on the back of your iPhone will let you launch just about anything you want.

For more, check out what’s in the latest iOS 18.4 release.

How to set up Back Tap on iPhone

Whether you want to link Back Tap with your flashlight, camera or launch a different iPhone app, the path through your iPhone settings begins the same way.

On your compatible iPhone (iPhone 8 or later), launch the Settings application and go to Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap. Now you have the option to launch your action (in this case, your flashlight) with either two or three taps. Although two taps is obviously faster, I would suggest three taps because if you fidget with your phone, it’s easy to accidentally trigger the accessibility feature.

Once you choose a tap option, select the Flashlight option — or a different action if you prefer. You’ll see over 30 options to choose from, including system options like Siri or taking a screenshot, to accessibility-specific functions like opening a magnifier or turning on real-time live captions. You can also set up Back Tap to open the Control Center, go back home, mute your audio, turn the volume up and down and run any shortcuts you’ve downloaded or created.

You’ll know you’ve successfully selected your choice when a blue checkmark appears to the right of the action. You could actually set up two shortcuts this way — one that’s triggered by two taps and one that’s triggered by three taps to the iPhone’s back cover.

Once you exit the Settings application, you can try out the newly enabled Back Tap feature by tapping the back of your iPhone — in my case, to turn on the flashlight. To turn off the flashlight, you can tap on the back of your iPhone as well, but you can also just turn it off from your lock screen if that’s easier.

For more great iPhone tips, here’s how to keep your iPhone screen from dimming all the time and canceling all those subscriptions you don’t want or need.