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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

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Tariffs Explained: Latest on Trump’s Shifting Import Tax Plan, and What It Means

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Apple, I’m (Sky) Blue About Your iPhone 17 Air Color

Commentary: The rumored new hue of the iPhone 17 Air is more sky blah than sky blue.

I can’t help but feel blue about the latest rumor that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 17 Air will take flight in a subtle, light-hued color called sky blue.

Sky blue isn’t a new color for Apple. It’s the featured shade of the current M4 MacBook Air, a shimmer of cerulean so subtle as to almost be missed. It’s silver left too close to an aquarium; silver that secretly likes to think it’s blue but doesn’t want everyone else to notice.

Do Apple employees get to go outside and see a real blue sky? It’s actually vivid, you can check for yourself. Perhaps the muted sky blue color reflects a Bay Area late winter/early spring frequent layer of clouds like we typically see here in Seattle.

«Who cares?» you might find yourself saying. «Everyone gets a case anyway.» I hear you and everyone else who’s told me that. But design-focused Apple is as obsessive about colors as they are about making their devices thinner. And I wonder if their heads are in the clouds about which hues adorn their pro products.

Making the case for a caseless color iPhone

I’m more invested in this conversation than most — I’m one of those freaks who doesn’t wrap my phone in a case. I find cases bulky and superfluous, and I like to be able to see Apple’s design work. Also, true story, I’ve broken my iPhone screen only twice: First when it was in a «bumper» that Apple sent free in response to the iPhone 4 you’re-holding-it-wrong Antennagate fiasco, and second when trying to take long exposure starry night photos using what I didn’t realize was a broken tripod mount. My one-week-old iPhone 13 Pro slipped sideways and landed screen-first on a pointy rock. A case wouldn’t have saved it.

My current model is an iPhone 16 Pro in black titanium — which I know seems like avoiding color entirely — but previously I’ve gone for colors like blue titanium and deep purple. I wanted to like deep purple the most but it came across as, in the words of Patrick Holland in his iPhone 14 Pro review, «a drab shade of gray or like Grimace purple,» depending on the light.

Pros can be bold, too

Maybe the issue is too many soft blues. Since the iPhone Pro age began with the iPhone 11 Pro, we’ve seen variations like blue titanium (iPhone 15 Pro), sierra blue (iPhone 13 Pro) and pacific blue (iPhone 12 Pro).

Pacific blue is the boldest of the bunch, if by bold you mean dark enough to discern from silver, but it’s also close enough to that year’s graphite color that seeing blue depends on the surrounding lighting. By comparison, the blue (just «blue») color of the iPhone 12 was unmistakably bright blue.

In fact, the non-Pro lines have embraced vibrant colors. It’s as if Apple is equating «pro» with «sophisticated,» as in «A real pro would never brandish something this garish.» I see this in the camera world all the time: If it’s not all-black, it’s not a «serious» camera.

And yet I know lots of pros who are not sophisticated — proudly so. People choose colors to express themselves, so forcing that idea of professionalism through color feels needlessly restrictive. A bright pink iPhone 16 might make you smile every time you pick it up but then frown because it doesn’t have a telephoto camera.

Color is also important because it can sway a purchase decision. «I would buy a sky blue iPhone yesterday,» my colleague Gael Cooper texted after the first rumor popped online. When each new generation of iPhones arrive, less technically different than the one before, a color you fall in love with can push you into trading in your perfectly-capable model for a new one.

And lest you think Apple should just stick with black and white for its professional phones: Do you mean black, jet black, space black, midnight black, black titanium, graphite or space gray? At least the lighter end of the spectrum has stuck to just white, white titanium and silver over the years.

Apple never got ahead by being beige

I’m sure Apple has reams of studies and customer feedback that support which colors make it to production each year. Like I said, Apple’s designers are obsessive (in a good way). And I must remind myself that a sky blue iPhone 17 Air is a rumored color on a rumored product so all the usual caveats apply.

But we’re talking about Apple here. The scrappy startup that spent more than any other company on business cards at the time because each one included the old six-color Apple logo. The company that not only shaped the first iMac like a tipped-over gumdrop, that not only made the case partially see-through but then made that cover brilliant Bondi blue.

Embrace the iPhone colors, Apple.

If that makes you nervous, don’t worry: Most people will put a case on it anyway.

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Astronomers Say There’s an Increased Possibility of Life on This Distant Planet

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are working to confirm potential evidence of life on a distant exoplanet dubbed K2-18b.

Astronomers are nearing a statistically significant finding that could confirm the potential signs of life detected on the distant exoplanet K2-18b are no accident.

The team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (which has only been in use since the end of 2021) to detect chemical traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), which they say can only be produced by life such as phytoplankton in the sea. 

According to the university, «the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.»

The findings were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and point to the possibility of an ocean on this planet’s surface, which scientists have been hoping to discover for years. In the abstract for the paper, the team says, «The possibility of hycean worlds, with planet-wide oceans and H2-rich atmospheres, significantly expands and accelerates the search for habitable environments elsewhere.»

Not everyone agrees, however, that what the team found proves there’s life on the exoplanet.

Science writer and OpenMind Magazine founder Corey S. Powell posted about the findings on Bluesky, writing, «The potential discovery of alien life is so enticing that it drags even reputable outlets into running naive or outright misleading stories.» He added, «Here we go again with planet K2-18b.Um….there’s strong evidence of non-biological sources of the molecule DMS.»

K2-18b is 124 light-years away and much larger than Earth (more than eight times our mass), but smaller than Neptune. The search for signs of even basic life on a planet like this increases the chances that there are more planets like Earth that may be inhabitable, with temperatures and atmospheres that could sustain human-like lifeforms. The team behind the paper hopes that more study with the James Webb Space Telescope will help confirm their initial findings.

More research to do on finding life on K2-18b

The exoplanet K2-18b is not the only place where scientists are exploring the possibility of life, and this research is still an early step in the process, said Christopher Glein, a geochemist, planetary researcher and lead scientist at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute. Excitement over the significance of the research, he said, should be tempered.

«We need to be careful here,» Glein said. «It appears that there is something in the data that can’t be explained, and DMS/DMDS can provide an explanation. But this detection is stretching the limits of JWST’s capabilities.»

Glein added, «Further work is needed to test whether these molecules are actually present. We also need complementary research assessing the abiotic background on K2-18b and similar planets. That is, the chemistry that can occur in the absence of life in this potentially exotic environment. We might be seeing evidence of some cool chemistry rather than life.»

The TRAPPIST-1 planets, he said, are being researched as potentially habitable, as is LHS 1140b, which he said «is another astrobiologically significant exoplanet, which might be a massive ocean world.»

As for K2-18b, Glein said many more tests need to be performed before there’s consensus on life existing on it.

«Finding evidence of life is like prosecuting a case in the courtroom,» Glein said. «Multiple independent lines of evidence are needed to convince the jury, in this case the worldwide scientific community.» He added, «If this finding holds up, then that’s Step 1.»

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