• AMD has adapted its chiplet design seen in Zen processors for its RDNA 3 GPUs.
• The chiplets combine 5nm and 6nm process nodes leading to a claimed 54 percent increase in performance compared to RDNA 2.
• The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT become available on 13th December.

Following the success of its chiplet based Zen processors, AMD has now announced its first graphics cards featuring a chiplet design.

Those cards are the AMD RDNA 3 based Radeon RX 7900 series comprised of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT.

According to Team Red, RDNA 3 combines 5nm and 6nm process nodes with each node primed for a specific purpose. According to AMD, this combination yields a 54 percent increase in performance per watt compared to AMD RDNA 2 architecture.

“The world’s first gaming GPU with a chiplet design delivers up to 15 percent higher frequencies at up to 54 percent better power efficiency. It includes the new 5nm 306mm Graphics Compute Die (GCD) with up to 96 compute units that provide the core GPU functionality. It also includes six of the new 6nm Memory Cache Die (MCD) at 37.5mm, each with up to 16MB of second-generation AMD Infinity Cache technology,” AMD explained in a press release.

With NVIDIA having just released the power hungry GeForce RTX 4090 which has seen power connectors melting, AMD’s talk of power efficiency is comforting. Make no mistake with a TDP of 355W at the top end, these GPUs are still rather hungry just not has hungry as NVIDIAs on paper.

“These new graphics cards are designed by gamers for gamers. As we were developing the new cards, we not only incorporated feedback from our customers, but we built in the features and capabilities we wanted to use,” said senior vice president and general manager of the Graphics Business Unit at AMD, Scott Herkelman.

AMD further claims that its ray tracing capabilities have improved by as much as 1.8 times compared to the previous generation. For content creators and streamers, AMD says its worked with the folks at OBS to improve video streaming and recording quality on Radeon RX 6000 and now RX 7000 series GPUs.

AMD provided a glimpse at the spec sheets of these GPUs.

Alongside these new GPUs, AMD is also rolling out some software improvements. One of these which caught our eye is the oddly named AMD HYPR-RX. This feature is set to be released in 2023 and is said to be a one-click preset that enables AMD Radeon Anti-Lag, Radeon Boost and Super Resolution. This preset improved frames per second in Dying Light by 85 percent than stock settings.

AMD is eyeing a 13th December launch with board partners including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX, Yeston and Vastarmor.

Team Red appears to be rather excited by this announcement and that has us keen to see how well these GPUs perform and how efficient they are. We also hope to see these cards competing more directly with NVIDIA.

As of time of writing there is no word on lower-spec RX 7000 GPUs but we do expect these in time.

With a slew of new hardware being announced in recent months, it’s looking like December is PC building month.