Last year AMD introduced a new generation of graphics cards, the RX 7900 series, but the top-of-the-line RX 7900 XTX doesn't match Nvidia's RTX 4090 in terms of specs or performance.

In an interview, AMD executives said the company was technically capable of developing a graphics card to match the Nvidia RTX 4090, but decided against doing so due to power consumption and final pricing concerns.

Also last year, Nvidia released its RTX 40 series graphics card, whichAs the flagship RTX 4090 naturally received a lot of attention. Officially, the RTX 4090 is the fastest gaming GPU in the world.

In terms of performance, Nvidia says that in a full ray-tracking game,Compared to the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti using DLSS 2, the RTX 4090 with DLSS 3 provides up to four times the performance improvement. In modern games, the RTX 4090 improves performance by up to 2x while maintaining the same 450W power consumption.

The RTX 4090 is powered by an AD102-300 GPU and uses 16,384 CUDA cores, 52% more than the RTX 3090 Ti, but the performance boost is even greater. Up to 2520MHz GPU frequency, 24GB 21 Gbps GDDR6X video memory, up to 1TB/s bandwidth, 450W default TGP, maximum configurable TGP 660W.

With the help of Taiwan Semiconductor's 4N technology, the acceleration frequency exceeds 2.5GHz, which is significantly higher than the previous generation of Samsung's 8nm technology.

AMD's RDNA 3 architecture RX 7000 series graphics card still uses Taiwan Semiconductor 5nm chips, has a main graphics computing module and six memory cache modules. Not only that, AMD has made many underlying changes to the architecture of RDNA 3, including cramping in more computing units and more shaders.

According to the official information, this generation of AMD has taken power consumption to the extreme, and the performance per watt has increased by 50% compared to the previous generation. This strategy is different from Nvidia's power-for-performance strategy. Nvidia's huge power consumption has made many players feel ashamed, while AMD's power consumption improvement is more in line with players' expectations.

Instead of following Nvidia's lead, AMD continues to use the 8-PIN interface. The RX 7900XTX has a TDP of 355W and the RX 7900XT has a TDP of 300W, slightly increasing the 7900XTX compared to the 335W of the previous RX 6950 XT, but the 7900XT achieves a decrease in power consumption.

What's more, this performance is even more evident when compared to the RTX 4090, which has a 450W TDP and can consume more than 600W in some extreme overclocking cases. Even the RTX 4080 has a 320W TDP.

So when asked why not develop a benchmarking RTX 4090 graphics card,AMD senior vice president and product group manager replied: "It is technically possible to develop Gpus with competing specifications from [NVIDIA].

However, a 600W graphics card with a reference price of $1,600 (about 11,000 yuan) developed in this way was not acceptable to the average PC gaming fan, and it was a deliberate decision not to adopt such a strategy."

From the player's point of view, AMD's argument is not unreasonable, after all, the RTX 4090 player users will buy only a small number of users, more users still prefer dessert grade graphics. At the same time AMD previously announced in the release of the RX 7900 XTX performance is far more than RTX 4080, but due to AMD has been driving problems, resulting in RX 7900 XTX in the early stage can not play the full strength.

AMD graphics cards have always been a "war in the future" tradition, with the continuous improvement of the RX 7900 XTX driver, coupled with the current two RX 7900 series graphics card prices have dropped significantly, the late RX 7900 series graphics card will have greater competitiveness and cost performance.

In addition, AMD has lagged behind Nvidia in terms of expertise. The RTX 4090 is not exclusively for gaming users, but also for professional users with deep learning and neural network needs.

So it's a little hard for AMD to compete with Nvidia on this front, and it's not as much in its own interest as it is in its own interest to take care of its users. AMD's current strategy doesn't look too problematic, but driver optimization is imminent.