7900XTX and WoW (New AMD Videocard)

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
1

So tomorrow (December 12th) is when the review embargo for the new AMD 7900XT and 7900XTX will be lifted. The MSRP of the 7900XT is supposed to be $899, and the MSRP of the 7900XTX is supposed to be $999. These prices compare favorably to the new Nvidia 4080 ($1200) and 4090 ($1600).

The question at hand is, HOW DO THESE CARDS PERFORM IN WOW?

I made this thread so that, starting tomorrow, people can post any WoW benchmarks that they find for these cards. It’s become more difficult over the years to find reviewers who include World of Warcraft in their benchmarks. Unfortunately, just because a certain card performs a certain way in FarCry 6 or CyberPunk 2077 doesn’t mean it will perform the same in WoW.

For a while, Nvidia GPUs seemed to perform better than AMD GPUs in WoW, relative to other games. If you took an AMD and Nvidia card that were neck-and-neck in most games and then benchmarked them in WoW, the Nvidia card would have a ~10% advantage. Has that changed?

And now we have additional variables, such as Ray Tracing performance. Nvidia was first to the game with Ray Tracing, and has generally had better Ray Tracing performance compared to AMD cards, even between cards that had similar rasterization performance.

My current Geforce 2080 supports Ray Tracing, but there is a noticeable hit to FPS when I enable it. For my next card, I’d like to be able to leave Ray Tracing enabled and still maintain 144fps (144Hz monitor) at max settings in basically all content. Will the 7900XTX be up to the task?

I’ve actually been trying to buy a 4090 Founders Edition since it was released, but despite my best efforts to give NVidia $1600, there are no cards for me to actually buy. At this point I’d love to stick it to Nvidia and get a 7900XTX instead, but it really depends on how it performs. For me, the tipping point will be how the 7900XTX compares against the 4080. If it can at least beat the 4080, then I might go that route. But if the 7900XTX can’t even beat the 4080, then that means it’s basically just a midrange card, fighting against the future 4070 and/or 4070 Ti. No thanks.

Let’s see some WoW benchmarks!

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I mean nobody knows yet, but if there is one guy on the internet who will test it, it’s gonna be this guy:

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I’m hoping the leaked benchmarks are bogus and it lives up to AMDs hype. And that we can actually get it. I just built my 13600k rig this weekend and am sitting tight with my old RX580 until things shake out. Maybe it will help drive prices down for last gen cards. I would hope 3080s don’t keep selling for $900-$1300+ like they do now with the new stuff being the same price or cheaper.

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All the launch reviews (none of which benchmarked World of Warcraft) seem to show the 7900XTX as being a bit faster than the 4080 in Raster performance, but lagging behind in Ray Tracing performance. Ray Tracing performance is more along the lines of Nvidia’s 3000-series cards.

But it also seems to show huge variance in performance between different games. In some games the 7900XTX is slower than the 4080, in other games it’s almost competitive with the 4090. That means we really won’t know how it performs in World of Warcraft until someone actually tests it… And how WoW’s RT implementation may affect performance is also another huge variable.

5

Performance looks pretty good. With some driver maturity it will get better. I doubt RT performance will get to 4080 levels though. The most concerning thing for me is the coil whine everyone is reporting. I built my system around Nactua fans to be quiet. I really don’t want a card that runs fans at close to max speed all the time. Maybe it’s a reference card thing. The actually card manufacturer’s may have it figured out but if get close to 4080 prices it makes these cards a bit less appealing. Last gen cards may be the way to go and skip this one.

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I have been running WoW with Ray Tracing on since I returned for Dragonflight…I am not even sure I notice it most of the time. But I’m not sure if it’s from improvements in Dragonflight’s Ray Tracing implementation, nvidia drivers, or upgrading from a 10900KF to the 13700KF, but there are many less “hitches” when enabling Ray Tracing than I remember it, and performance is much better than I remember.

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If you really want to buy it, ignore 7900 XT and go for XTX.

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That’s the only reason I’m not jumping on one tomorrow. I build my systems with silence at the #1 priority.

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This is the AMD references cards we’re talking about right? If it has coil whine issues I would think that waiting for board partner models, those from e.g. Asus and Sapphire, should solve that since the designs of the PCBs and the components on them can vary a lot between manufacturers, and there’s a good chance it’ll come with a better cooler to boot.

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I still have not found any benchmarks at all for this card and WoW. So if anyone knows of some, please post them.

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How does your 580 do? I’m looking for a cheaper card to upgrade on the stock one in my iMac using an eGPU

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After WoW went DX12 the situation flipped a bit. The Radeon 6K series has lower CPU overhead and the cache made it faster than the Nvidia equivalent. If you have ray tracing then that’s a different story.

As far as the 7900 XT/XTX series cards released a few days ago. Just ignore it just like the 4080. Horribly priced cards and not great perf.

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Are the radeon 6k series any good? I’m considering getting one and an EGPU

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I use a 6800 for compute. When I used it for games the thing rocked.

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It works fine with WoW but I wouldn’t recommend buying it. It’s old and you can probably get newer better cars for less money.

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using a 6600xt 8GB here and it’s working great. my monitor is only 1080p tho so i think my card fits well with it

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He’s talking about the RX 6000 series not the old non-RX 6000 series. RX 6000 is the most recent gen other than RX 7000 series.
RX 6000 cards are the fastest you can run WoW at max OC other than the RTX 4090.

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You really think that a 6900 XT or 6950 XT is faster than a RTX 4080, or even a RTX 3090 Ti in WoW?

I recently came across some youtube videos that are the closest thing I’ve found so far in terms of being able to compare a 7900 XTX against a 4080 in WoW.

7900 XTX: https://youtu.be/QrW8nGQXNrw?t=553
RTX 4080: https://youtu.be/08P50G58pbs?t=306

From watching the videos, it seems like the RTX 4080 gives better performance than the 7900 XTX. The 7900 XTX spends a disturbing amount of time completely pegged at 100% GPU-usage. The RTX 4080 certainly also shows high GPU-usage in most cases, but it seems like it still has a bit of headroom available. Both videos were using a Ryzen 5800X3D, currently the fastest CPU available for WoW.

The only caveat would be that the videos were done with Ray Tracing enabled. Maybe with Ray Tracing disabled they would be closer in performance. Nonetheless, I feel that if you are spending $1000+ on a video card, you shouldn’t have to compromise by disabling features. And with the 7900 XTX supposedly having Ray Tracing performance comparable to a 3090 Ti (aka pretty darn good), it seems like it should have been able to handle it better.

I’d still love a more direct comparison, but those videos cover a lot of different zones, and the trend seems clear. If anyone has any additional benchmarks or relevant videos, please post them!

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Without including ray tracing the 4080 and 7900 TXT are pretty even. The selling point is that the 7900 is about $500 cheaper.

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I assume that you were thinking of the 4090, not the 4080? The 4080 is still more expensive, but not that much more.

MSRP:
7900 XTX: $1000
RTX 4080: $1200
RTX 4090: $1600