Over the past couple of months, the Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card has been actively cheaper, and is now offered at a price below the recommended one. It seems that the time has come for the older RX 7900 XTX. Over the past few days, the adapter has significantly fallen in price both in the US and in Europe.

In the US, the card sells for $1,030 or more, with a suggested retail price of $1,000. That is, we can say that the prices were lowered almost to the recommended ones. What’s more, NewEgg is also temporarily offering a $30 discount coupon, so the Sapphire model can be purchased for exactly $1,000. In Europe, interestingly, the situation is even more curious. There, they ask for a card from 1090 euros, but you need to remember that this is the price including taxes, while in the USA for most states you need to add another tax to the price indicated above.

In any case, the RX 7900 XTX is becoming more profitable against the backdrop of the RTX 4080, which is not getting cheaper and is still sold at a price of 1250-1300 dollars / euros. At the same time, for example, in the latest Resident Evil 4, the AMD adapter is much faster than the competitor, and even with ray tracing retains a slight advantage.

Last month, AMD published a Processor Programming Reference (PPR) for its Zen 4 processors, codenamed Phoenix, and the description states that these CPUs will feature a combination of large and small cores. Thus, rumors are confirmed that AMD will switch to the principles of architecture, once introduced by Arm, and then adopted by Intel.

However, there will be one major difference from Intel: if the “blue” cores of different architectures are used in their CPUs (high-performance Golden / Raptor Cove and energy-efficient Gracemont), then AMD will have all the cores on the Zen 4 architecture, only conditionally small ones will receive less cache and will work at lower frequencies, but they will consume less energy. One of the Phoenix CPUs was previously lit up on the network – 2 of it are two “large” cores and four “small” ones. But this is just one of the options, and besides, it is clearly not the most powerful.

The premiere of Phoenix processors is expected at CES 2024 or a little later – in the second half of 2024.

The authors of the Computerbase resource published a review of the game Resident Evil 4, where, among other things, they evaluated the performance using modern video cards.

The project itself is not particularly demanding. In Full HD, at maximum graphics quality settings, the GeForce RTX 3060 produces almost 80 fps, and the RTX 4080 delivers almost 200 fps. At 4K, the RTX 3080 is enough for 60 fps, but an interesting feature of Resident Evil 4 already appears here: the RX 7900 XTX is more than 20% ahead of the RTX 4080, despite the fact that the RX 6800 XT performs at the level of the RTX 3080. That is, a new game Capcom works better on the latest AMD adapters.

Another feature of the game is that it has very “cheap” ray tracing. In Full HD in this mode, the same RTX 3060 produces more than 60 fps. And even in this mode, the RX 7900 XTX is ahead of the RTX 4080, albeit very slightly.