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The Nvidia RTX 4080 Super and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX are their respective companies' flagship offerings. Both GPUs are designed with high-end 4K gaming in mind and are packed with the latest hardware, like the most recent Optical Flow Accelerators and the Tensor cores for the Nvidia card. The AMD GPU, on the other hand, packs the latest Compute Units and improvements to RT core hardware.
The graphics cards share a ton in common, like their price point: $999. This makes choosing one out of the two high-end graphics cards pretty difficult. In this comparison article, we will go over the differences between the two GPUs and try to answer which is the better option.
Both the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super and AMD RX 7900 XTX are powerful graphics cards
Before delving into the performance details of the two graphics cards, let's go over their on-paper specs. Nvidia and AMD use wildly different architectures for their graphics processors and hence an accurate head-to-head comparison between the two isn't possible. However, let's still have a look at the specs to get an idea of what to expect.
Specs comparison
The RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX are stacked graphics cards. The RTX maxes out the AD103 graphics processor with 10,240 CUDA cores and 80 RT cores. It packs a staggering 16 GB GDDR6X memory buffer.
The RX 7900 XTX is also built along similar lines given it's the AMD flagship. The GPU bundles 9,728 shading units, 96 RT Compute Units, and 96 RT cores. It levels the 4080 Super with its massive 24 GB GDDR6 VRAM, which can come in handy in demanding workloads like rendering and AAA game development. Gamers have little use for this much video memory.
A brief look at the other specs of the graphics cards is as follows:
Both cards draw over 300W, which makes them some of the worst in terms of power efficiency. You will need a hefty power supply in the range of 750W or more.
Also, check out a comparison between the RTX 4080 Super and the RTX 4080.
Performance comparison
The RTX 4080 Super isn't a massive upgrade over its older non-Super sibling. The main target of the card is a $200 price cut, that brings it close to the RX 7900 XTX. Performance-wise, the GPUs are quite close. However, the Nvidia card has its ups in terms of ray tracing and upscaling capabilities.
The AMD GPU beats the 4080 Super with ray tracing turned off in most video games. Below is a list of performance metrics recorded by the two cards in some of the latest titles. These benchmarks have been sourced from the YouTube channel Testing Games.
However, with ray tracing turned on, the AMD graphics card crumbles, giving the RTX 4080 Super over 100% performance lead. Here are a couple of performance marks of the cards in some of the most demanding games with ray tracing:
With more and more titles implementing ray tracing, the Nvidia GPU has come out ahead of its AMD alternative. Given the card costs as much as the RX 7900 XTX and is slightly more power efficient (355W vs. 320W), the 4080 Super is the video card to opt for this generation.
Check out our other GPU comparisons:
Nvidia RTX 4060 vs RTX 3070 || AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT vs RTX 3070 || Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super vs RTX 3070 Ti
