The 7900 XTX is the top of AMD's stack. That doesn't mean that it has to be as fast as the 4090, especially not with a $600 difference in MSRP between the two.
How does it not? Is spending $1600 the same as spending $1000 to you?
Edit: Let's play a game - let's suppose Matrox is coming back from their ashes, and are releasing a gaming GPU with the name Wonder Vision 900 for an MSRP of $500. Would you assume that it's a 4090 competitor just because it has a "9" in its name? Or would you assume that it's a 3060-3070 competitor because it's sold for $500?
The true price is much much different.
1569 vs 1965. 25% difference for 20% more FPS without ray-tracing and
50% more FPS with ray-tracing.
This offer by AMD is definitely not serious given its history and extremely low market share of only 8% and declining.
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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Grafikkarte (2022) Preisvergleich | Günstig bei idealo kaufen
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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Grafikkarte (2022) Preisvergleich | Günstig bei idealo kaufen
@ARF made my argument for me.
In the end, the market pays and scales according to real performance. I already said it:
this is not about sense. Or logic. Logic is rationale. The market is not built on rationale alone, the better half of the actual market price in real life is
emotion. MSRP is a price based on rationale alone: price vs FPS & featureset; then, emotions and 'local rationale' get added, and we end up with local pricing.
The facts: AMD has its top end offering in the shape of a 7900XTX, and Nvidia has its top end in the shape of a 4090. When you're in the market for a top end card, you will compare the two, despite the price difference. When you have 1000 bucks to spend for a 7900XTX, you
absolutely will form an image of its performance
compared to the 4090 and the 4080. You will consider moving up to get more, and if you're not, you're going to convince yourself you don't need to.
Other facts: If you were gunning for a 4080, you will be comparing it to probably
both the 7900XTX and the 7900XT. In both cases you're looking at a price/perf comparison that is just about the same. Its not strange to compare this to the 4090 while you're at it, which arguably has a better perf/$ simply because its absolute performance is higher which is a lifetime increase on top of its perf alone. And again, that is the exact same trick for both Nvidia and AMD's product placement isn't it? The 7900XT is also not quite a good perf/$ purchase despite its lower position in the stack. This supposed counter intuitive product placement serves the idea that they want to upsell their products. They'd rather have fat lines for the 4090 and the XTX, so they price them along the same perf/$ metric. This is a sound strategy for Nvidia, already commanding the vast majority of market share. It is however NOT a great strategy for AMD, unless they've pretty much given up on gaining share, which I think is the case.
Price in isolation is never a good guide. The stack order, the product placement and the comparative perf/$ of each part is not sensitive to the actual sale price. Even a 2000 dollar card can be on a great perf/$ even if the absolute price is unbearable. AMDs problem in a nutshell: they
chose not to dive under the perf/$ metric of Nvidia's offerings by any reasonable measure, so they
chose to get their card compared to whatever is Nvidia's greatest. The gap is too small to
not consider the 4090 when you're already spending upwards of 1K - this is way beyond the territory of mid range price conscious buyer markets.
All of this is not new. AMD was trailing top end performance before, and Nvidia made bank on it before. They'll do it again. Back then, AMD was ready to compete on price by killing its margins. Lisa Su is not of that category, clearly, we see it on Zen, and we see it on RDNA. That's AMD's choice. And where are they now? 8% share... We can applaud her for bringing AMD back... I'm not quite so convinced since RDNA3.
Edit: Let's play a game - let's suppose Matrox is coming back from their ashes, and are releasing a gaming GPU with the name Wonder Vision 900 for an MSRP of $500. Would you assume that it's a 4090 competitor just because it has a "9" in its name? Or would you assume that it's a 3060-3070 competitor because it's sold for $500?
Matrox coming back after a long absence would be treated just like Intel is right now. Cautiously.
AMD however has historically been trying to 'counter' Nvidia at every turn. So it makes sense their x900 is seen as competitive to the x90. Its that simple, honestly. AMD was also not shy of entering the semi pro markets with their gaming line up. They've been following Nvidia every step of the way, in feature set, in product line up, etc and they misfired with the way they priced and placed their 7900 line up.
And... look at Zen! Its the exact same picture. Intel 9? Ryzen 9. AMD is always 'we can do it too'. Never 'we just did this'.
