XFX MERC 310 Radeon RX 7900 XT Review: Bigger, Badder RDNA 3

We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on a Gigabyte X570 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM clocked at 3,200MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use, and enabled Resizable BAR support. The memory clock was dialed-in to its optimal performance settings using its XMP profile and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 11 Professional installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Our Test System Configuration:

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Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 9 5800X3D (3.4GHz - 4.5GHz, 8-Core) Gigabyte Aorus X570 Pro Wi-Fi 16GB G.SKILL DDR4-3200 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Integrated Audio / Network NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX XFX MERC 310 RX 7900 XT Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon 22.9.1 / 22.40.00.57 NVIDIA Drivers v526.74

Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.3.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v2.6 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition CryTek Neon Noir Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Assassin's Creed Valhalla FarCry 6 Forza Horizon 5 F1 2022 / F1 2021 A Plague Tale: Requiem Guardians Of The Galaxy Fortnite

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LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks

IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks

IndigoBench paints a similar picture and once again the XFX MERC 310 RX 7900 XT's score is nearly identical to the reference card's score and within the margin of variance for this benchmark. 

Blender v3.3.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmarking tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...

Blender leverages NVIDIA's OptiX framework to accelerate rendering on the GeForce RTX GPUs' RT cores and that advantage allows the GeForce cards to dominate here. In this benchmark, once again the XFX custom card squeaks out a slight victory over the reference Radeon RX 7900 XT, in two of the tests. 

Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results

The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.


Once again the new Radeon RX 7900 XT cards slot in virtually on top of each other, and are able to outpace the Radeon RX 6900 XT by a comfortable margin, at least in the 8K 12:1 compression test. Regardless, none the Radeons tested here can match the GeForce cards at the higher 12: 1 compression level. It seems as though AMD could improve things in general for GPU compute performance with a few key drive optimization.

However, as you'll see next, gaming performance has been well-optimized for the most part...