Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today debuted two new graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT, that will create more competition for Nvidia Corp. in the consumer chip market.

AMD detailed the chips at Gamescom, a video game industry event taking place this week in Germany.

Enterprise spending on standalone graphics processing units has eclipsed consumer demand in recent years. However, desktop GPUs continue to represent a sizable market. Nvidia disclosed this week that its gaming business, which mainly makes consumer graphics cards, generated $2.49 billion in revenue last quarter. 

AMD’s new RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT chips are positioned in the middle of the GPU price scale. They will go on sale for $499 and $449, respectively, significantly below the $900 that AMD’s top-end consumer GPU fetches. The company says that the two chips can provide 20% higher performance per dollar than comparable Nvidia silicon.

In an AMD graphics card, the transistors are organized into processing modules called compute units. The RX 7800 XT chip, the more expensive of the two GPUs the company announced today, features 60 compute units. The lower-end RX 7700 XT has 54.

The chips’ specifications diverge in a number of other areas as well. The RX 7900 XT has 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, a specialized type of RAM used by GPUs to store the data they process, while the RX 7700 XT includes 12 gigabytes. The former card also has a larger Infinity Cache, a pool of high-speed memory that transistors use to share data with one another during processing.

Both cards are based on RDNA 3, AMD’s latest GPU architecture. A chip built using RDNA 3 is not a single piece of silicon, but rather comprises multiple semiconductor modules that are manufactured separately. This approach simplifies production in certain respects and can reduce the associated costs.

RDNA 3 also introduces other innovations. According to AMD, it includes upgraded machine learning accelerators that are more than twice as fast as its previous-generation technology. Furthermore, RDNA 3 includes circuits optimized for ray tracing, a rendering method that video games use to display lighting effects.

In the software department, AMD’s two new chips introduce a feature called FSR 3. It’s a machine learning tool that can automatically improve the visual fidelity of video games. 

An animation consists of multiple static images, or frames, that are displayed one after another in quick succession. AMD says that FSR 3 can insert additional frames into video game animations to improve their quality. The software also promises to reduce aliasing, a rendering error that often affects video games.

AMD will make the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT available for purchase on Sept. 6. They will also be sold by a number of AMD hardware partners, which offer products that combine the chipmaker’s silicon with external components such as fans.

Image: AMD