AMD has providedbenchmarksof its flagship RX 7900 XTX going head to head against theNvidia RTX 4090andRTX 4080 Superwith DeepSeek’s AI model. According toDavid McAfee on X, the RDNA3-based GPU outperformed the RTX 4090 by up to 13% and the RTX 4080 Super by up to 34%.
AMD tested the three GPUs with multiple LLMs and various parameters using DeepSeek R1. TheRX 7900 XTXsaw its biggest victory against the RTX 4090 using DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B, where it outperformed the Ada Lovelace GPU by 13%. AMD also tested three other LLM configurations against the RTX 4090. The RX 7900 XTX outperformed the RX 4090 in two of the three configurations — it was 11% faster using Distill Llama 8B and 2% faster using Distill Qwen 14B. The RX 4090 was 4% faster than the RX 7900 XTX in one configuration, using Distill Qwen 32B.
DeepSeek performing very well on @AMDRadeon 7900 XTX. Learn how to run on Radeon GPUs and Ryzen AI APUs here: https://t.co/FVLDLJ18Ov pic.twitter.com/5OKEkyJjh3January 29, 2025
AMD tested three configurations against the RTX 4080 Super. The RX 7900 XTX outperformed the RTX 4080 Super by 34% using DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B. This lead dropped to 27% using Distill Llama 8B, and 22% using Distill Qwen 14B.
This should all be taken with a pinch of salt, of course, as we can’t be sure how the Nvidia GPUs were configured for the tests (which, again, were run by AMD). Not all AI workloads take advantage of a GPU’s full computational throughput. We saw this in ourStable Diffusion tests, where Stable Diffusion did not use FP8 calculations or TensorRT code for processing.
It’s not common for the RX 7900 XTX to be used as a dedicated AI processor, but the architecture is more than capable of processing AI workloads. TheRDNA 3architecture the RX 7900 XTX is based on is capable of matrix operations, supporting BF16 and INT8. AMD officially added the “AI Accelerator” terminology to RDNA 3 to demonstrate its AI-processing prowess. The RX 7900 XTX features 192 AI accelerators.
AMD recently published atutorialon how its customers can get DeepSeek R1 to run on compatible AMD consumer-based hardware, including the RX 7900 XTX. DeepSeek R1 is a new AI model that offers performance comparable to Western leading-edge AI models, but at a fraction of the computing cost. DeepSeek R1 uses an assortment of hardware-based optimizations to make its model run11X fasterthan its competitors, including using Nvidia’s assembly-likePTXprogramming language.
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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
