AMD is no longer hopelessly behind when it comes to professional programs.
The two graphics specialists AMD and Nvidia are usually able to give each other a fight to the finish line when it comes to performance in games.
But AMD has long had a weakness in programs aimed at those who need to order something with their PCs.
Historically, AMD has been far overtaken by its arch-rival as soon as programs for video editing, 3D rendering or other computing-intensive tasks had to be lifted.
But with its brand new RDNA 3 architecture in the RX 7000 generation of graphics cards, AMD is changing that power relationship.
This is evident from a series of tests carried out by Computerworld’s sister media PC World, where the capabilities of the new architecture are tested.
Video and streaming benefits
The more normalized power ratio is seen in tasks such as video rendering with both new standards such as AV1 and HEVC or the older H.264.
The rendering quality with AV1 now lands somewhere between Intel’s rudimentary results, while Nvidia still maintains a slight advantage.
When it comes to video streaming, the score from Netflix’s VMAF test shows to be significantly improved compared to older AMD generations, while there is still some way up to Nvidia and the test’s duke from Intel.
When it comes to video rendering, RDNA 3’s encoder is now capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously.
In a test carried out together with a Ryzen 9 7950X processor, it managed to run six tasks at once, while Nvidia’s top card is limited to a maximum of three.
For this to be possible, it requires the right settings. Here it is noted that results with resolutions of 1440p or higher encounter problems and need to be compressed less efficiently before the results become fluid.
Hangs in at the top
When it comes to video editing, AMD’s new RX 7900 XT card makes a good figure again, by overtaking Nvidia’s previous top models in the RTX 3090 series.
The new RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 series from Nvidia, however, AMD’s new star card does not manage to match in a discipline such as Davinci Resolve in the benchmark test from the system specialists from Pugetbench.
AMD’s new top card thus does not wrest the lead from Nvidia, but it places AMD in the slipstream of the expensive top models from Nvidia.
Here it should be noted that the ultimate top model from AMD in the RX 7900 XTX is not included in the test, and that with its extra powers it can potentially close the gap to Nvidia’s graphics card.