If the RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XT and XTX have the same amount of GDDR6, why does the 4090 outperform the 7900?

Question

I’ve been looking at upgrading my PC in a few months, not to anything this powerful (but a man can dream) and in looking at GPU comparisons I see that the 4090 tends to be streets ahead of the RX 7900’s in terms of performance. Why is that if they have the same amount of memory?

In: 2

Answer 1

Performance does not scale smoothly with memory ammount. It is usually either “it works” or “it doesn’t work” with not much in between.

Memory is used to store data. Either you have enough memory and it works fine. Or you do not have enough memory and you have really bad time.

If the card doesn’t have enough memory the game may simply crash or it may have ungodly stuttering because it has to load and unload data from RAM or hard drive.