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Is the 7900 XT good for streaming?

Does the 7900 XT streaming capabilities live up to the card's relatively high price tag
Last Updated on December 22, 2022
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The 7900 XT delivers strong and reliable results in streaming tasks. This GPU makes use of interesting technology provided thanks to its new architecture to close the gap between AMD and its competitors. However, it still has a long road to walk to be considered meta for certain scenarios, making the 7900 XT streaming capabilities a still unanswered query.

The new flagship AMD Radeon 7900 XT exceeds the performance the outward public was expecting. Team Red has created a GPU that is better in most aspects than any other previous-gen GPU and can compete neck to neck with Nvidia GPUs in tasks other than gaming.

AMD GPUs have not been great for content creators. Thus, the brand finally decided to change the paradigm and improve its game in this realm. The RX 7900 XT now has proven strong and surprising results in several streaming tasks.

For the release of the RDNA 3 architecture, AMD acquired Xilinx, which is, according to Team Read CEO Dr. Lisa Su, “the industry’s high-performance and adaptive computing leader.” One of the changes it wrought is the implementation of the “New dual media engine” that will be supporting the use of the AV1 encoding system.

Is AMD hardware encoding good?

With the addition of the new AV1 encoding system, AMD has closed the big gap that always exists between it and Intel or Nvidia. This new implementation allows AMD to simultaneously encode and decode within different channels. Thanks to this implementation, it is now even more difficult to catch up with the differences between AMD, Intel, and Nvidia low-bitrate AV1 encoding.

The YouTube streaming expert EposVox has made a deep analysis comparing AMD, Intel, and Nvidia’s performance when it comes to streaming. In that video, the host gets to some sound conclusions. The main and most important takeaway is that RDNA 3 architecture has gotten some incredible increase in streaming performance over the last generation (RDNA 2).

According to its benchmark, H264 and HEVC encoding on RDNA 3 architecture has improved a lot over the RDNA 2 generation. But, it still falls behind Intel and Nvidia setups.

In conclusion, AMD has come a long way when it comes to streaming and content creation. The improvements in RDNA 3 architecture over previous generations are impressive. But, if you want to stream the most demanding content at the best bitrates, then you will be better off getting an Nvidia 4000-series if you have the money for it.

Camilo is a contributor for PC Guide. He's been into tech since he was a teen, surfing through the web and local stores trying to find the cheapest way to play the latest Half-Life on his old Windows