Driver updates will fix abnormally high power use for AMD’s new RX 7900 GPUs
Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX (rear) and 7900 XT (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT GPUs are still fresh, and as with most products based on new architectures, there are some early bugs to work out.
A driver update released earlier this week (version 22.12.2, the second driver release for the RX 7900-series in as many weeks) addresses high power use during video playback when using the cards' built-in media decoding hardware. Other problems have been acknowledged but not fixed yet, including "high idle power [...] when using select high resolution and high refresh rate displays."
German review site Computerbase (via Tom's Hardware) noticed these issues and others when testing the cards; the site also measured significantly higher power consumption than the RX 6900 series and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000 and 4000 series cards when sitting idle at the Windows desktop with a pair of connected 60 Hz 4K monitors.