US chip maker AMD has announced the next generation of its high-end graphics cards as it seeks to take the fight to rival Nvidia for a share of gamers’ wallets.

The new RX 7900 XTX and XT GPUs, or graphics processing units, will go on sale on 13 December. They boast a new “chiplet” design based on the company’s new RDNA 3 architecture.

The higher end of the new cards, the 7900 XTX, will cost US$999 (R18 000 before import duties and other taxes), and the XT will cost $100 less, or $899.

In comparison to its previous-generation cards, this represents a significant price jump. It seems AMD is following the same trend in pricing as rival Nvidia. However, Nvidia’s RTX 4080 card is $1 199 and pricing goes up to a wallet-destroying $1 599 for the RTX 4090.

So, how do these cards perform?

The flagship RX 7900 XTX has 96 compute units clocked at 2.3GHz and 24GB of GDDR6 memory. The card is aimed at 4K gaming and AMD claims it is up to 1.7 times faster than its existing RX 6950 XT card at 4K.

It draws up to 350W of power, whereas the RTX 4090 can suck down as much as 450W. AMD said it focused heavily on extracting maximum performance per watt from the lates designs.

The RX 7900 XT, meanwhile, has 84 compute units, a clock speed of 3GHz, 20GB of GDDR6 memory and draws maximum power of 300W.

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Significantly, AMD decided to support the DisplayPort 2.1 standard on both of its new cards. This means these GPUs support higher refresh rates both in 4K and 8K resolutions – a stunning 480Hz at 4K and 165Hz at 8K. Nvidia’s new RTX 40-series GPUs support only DisplayPort 1.4.