AMD corrects some Radeon RX 7900 XTX / XT consumption issues

Radeon RX 7900 series beat video decoding; Moderated by Adrenaline Driver Edition 22.12.2. However, AMD warns that “further energy efficiency improvements are planned for future versions.”

AMD has released Adrenalin Edition driver 22.12.2 exclusively for its RDNA 3 graphics cards. Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT. As the company points out, it achieves “improvement in power consumption during hardware accelerated video playback”. Actually, like Intel Arc A750 and A770 graphics cards, which consumed a lot at idlethe Radeon RX 7900 series beat, but when decoding video.

This discovery fell upon our colleagues at ComputerBase. As you can see from the graph above, with the old driver, 22.12.1, both Radeon RX 7900s eat up a lot more than other graphics cards when playing 4K YouTube video at 60fps. Measurements reveal 71 W for the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 80 W for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Abnormal consumption for the same task, the GeForce RTX 4090 is satisfied with 32 watts, and the Radeon RX 6900 XT with 30 watts.

Radeon RX 7900 XTX/XT: No, AMD does not sell incomplete GPUs

More improvements to come

The new driver fixes this problem according to AMD. The company writes in the notes, however, that “further energy efficiency improvements are planned for future versions.” Indeed, among the identified problems awaiting resolution appears that related to “the high reserve capacity observed on an ad-hoc basis when certain high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitors are used”. In short, it is clear that AMD has not yet corrected all the problems with power consumption.

Other than that, the new driver for Radeon RX 7900 XT / XTX graphics cards also fixes the following bugs:

Observable corruption when using the default HD with multiple monitor setups.
Observable system glitch when switching display modes with 4 monitor settings.
When loading Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the application may crash or the driver may time out after enabling ray tracing settings.

To download the Adrenaline Edition 22.12.2 driver, go to AMD website.

Source: AMD, computer base