AMD claims RX 7900 XTX outperforms RTX 4090 in DeepSeek benchmarks

AMD has provided benchmarks of its flagship RX 7900 XTX going head to head against the Nvidia RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Super with DeepSeek’s AI model. According to David McAfee on X, the RDNA3-based GPU outperformed the RTX 4090 by up to 13% and the RTX 4080 Super by up to 34%.

AMD tested the three GPUs with multiple LLMs and various parameters using DeepSeek R1. The RX 7900 XTX saw its biggest victory against the RTX 4090 using DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B, where it outperformed the Ada Lovelace GPU by 13%. AMD also tested three other LLM configurations against the RTX 4090. The RX 7900 XTX outperformed the RX 4090 in two of the three configurations — it was 11% faster using Distill Llama 8B and 2% faster using Distill Qwen 14B. The RX 4090 was 4% faster than the RX 7900 XTX in one configuration, using Distill Qwen 32B.

AMD tested three configurations against the RTX 4080 Super. The RX 7900 XTX outperformed the RTX 4080 Super by 34% using DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B. This lead dropped to 27% using Distill Llama 8B, and 22% using Distill Qwen 14B.

This should all be taken with a pinch of salt, of course, as we can’t be sure how the Nvidia GPUs were configured for the tests (which, again, were run by AMD). Not all AI workloads take advantage of a GPU’s full computational throughput. We saw this in our Stable Diffusion tests, where Stable Diffusion did not use FP8 calculations or TensorRT code for processing.

It’s not common for the RX 7900 XTX to be used as a dedicated AI processor, but the architecture is more than capable of processing AI workloads. The RDNA 3 architecture the RX 7900 XTX is based on is capable of matrix operations, supporting BF16 and INT8. AMD officially added the “AI Accelerator” terminology to RDNA 3 to demonstrate its AI-processing prowess. The RX 7900 XTX features 192 AI accelerators.

AMD recently published a tutorial on how its customers can get DeepSeek R1 to run on compatible AMD consumer-based hardware, including the RX 7900 XTX. DeepSeek R1 is a new AI model that offers performance comparable to Western leading-edge AI models, but at a fraction of the computing cost. DeepSeek R1 uses an assortment of hardware-based optimizations to make its model run 11X faster than its competitors, including using Nvidia’s assembly-like PTX programming language.