AMD Puts RX 7900 Up Against Nvidia RTX 4090 in DeepSeek Tests

It didn’t take long for people to start testing their gear with DeepSeek’s benchmarks. And as you’d expect, the companies making hardware for AI were quick to see how their models fared with a different structure than that of the leading LLM, OpenAI. Now, AMD is letting it be known that its Radeon RX 7900 XTX outperformed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 in benchmarks based on DeepSeek.
The benchmark scores come by way of an X post from David McAfee, AMD’s vice president and general manager of Ryzen and Radeon. He put up a chart comparing  both the GeForce RTX 4080 Super and the RTX 4090 against the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, along with the note: “DeepSeek performing very well on @AMDRadeon 7900 XTX.”
Anytime a hardware manufacturer (or anyone who stands to benefit from the outcome, for that matter) provides benchmark scores, it’s better to view them as food for thought, rather than for informing your next purchase. Stick to independent reviews when you’re shopping.
With that in mind, the numbers are interesting. The Radeon RX 7900 XT, which has 24GB of VRAM, blows the 16GB GeForce RTX 4080 Super out of the water in all three of the benchmarks AMD showed. The Radeon GPU also outperforms the 24GB Geforce RTX 4090 in three of the four tests, but by smaller margins. In DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen, the RTX 4090 outperforms by 4%.
DeepSeek’s hardware usage differs from OpenAI, which has been the LLM of choice until now. DeepSeek certainly made a splash and seems to have (and we use this word rarely) disrupted the industry, at least momentarily. The app is apparently sending quite a bit of user data to China, making OpenAI seem like the better choice for organizations that want to keep their info out of China’s hands.
We’d rather see comparisons of the latest generation of hardware from AMD and Nvidia, but we’ll have to wait. Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 5090 and 5080 GPUs were released today, and AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and 9070 haven’t been released yet. Putting AMD’s new GPUs up against Nvidia’s high-end cards wouldn’t make for a fair comparison, anyway. Once AMD and Nvidia make their midrange cards available, we’ll be able to see the real showdown.
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