llamaperf

NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs AMD RX 7900 XTX for local LLMs

57 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and 47 on the AMD RX 7900 XTX

Which is faster for local LLMs?

On Qwen3.8 27B at 4-bit, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 has 40.0 generation tokens/s (3 runs); prompt processing 1949.3 tokens/s (2 runs); the AMD RX 7900 XTX has 42.5 generation tokens/s (6 runs); prompt processing 640.0 tokens/s (4 runs). Those are community reports whose engines and settings differ, so the gap is a rough sign, not a controlled measure of the two cards. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 5% higher on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (1,008 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 4090, 960 on the AMD RX 7900 XTX). Across 2 shared models with generation measurements on both cards, the NVIDIA RTX 4090's median is higher on 1 and the AMD RX 7900 XTX's on 1.

NVIDIA RTX 4090
Memory
24GB
Memory bandwidth
1,008 GB/s
FP16 compute
330 TFLOPS
Reports
57
AMD RX 7900 XTX
Memory
24GB
Memory bandwidth
960 GB/s
FP16 compute
123 TFLOPS
Reports
47

Measured on both

Generation and prompt processing speeds from plain runs (one device, one request, no speculative decoding, the whole model in the device's memory) of the same model size at the same bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these

ModelNVIDIA RTX 4090AMD RX 7900 XTX
Qwen3.8 27B4-bit40.03 runsPP 1949.3 (2 runs)llama.cpp8K to 194K context42.56 runsPP 640.0 (4 runs)llama.cpp, Ollama, 2 not stated64K to 220K context, 3 not stated
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active4-bit149.6one runOllamacontext not stated142.8one runPP 4331.2 (one run)llama.cppcontext not stated

Estimated by the calculator

The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape. Where a model was also measured above, the measurement wins.

ModelNVIDIA RTX 4090AMD RX 7900 XTX
Qwen3.8 27B36.5 t/sQ4_K_M34.8 t/sQ4_K_M
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active82.3 t/sQ5_K_S78.4 t/sQ5_K_S
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active19.6 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM19.5 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active129.3 t/sQ4_K_S123.2 t/sQ4_K_S
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 27B36.5 t/sQ4_K_M34.8 t/sQ4_K_M
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
GLM-5.3 320B · 18B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 4090 · AMD RX 7900 XTX

Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 4090 · AMD RX 7900 XTX

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