Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is one of the best-looking games ever made. We benchmarked it at “Ultra” the other day across the fastest AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards, but there’s a higher (hidden) quality preset, “Unobtanium,” that’s even more intensive. We’ll test this forbidden preset on the GeForce RTX 4090 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX to demonstrate how punishing it can be. Our test system consists of a Core i9-13900K paired with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory on an ASUS Z790 Maximus Hero.
Avatar Frontiers of Pandora Unobtanium: RTX 4090 vs RX 7900 XTX
From the looks of it, “Unobtanium” makes a more generous use of ray tracing, granting the GeForce RTX 4090 a 61% lead over the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The Ada flagship manages 58 FPS at the highest graphics quality preset at 4K, while the 7900 XTX tops out at 35.5 FPS.
The frametime graph reveals a cleaner graph for the RTX 4090, even though the frametime variance is the same overall.
At 4K, neither graphics card produces a playable experience. The GeForce RTX 4090 averages 31 FPS while the RX 7900 XTX manages just 18.8 FPS using the “Unobtanium” preset. For reference, the RTX 4090 averaged 67 FPS at Ultra, while the RX 7900 XTX produced 44.6 FPS.
Using Frame Generation and FSR 3 “Balanced” Frame Generation, the GeForce RTX 4090 manages 56.7 FPS and 109 FPS at the “Unobtanium” preset at 4K. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX registers 35 FPS with (only) Frame Generation and 74.2 FPS with FSR 3 “Balanced” and FG enabled at once.
The frametime graphs of the two GPUs look very similar, but the RTX 4090 has fewer spikes overall. This isn’t the kind of difference that can differentiated by us humans.
