So upon further tinkering and testing the card it is very different than even their last RDNA2 cards. With this card it almost doesn't matter what you set your "target" clocks at in the Radeon wattman overclocking utility in the AMD drivers. The card's core clocks all but ignore your requested targets entered in the driver, the only clock that behaves as expected is the memory clocks in that you can set it at whatever specific clock speed you want. The core however is really only manipulated by lowering the core voltage and then increasing the card's power budget. Lowering it from the default 1150mv to just 1100mv and setting the card to allow the max +15% power results in the core clock skyrocketing from holding roughly 2400-2500Mhz at default to holding 2700-2800Mhz when undervolted and allowing the card to draw more power. 
 
Undervolted and higher power budget = Time Spy 26396 (which is a 400+ point increase from above)
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/34336442
 
Another thing is there is apparently no way to adjust or even see which clock you are manipulating be it the core clock or the shader clock. I assume the driver is reporting the core clocks and that's what you are able to adjust but I would have really liked to even see what the shader clocks are running at. AMD stated the RX 7900 XTX has shader clocks of 2.3Ghz and "front end" clock of up to 2.5Ghz. I remember back to the GTX 280 days when Nvidia tried a similar technique with the shader clocks and core clocks. The difference was that they were set on ratios and you could actually adjust them with tools like RIVA Tuner. No such luck with AMD's RDNA3 it seems. I've tried all the usual suspects like MSI Afterburner, Sapphire's Trixx and ASUS's GPU Tweak but all are the same, they only report one core clock speed. 
 
EDIT: This is pretty nuts, it gave me an even bigger bump in Port Royal at 16681 (almost 700 points higher than above)
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/86543548?
 
EDIT2: The trend continues in Speed Way at 6359 (which if talking about % gain is the highest yet from the above results)
https://www.3dmark.com/sw/228610
 
Seems the RT accelerators really appreciate the bump in clock speed where as in rasterized workloads the core clock doesn't benefit performance as much. Very interesting. 
 
Makes me actually wanna watercool this thing and see what it can really do. 
 
EDIT3: This'll be the last update tonight but lowering core voltage to 1050mv gives yet another performance boost and has the card running at 2800-2900Mhz which is good for a Time Spy score of 26836. It held an average of almost 2850Mhz through the test.
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/34337491
 

Sajin
Cool. Think I'll be sticking with my 4090 though. 

As will I for sure, this was just for fun in my AMD rig. I still have both RTX 4090s and I can't see this replacing my Gigabyte RTX 4090 that has better VR support in a rig that is pretty much only used for VR. I mean hell, as you can see this thing loses in VR benchmarks to Nvidia's last generation RTX 3080 lol. Forget about competing with the current gen RTX 4090 in VR, it's not even close. Just like AMDs ray tracing performance compared to Nvidia they are about a generation behind. 
 
This just makes me wonder what went wrong with RDNA3 to ship them in their current state. They (RX 7900 series) obviously benefit greatly from lowering voltage which is in stark contrast to the RTX 40 series in that they are starving for MORE voltage. Raising the power budget on 7900 series also benefits them where as raising it on RTX 40 series seems to do pretty much nothing for performance. Maybe it's teething issues from their first chiplet GPU or some other unknown factor that had them ship in this state (lower clocks and higher voltage) we'll probably never know. I'm sure yields has at least something to do with it, but from what I'm reading my card isn't alone (far from it actually) in exhibiting this behavior where lowering voltage increases performance. Which again is exactly the opposite of what happens with 40 series if you cap your voltage at say 950mv you also cap your performance. 
 
Maybe with the rumored 7950 refresh next year they can sort it out. 

rjohnson11
The RTX 7900 XTX does very well in rasterization, but when compared to NVIDIA's flagships card with ray tracing and DLSS it falls behind. 
 
AMD needs to work harder to get better ray tracing results. 

Totally agree they need to increase their ray tracing performance but that’s gonna have to come with a new core architecture when they move on from RDNA. The issue appears to be that where the RT accelerators are in the pipeline and the fact that their RT cores can’t handle as many BVH intersections per clock as NVIDIA RT accelerators can.

It’s not “terrible” anymore at least. Having the RT performance of a RTX 3080 isn’t bad on its own but when compared to where NVIDIA is now at their RT performance it pales in comparison.