Buying a good graphics card within the last couple of years has been nothing short of a grand adventure, filled with high prices, low stock levels, and a shortage of electronics to boot. Still, this hasn’t halted AMD, Nvidia, and now Intel from launching new products, and today we’re going to be looking at the new AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT. The two GPUs are positioned to take on the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 graphics cards, hence the similarly named SKUs.
We’ve seen what the mightily impressive Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is capable of doing at a price of more than $1,500. The lower-end segments of the GPU market have been full of previous-gen card recommendations, which is set to change with recently released Nvidia GPUs and these two new cards from AMD. If you’re looking for some solid GPUs for enjoying all your favorite PC games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT are two brilliant cards and are actually worth buying.
In this review, we’re going to dive into what powers these graphics cards, how they perform with a variety of PC games, and why we believe you should buy one. AMD provided XDA Developers with samples of both the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, but had no input in this review.
Source: XFX
AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT
The AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT is a good value graphics card with a primary focus on scoring high frame rates at 1080p and decent performance at 1440p. It’s also capable of handling some 4K gaming, should you be comfortable turning down a few settings and enabling AMD’s FSR technology.
Pros
- Solid 1440p performance
- Can handle some 4K gaming
- Latest RT cores and FSR tech
- DisplayPort 2.1 and AV1 support
Cons
- Shadowed by RX 7800 XT’s value
- Weak 4K showing without FSR
- Ray tracing is far behind Nvidia
Source: AMD
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
The king of AMD’s RX 70 series graphics cards for 1440p gaming, this is the GPU you should buy if you’re after butter-smooth 2K performance. The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is also fairly good at 4K gaming, especially when paired up with FSR.
Pros
- Excellent 1440p performance
- Good 4K performance
- DisplayPort 2.1 and AV1 support
Cons
- Ray tracing is poor compared to RTX 4070
Pricing and availability
Both the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT launched on September 6, 2023. Prices come in at $449 for the RX 7700 XT and $499 for the RX 7800 XT. There are no AMD versions of the latter GPU, meaning you will have to rely on AIB pricing for the faster card. To help entice gamers, a free copy of Starfield is available with both cards. These are considerably more affordable when compared to AMD and Nvidia’s more power-hungry offerings. The RTX 4090 is almost three times as expensive, putting the GPU market and its pricing dilemma into perspective.
Specifications
Powerful specs at more reasonable prices
AMD designed the two graphics cards with 1440p (2K) gaming in mind. As such, they both fit into the RX 70 series by slotting below the RX 7900 XT. The RX 7600 is the current entry-level GPU from Team Red. Sporting the latest innovations from AMD With its RDNA 3 architecture, the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT offer considerable gains over their predecessors, according to published data by AMD. As well as boosting performance through hardware, AMD has been working hard on its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and HYPR-RX technologies.
There’s also full support for the latest high-refresh displays with DisplayPort 2.1, advanced ray tracing support, AI accelerators, and AV1 encoding. The RT cores are second-gen and the AI accelerators are new for the RX 70 series. RAM allocations of 12GB and 16GB on the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT should be enough for 1440p gaming for many years to come, though we suspect this may cause problems for those who attempt to try their luck at UHD resolutions. We positively reviewed the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT and found RDNA 3 to offer considerable gains over previous-gen cards.
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AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT Brand AMD AMD Architecture RDNA 3 RDNA 3 Process 5 nm, 6 nm 5 nm, 6 nm Transistors 28.1 billion 28.1 billion Shader Units 54 60 Ray Accelerators/Cores 54 60 AI Accelerators/Cores 108 120 Stream Processors 3,456 3,840 Base Clock Speed 2,171 MHz 2,124 MHz Boost Clock Speed 2,544 MHz 2,430 MHz Memory Capacity 12 GB GDDR6 16 GB GDDR6 Memory Bus 192-bit 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 1,995.3 GB/s 2,708.4 GB/s Power Draw 245 W 263 W
Compared to previous generation GPUs from AMD, the second-generation AMD Infinity Cache has allowed the company to effectively half the amount of available cache while improving effective bandwidth. The RX 7700 XT comes with 48 MB (versus 96 MB on the RX 6700 XT) yet has an 18 Gb/s, 192-bit memory system for a bandwidth of up to 1,995.3 GB/s. The RX 6700 XT only managed 1,278 GB/s. The RX 7800 XT is a similar story with 64 MB (versus 128 MB on the RX 6800) and comes rocking a 19.5 Gb/s, 256-bit memory system for up to 2,708.4 GB/s of bandwidth.
To make all this work and achieve higher performance results, AMD increased the total board power of the RX 7700 XT to 245W from 230W with the RX 6700 XT. The RX 7800 XT hits even higher at 263W from 250W with the RX 6800. Both of the new RX 70 series GPUs are recommended to be used with a power supply that can handle 700W of total output. All-in-all, AMD effectively more than doubled the raw performance of both cards over their predecessors with the RX 7700 XT achieving 35 TFLOPS and the RX 7800 XT 37 TFLOPS.
Hardware
RDNA 3 and the latest in AMD’s video technologies
We received the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT and XFX Radeon RX 7700 XT Speedster 219 Quick edition for review. Interestingly, the larger GPU in our collection of photos is of the RX 7700 XT with its over-engineered cooling solution. The shroud is massive, rivaling that of far more expensive and powerful cards. The RX 7800 XT follows the usual AMD affair when it comes to design with very little in terms of elements, and there’s essentially zero RGB lighting. The same goes for XFX’s RX 7700 XT, though it has more going on throughout the design.
Cooling isn’t an issue on either card. Both of these GPUs are powered by the latest RDNA 3 architecture with a Navi 32 processor. Power is delivered using two 8-pin connections. Everything is controlled using AMD’s excellent software package, which allows one to keep tabs on power usage and temperatures, as well as configure optimizations for games and even dabble in some overclocking. If you’re also using an AMD processor, various controls will be unlocked here for the chip.
Performance
You won’t be disappointed with 1440p gaming
According to AMD, the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT perform (on average) better than the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070, respectively. That is until ray tracing is enabled, which saps the performance gains made by AMD with these latest GPUs. Nvidia’s ray tracing setup is simply better at handling the heavier workload, especially at higher resolutions. We experienced a similar story through our extensive testing and found the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT to be excellent for gaming at 1440p. 4K is also possible with FSR enabled and some visual settings conservatively configured.
We reviewed the two GPUs using the following test bench:
- AMD Ryzen 9 7900
- 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM
- Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master
| Game / Average FPS | Radeon RX 7700 XT | Radeon RX 6700 XT | GeForce RTX 4060 Ti |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 |
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| Far Cry 6 |
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| GTA 5 |
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| Metro Exodus |
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| Red Dead Redemption 2 |
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| Shadow of the Tomb Raider |
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2K and 4K performance on both the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT is strong. They blow the previous generation cards out of the water and more than match what Nvidia offers with the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070, comfortably beating the two Team Green GPUs in some cases. Things take a slight turn for the worse when we enable ray tracing. Activating FSR does help AMD recover some lost frames due to the additional strain on its RNDA 3 GPUs, but even then Nvidia’s DLSS technology is simply better overall and widens the gap in many cases.
| Game / Average FPS | Radeon RX 7800 XT | Radeon RX 6800 | GeForce RTX 4070 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 |
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| Far Cry 6 |
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| GTA 5 |
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| Metro Exodus |
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| Red Dead Redemption 2 |
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| Shadow of the Tomb Raider |
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Nvidia is still the leader in the field when it comes to ray tracing. The RTX 40 series cards didn’t have the smoothest of launches, but there’s no denying just how powerful the GPUs are. AMD still has some ways to go in catching up with Team Green with more advanced lighting effects. We’re fans of what RDNA 3 has brought to the table and while the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT are two capable graphics cards, there’s some serious competition in this segment of the market with Nvidia and Intel.
AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT: Should you buy them?
While it’s almost expected for many to pay far and beyond for a graphics card, prices have returned to some form of normality, even if there are those who would suggest MSRPs were inflated to begin with. The RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT are well-positioned and priced to take on the competition from Nvidia. The RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 are both great GPUs in their own right and leave AMD in the dust when ray tracing is enabled, but one simply can’t overlook the value offered by AMD here.
If you’re going to stick with a 2K monitor for the foreseeable future or may dabble in 4K gaming here and there, either GPU would work very well. The RX 7800 XT is the more powerful card and has an additional 4GB of VRAM, which makes all the difference when handling high-resolution textures, which is commonplace with 4K. Nvidia is still the king of ray tracing, though AMD has made some strides across the board compared to earlier iterations of its own implementation of the technology.
If we had to recommend the best GPU for gaming, it would be the RX 7800 XT, simply because it’s always better to spend slightly more money for the absolute best performance your budget would allow for. The RX 7800 XT is the card to buy if you also plan on doing some 4K gaming at some point, whereas the RX 7700 XT is the GPU for you if you’re going to stick with an existing 1440p monitor.
Source: XFX
AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT
The AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT is a good value graphics card with a primary focus on scoring high frame rates at 1080p and decent performance at 1440p. It’s also capable of handling some 4K gaming, should you be comfortable turning down a few settings and enabling AMD’s FSR technology.
Source: AMD
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
The king of AMD’s RX 70 series graphics cards for 1440p gaming, this is the GPU you should buy if you’re after butter-smooth 2K performance. The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is also fairly good at 4K gaming, especially when paired up with FSR.