AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT will go up against Nvidia’s 4070 and 4060 Ti

 

AMD has been slower than Nvidia to fill out its next-generation GPU lineup, and for months there has been a huge gap between the Radeon RX 7900 XT (currently retailing between $750 and $850) and the Radeon RX 7600 (holding steady at $270ish). Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda's upcoming "Skyrim in space" title, Starfield.

 

AMD kept the prices of both cards under wraps while pre-briefing members of the press about the announcement, which is unusual but not hard to explain. AMD's RX 7600 launch was spoiled a bit by Nvidia, which preempted the 7600's announcement by offering a more powerful GeForce RTX 4060 at the same $299 price that AMD had planned for the 7600. This prompted AMD to cut the 7600's price to $269 before it was even announced; we'll have to wait and see if Nvidia chooses to change its prices in response to the new Radeon cards' launch.

 

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia's $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti.

 

The new Radeon cards also support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) version 3, a new version of AMD's GPU-agnostic AI upscaling technology that also promises extra AI-generated frames à la Nvidia's proprietary DLSS 3 and DLSS Frame Generation feature. But unlike Nvidia, AMD isn't restricting FSR 3 to its latest cards, and users of RX 6000-series cards plus recent Nvidia GeForce and Intel Arc cards will be able to benefit, too, at least when games start supporting it. You can read more about FSR 3 and AMD's other software announcements here.

What’s in a name?

Like the 7900 series, both GPUs use a chiplet-based design, where the main GPU hardware is located in a large silicon die built on TSMC's 5 nm manufacturing process and multiple small memory controller dies (MCDs) built on a 6 nm process (the RX 7600 uses a single monolithic die, like the laptop versions of the RDNA 3 GPUs).

 

Both cards use the same GPU die (codenamed Navi 32). But the RX 7800 XT has more of AMD's compute units (CUs) enabled, as well as more MCDs. Each MCD adds 64 bits to the memory bus width—the 7800 XT uses four MCDs, while the 7700 XT uses three.

 

If there's thread that runs through the last 12 months' worth of GPU launches, it's that the performance you can get for your money hasn't improved all that much unless you're paying for a tippy-top high-end card like the GeForce RTX 4090 or 4080 or the Radeon 7900 XTX. Sure, cards like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 perform a bit faster than their predecessors at similar prices. And power efficiency has improved a lot, particularly for Nvidia's cards. But the very best you can usually get is "the same performance for a little less money" or "a little bit faster for the same money."

 

Neither the 7800 XT or 7700 XT look to change that equation much. We'll need to test them to see for sure, but it looks like the 7800 XT will be (at best) a small step up from the 6800 XT for around the same price (the 6800 XT currently starts at around $500). The 7700 XT looks like a substantial step up from the current 6700 XT and 6750 XT, but for around $90 more than the 6750 XT currently sells for, and it's barely cheaper than the more-powerful 7800 XT.

 

	RX 7900 XT	RX 7800 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 7700 XT	RX 6700 XT	RX 6750 XT	RX 7600
Compute units (Stream processors)	84 (5,376)	60 (3,840)	72 (4,608)	60 (3,840)	54 (3,456)	40 (2,560)	40 (2,560)	32 (2,048)
Boost Clock	2,400 MHz	2,430 MHz	2,250 MHz	2,105 MHz	2,544 MHz	2,581 MHz	2,600 MHz	2,600 MHz
Memory Bus Width	320-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit	192-bit	128-bit
Memory Clock	2,500 MHz	2,438 MHz	2,000 MHz	2,000 MHz	2,250 MHz	2,000 MHz	2,250 MHz	2,250 MHz
Memory size	20GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP)	315 W	263 W	300 W	250 W	245 W	230 W	250 W	165 W

 

Comparing the RX 7800 XT to its direct predecessor, we're looking at fewer compute units offset by a newer architecture and higher clock speeds (unlike some Nvidia cards, AMD is at least giving you the same memory bus width and the same amount of RAM). The rated power consumption is 12 percent lower, which is nice, but pushing the clock speeds higher may have disproportionately increased power consumption (compared to the 7900 XT, which has 40 percent more CUs but only uses 20 percent more power).

 

Price, performance, and efficiency are the most important things about any GPU, and how a card is named is only tangentially related to those things. But in this case, it seems like the RX 7800 XT is a more logical replacement for the non-XT RX 6800, which had the same number of CUs, while the mostly China-exclusive "RX 7900 Golden Rabbit Edition" with 80 CUs seems like a more straightforward upgrade path for the RX 6800 XT.

 

The RX 7700 XT is more compelling when compared to its direct predecessors. It has more compute units than the RX 6700 series cards, the same amount of memory and memory bus width, and consumes about as much power as the RX 6750 XT that AMD released as a mid-generation refresh last year.

 

AMD is making a first-party version of the RX 7800 XT's reference design on its website; though an (identical) reference design is pictured for the RX 7700, AMD told us that it won't be making or selling one. The 7800 XT's reference card is smaller than either 7900-series reference design, with an understated RGB-free dual-fan cooler, but it's larger than the diminutive RX 7600. Both cards use a pair of 8-pin power connectors, avoiding the newer but occasionally controversial 12VHPWR connector.

 

According to AMD's performance figures, the RX 7800 XT compares well to the $600 RTX 4070, running between 5 and 23 percent faster in 1440p games with ray-tracing effects turned off and even outperforming it in a handful of games with light ray-tracing effects. In games that make heavier use of ray tracing, AMD is at its usual performance deficit relative to Nvidia.

 

The RX 7700 XT stacks up even better than the 16GB version of the $500 RTX 4060 Ti, though bear in mind that this card performs identically to the $400 8GB model in games that don't use the extra RAM. It's between 31 and 9 percent faster in titles without ray tracing enabled, and it's fast enough that even games that use ray-tracing effects extensively shouldn't run too much slower on AMD's card.

 

While performance relative to Nvidia's latest-generation cards looks mostly competitive, Nvidia's architecture still looks more power-efficient. The RTX 4070 is rated at 200 W, compared to 263 W for the RX 7800 XT, while the 245 W RX 7700 XT is being compared to a 160 W 4060 Ti. We'll look into real-world power usage numbers when we test them.

 

Listing image by AMD