Remember GPUs that had great price to performance and offered true generational leaps over their predecessors?
Oh, what a time that was.
But this is now, and AMD's new Radeon RX 7700 XT and
7800 XT aren't going to make us relive those glory days. I can tell you that up front, but
right now, maybe they don't have to. Maybe all they need to do is just
just not give us a wedgie and shove our heads in the toilet. And
you know what? I'm feeling pretty optimistic to the point where I'm even gonna preemptively
thank AMD for not treating me like a high school bully, and I'm gonna hope that the final members of the RDNA 3
desktop family don't let me down with any game-breaking bugs that wipe this smile off my face.
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AMD is positioning their new hotness against Nvidia's RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070.
And, at least from the preliminary numbers that they showed, it looks like Nvidia's
preemptive price drop on the 16 gig version of the 4060 Ti may not be enough. All other things aside,
both of these cards have more than 8 gigabytes of VRAM, which is a major advantage over the
less overpriced 8 gig variant of the 4060 Ti in games that require it. And the
7800 XT in particular looms very impressive, at least on paper. Compared to its little brother,
it has six more compute units and only slightly lower clocks with 45 percent faster memory and a
proportionally wider bus to go with it. All of that for just
$50 more and an extra 18 watts of power consumption.
Which actually raises a lot of questions for me. Can the RX
7700 XT justify its existence at that price? Will Nvidia have to lower their prices even more than they already did a few days ago?
Oh, and is FSR 3 coming? We can't answer that last one just yet,
but we can address the first two with some benchmarks. Given this is our first post hiatus hardware review and we were working under a deadline,
we had to make some tough choices on which GPUs to include in our roster.
So we ended up with fewer cards,
but more QC, which is going to be the path forward until some of our new automations come online.
One final note, by the way, our RTX 3070 needed the resizable bar BIOS flash,
so if you're playing along at home with a 30 series GPU and you're getting lower numbers than us,
do make sure you check that. While you're waiting for your PC to restart, maybe check out our new screwdriver variants from lttstore.com.
We're gonna start with 1080p and work our way up. The geometric mean of all of our testing puts the RX
7800 XT at the top of the charts, which is great, except, you know, this is kind of awkward, the last-gen RX
6800 XT comes in as a
surprisingly close second, with the RTX 4070 picking up the bronze, though with
silver tier 1% lows, which indicates a similarly smooth gameplay experience.
Interestingly, Atomic Heart has the 4070 leading the pack by a fair margin,
probably indicating poor optimization for AMD in that particular title given the rest of our results.
The 7700 XT, meanwhile, works out to be about
15% slower than its bigger brother and lives smack dab in the middle between Nvidia's current and previous 70 class cards.
Pretty respectable and it puts these new cards in a really nice sweet spot for high refresh rate 1080p gaming in modern titles.
Though, it is worth noting that the 6800 XT is just about on the
7800 XT's level and you may be able to find it for cheap in the coming weeks.
Also worth noting, the RTX 3070 is a fair bit cheaper than the 7700 XT right now,
if you care about Nvidia's exclusive features, though
it will be slower and offer slightly worse value for its performance, at least in terms of raw raster FPS.
Needless to say, the 40 series isn't winning any value awards right now. So, let's move on.
Many of the best gaming monitors these days are 1440p and AMD markets both of these new GPUs for driving these higher
resolution displays. And this is where things get really spicy and also a little weird.
While both cards still enjoy a nice lead over their green rivals, the RX
6800 XT is once again pretty dang close to the
7800 XT and that's despite being a last-gen card and pushing
77% more pixels than 1080p. More on that later.
The 7800 XT does still maintain its performance gap with its current-gen sibling,
however, and it's looking at a geomean of about 8% faster than the RTX 4070 across all of our testing. The
7700 XT for its part still slots in between the RTX 3070 and
4070, though it skews a little closer to the 3070. As for the 4060 Ti,
I don't really enter the equation at all, making AMD again the current-gen winner in terms of performance and
value for modern titles at
1440p
until we turn on ray tracing, where of course the story changes dramatically in Nvidia's favor.
Here, even the last-gen
3070 beats the
7800 XT. Now, I'm not going to tell you what to think about the importance of ray tracing. That's up to you,
but it could have a significant impact on your evaluation of who is the better value here.
Despite the inroads that AMD is making generation over generation, Nvidia simply has a more mature
implementation of this next-gen lighting technology, both on the hardware side and in software.
Speaking of software, while we were gathering this data, we noticed something really bizarre with The Last of Us Part 1.
First of all, here's how the RX 6700 XT looks across all the runs we did. You can see that it's really consistent.
The lines are mostly overlapping. That is a really good thing for smooth gameplay.
Now, let's look at the 7700 XT and
Wow, that is all over the place.
In fact, this is how all of our 8 gig cards look.
Except this isn't an 8 gig card and this shouldn't be happening given that it is a 12 gig card.
But we reran the test 10 times to verify and
unfortunately,
it just didn't behave like the other higher memory cards, which look a lot more like the 6700 XT
I showed you before.
So what's going on here?
Our best guess here is that either the graphics driver or the game are treating the 7700 XT as if it only had
8 gigabytes of VRAM when in fact it has 12. What this implies is that it's actually possible for the
7700 XT to gain some performance in The Last of Us Part 1 and
there could be even more to the story that could push it higher still.
You might notice that F123 wasn't in our test suite this time around despite AMD including it in theirs.
This is because both of the new cards, and it should be noted, only the new cards
consistently crashed the entire system during gameplay.
We originally thought it might be the game, maybe a recent update, but then even non-game applications
like hardware info began causing crashes.
We are still talking to AMD about this and if we have an update from them,
we're gonna have that posted in the video description,
but Labs's preliminary investigation points to it being a driver bug that's caused by error handling code being called for erroneously,
which is ironic. And if it happens enough, we'll lock up the driver entirely and crash the system.
This could be impacting performance results across the board and we would have no way of knowing about it.
But unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that happens often with product launches and launch day reviews.
So just keep it in mind as we continue.
Now this isn't a GPU tier that is normally associated with high-end productivity.
So this section is gonna be pretty brief, but if Blender is your weapon of choice, AMD will get the job done,
but
Team Green is gonna be the way to go if you want the best performance because keep in mind,
we're not even showing the ray accelerated optics renderer here, which is even faster on Nvidia.
We're just looking at compute and even now, the lowly RTX 4060 Ti is out ahead of the
800 class cards from AMD that... wait a second.
Why is the 6800 XT also ahead of the 7800 XT?
Okay, I said I would address this later and later is now. The RX 7800 XT is really more like this generation's
RX 6800 non XT. I mean, I can kind of see AMD's justification. The
7800 XT does bring some new stuff to the table. The RDNA 3 chiplet design, AI accelerators,
higher core clocks, faster memory, and as we've seen, the whole package usually works out in gaming.
But for compute performance, the 6800 XT still beats it.
So I know this is a bit of an aside, but AMD, can you please settle on a coherent naming scheme already?
Are we committed to XT and XTX? Are we gonna add more Xs for the 8000 series?
Is this all part of a back-alley deal to make people think that XFX cards are faster?
I mean, to AMD's credit, at least every 7000 series Radeon to date is RDNA 3,
so that's something, but this inconsistency makes intergenerational comparisons
extremely difficult for consumers. Even just looking at these two cards, the
7700 XT really does look like a substantial upgrade from the 6700 XT. More compute units, extra memory bandwidth, and
significantly better performance. I'm like, yeah, this is faster in games, but it's a less clear-cut picture.
Sorry. Coming back to our testing, where AMD in general does have an advantage over Nvidia is in DaVinci Resolve, where the
6800 XT still tops the charts for H.264, with the
7800 XT trailing just behind the RTX 4070 and the 7700 XT rendering twice as fast as the
4060 Ti, which languishes with the last-gen cards. We can say basically the same thing for H.265 performance,
and in AV1 encoding, the 7800 XT pulls clearly ahead of the RTX 4070.
Don't mind the 4060 Ti, though.
It just likes to take its time. Keeping in mind that there are no first-party, built by AMD RX
7700 XT cards, and ours is therefore a third-party design from XFX, your mileage may vary with respect to power consumption,
but, um,
we did see some weird stuff here, and we do need to tell you about it. And,
yeah, that is not an error. Our 7700 XT reports higher power consumption than the built-by AMD
7800 XT, with a peak of roughly 300 watts.
Of course, they are so close that they might as well be drawing the same amount of power. Our best theory
is that perhaps the lower compute unit count allows for more thermal headroom for it to boost under this power virus load.
It also has a significantly beefier cooler. When we add NVIDIA to the mix, though,
the hairs we're splitting between these cards start to feel a lot less important. Not only does the 4060 Ti
significantly undercut the 7700 XT for power consumption, even the
4070 draws less power. Maybe, though, this is just combustor...
combusting things. Let's turn our attention, then, to our go-to real-world game for power testing,
F123, for as long as we were able to run it anyway. Here, we see relative power consumption
that is actually more in line with what we'd expect. They are less power hungry than the 6800 XT, thankfully,
so that's one unambiguous generational improvement. Now,
it's time to talk about AMD's software. And I do mean talk about it, since that's all that AMD has done so far,
and that's all that they've enabled us to do.
FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 is supposedly
finally coming, and will contain AMD's implementation of fake frame generation, a la NVIDIA's DLSS3.
We've been waiting nearly a year now for its release, and for NVIDIA's solution to mature to the point where
I'm actually kind of worried about Team Red here. We weren't able to run it ourselves,
but they did offer up an example,
but the one they did was under very favorable conditions. A 4K 60 video on
slow-paced gameplay that was already pretty close to running at 60 FPS, and
despite that, the first impression looks pretty rough to us.
It's too early to seriously pixel-peep and comment on the visual quality from this demo alone,
and they say it will be available in early fall with Forspoken and Immortals of Avium,
so hopefully we're gonna be able to test it for ourselves soon, and it will really impress us.
What we know right now is that this flavor of Frame Gen, dubbed
Fluid Motion Frames, is going to be open and available to run on GPUs that do not have machine learning or AI
accelerators, with, AMD claims,
performance that will supposedly be similar to DLSS3.
So, in other words, when you're comparing native FPS to native with Frame Gen,
you are going to be using your GPU compute, not the separate AI compute,
so you will expect less than double the frame rate due to that processing overhead.
Like DLSS3, then, AMD recommends that you enable it only to enhance
60 FPS and higher gameplay, rather than to make up for very low FPS.
We will, of course, be testing that as well.
And we'll also be testing AMD's claims that the Radeon driver can enable Frame Gen on any
DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 title via HyperRx, a one-click optimizer feature that was first announced last year.
Now, you would think that this kind of thing would require at least some input from the game engine,
but maybe AMD's onto something. We shall see. We can't try it yet.
The other new major feature that's coming with FSR3 is something that AMD is calling native anti-aliasing,
and this is a competitor to Nvidia's deep learning anti-aliasing.
Both process the native image, like FSR or DLSS, but without adjusting the scale.
And, as I understand it, that would pretty much boil AMD's version down to temporal anti-aliasing, as we know and love it,
but then with a sharpening pass. And the comparison image doesn't do much to convince us that there's much else going on.
Yes, there is more detail than native, but that's detail that used to be subtle and now kind of looks like noise.
It is early though, and with the latest consoles being powered by AMD,
I'm sure that game devs are gonna have some interest in helping to dial this in,
but it really feels like AMD missed an opportunity to leverage their AI accelerators and create a true DLAA alternative.
Maybe we'll just have to wait for Intel's XCAA.
For now, all we can do is wait and see if these features are worth turning on, if we're ever allowed to.
FSR3's requirements, for example, are a little weird, but here's the TLDR.
Frame Gen is going to be supported on Radeon RX 5700 and higher, or, on the team green side, the RTX 20 series and higher.
Users of RX 590s or GTX 10 series cards can still use the upscaling and native anti-aliasing modes though.
Obviously, the Frame Gen in every title feature only works for Radeon cards, at least until modders get going with projects like CyberFSR.
And then, perhaps most importantly,
consoles should support all of the above, which could lead to some interesting times ahead if it makes game studios consider ray tracing or
more complex visuals more often.
Which is enough conversation about what could be coming in the future.
Looking at it today, a clear winner emerges from the current gen competitors, the RX
7800 XT. The 7700 XT already makes Nvidia's pricing look pants-on-head stupid, and the
7800 XT is, on average, around 20% faster for just 11% more currency.
No-brainer, go ahead and buy wise what I would say, if it weren't for the unfortunate reality that the RX
6800 XT still exists. For now though, it's true, it lacks AI accelerators,
it does have slower memory, but the performance is still there, especially in productivity, and they're currently priced about the same as the
7800 XT.
Which I wouldn't necessarily buy it at, even just for the longer driver support that you're gonna get out of a newer card,
but you can expect them to go lower as they're cleared out, or if you get one secondhand, and they could be a great deal.
Plus, if you want to get into Starfield, all AMD cards come with Starfield Premium Edition,
which is a hundred dollars that you're not gonna have to spend on top of your new GPU.
That makes Nvidia's comparative pricing even worse, since their bundle of in-game items for a free-to-play game is...
significantly less valuable and less desirable, if the Steam reviews are any indication. With all that said, I
don't hate this then. Don't get me wrong, while these launch prices are lower than last gen in a vacuum,
they're still inflated for the performance level, so unless you really need the upgrade now,
I'd still recommend sticking with what you've got, or checking out our recent guide on how to buy a secondhand GPU.
But, unlike the transparently insulting 4060 series launch from Nvidia, at least this doesn't feel like AMD is just
spitting in our collective faces. It's not AMD's gift to gamers either, it's just...
fine. And I guess in times like these, that's refreshing?
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If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our review on the RTX
4060 Ti for a little bit more on why we've been ragging on that card during this entire video. It's
not good.