AMD recently announced its latest graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT at Gamescom in Germany, aiming for what it calls the “enthusiast” market.
Both GPUs are built primarily for 1440p resolution gaming, making them beefier choices than the RX 7600 released earlier this year. As for a red-versus-green comparison, the two new Radeon cards appear to directly compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 and 4060 Ti cards respectively.
Although AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of its graphics business unit, Scott Herkelman, claimed that “gamers today are choosing 1440p displays more than any other display resolution,” the numbers say otherwise. According to the Steam Hardware and Software Survey, more than 60% of Steam users play games at 1080p, while less than 15% use 1440p, reflective of the higher cost of components and displays required to hit the sharper resolution. Granted, the proportion of people playing on the higher 1440p resolution is growing, but it still has a way to go.
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT details
At US$499 for the 7800 XT and US$449 for the 7700 XT, the cards are competitively priced against AMD’s main competitors in Nvidia. We’ll include local pricing as soon as it’s available, which shouldn’t be too far away considering both cards launch on 6 September 2023. For comparison, the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti retails for US$400, while the RTX 4070 costs US$600.
Notably, despite either costing less or a similar amount to its direct competition, both the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT include more GDDR6 memory than Nvidia’s cards. Here, the 7800 XT wields 16GB compared to the RTX 4070’s 12GB, while the 7700 XT houses 12GB to the RTX 4060 Ti’s 8GB (although there are separate 16GB models that cost more).
AMD benchmarks highlighted by The Verge seem to indicate stronger gaming performance at native 1440p for the Radeon cards. This includes higher frame rates on intensive games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
In addition to the new hardware, AMD also revealed during its Gamescom presentation that it’ll launch FSR 3 on the same 6 September date. FSR stands for FidelityFX Super Resolution, the latest version of which will include frame generation technology to help boost games’ refresh rates. It’s AMD’s version of DLSS from Nvidia, which basically renders frames at a lower resolution before upscaling them, lightening the load on the hardware.
| AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT | AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT | AMD Radeon RX 7600 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 60 | 54 | 32 |
| Memory | 16GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Clock speed | Game Clock: 2124 MHz Boost Clock: up to 2430 MHz | Game Clock: 2544 MHz Boost Clock: up to 2171 MHz | Game Clock: 2250 MHz Boost Clock: up to 2655 MHz |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit |
| Infinity Cache | 64 MB | 48 MB | 32 MB |
| TBP | 263W | 245W | 165W |
| Price (RRP) | US$499 | US$449 | US$269 |
