Review of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT: Recommended for 1440p Gaming

The two GPUs from AMD are designed for the 1440p middle ground and provide the price and performance to fill that void well. Starting at $449 for the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 for the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT, respectively, they compete on pricing similarly with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (around $400) while beating it in most situations.

The more expensive RTX 4070 GPUs from Nvidia start at around $600. Although they fight for the same 1440p crowd, there don’t appear to be any Nvidia cards in the $400 to $600 range inhabited by these AMD GPUs.

The 7800 XT is available on AMD’s website in addition to models from other companies, whereas the 7700 XT is exclusively accessible through its board partners.

DON’T LIKE

• AMD’s raytracing performance still lags

DON’T LIKE

• The power connectors are uncomfortably close to the top grille
• Card may be too long to fit comfortably into midsize or smaller systems

DON’T LIKE

• The power connectors are uncomfortably close to the top grille
• Card may be too long to fit comfortably into midsize or smaller systems

If the price difference between these two AMD models is $40, you would be better off spending more money and purchasing the 7800 XT. It will last you longer because it performs noticeably better at 1440p and extends to 4K play better. (For instance, the RX 7700 XT clocked 65 frames per second in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K using the Highest preset while the RX 7800 XT averaged 81fps.)

Additionally, AMD has made available Hypr-RX, a one-click optimization tool that it first unveiled at CES 2023 in January. It uses AMD’s Boost and Anti-Lag optimization along with its Super Resolution upscaling and is comparable to Nvidia’s DLSS 3. But because each game’s settings must be tailored specifically for it, it necessitates developer involvement.

Specifications

 

The RX 7000 series, among other things, introduced support for DisplayPort 2.1, which has the requisite bandwidth to provide full gamut coverage of Rec.2020 or up to 480Hz in 4K, as well as 165Hz at 8K and 12 bits per color (up from 10 bits) for HDR. That is an increase in link bandwidth from the 20Gbps in DP 1.4a, which Nvidia’s devices still use, to up to 54Gbps. Although trying to play in 8K on one of these seems impossible, extra bandwidth for HDR is always appreciated.

 

Although I’m not sure the RX 7700 XT gets hot enough to need the XFX’s triple-fan cooling, having a backup plan is always a good idea if you intend to overclock it. Contrary to many cards that merely have solid slabs, this card features ventilation on the backplate as well. It’s a long card, and it was rather close to my Corsair 4000D midsize tower case’s front fans.

The placement of the power plugs, which necessitates a little too much jiggling close to the sharp-bladed grille, is my major complaint. You might not care if you don’t switch GPUs very frequently.

On the other hand, the AMD version of the Radeon RX 7800 XT card features the company’s standard dual-fan layout.

Performance

Despite all of the higher-end 7800 XT’s incremental spec benefits, the RX 7700 XT occasionally outperformed it. The 7700 XT may have outscored the more expensive GPU in those instances without becoming any hotter because of its higher clock rates.

The lack of ray tracing in Starfield is not surprising given that AMD was a significant development partner and that the Xbox employs AMD GPUs. Although AMD appears to be catching up, it still lags behind by roughly 17% (according to 3DMark’s DXR test). The quality of FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.1 has now reached a stage where it is actually useable and improves performance without appreciable quality loss, however it looks terrible with ray tracing. It’s a shame because it would sometimes enhance the game’s aesthetics.

Despite widespread criticism of Starfield’s performance on the PC, which is included as part of a bundle on these and other AMD cards and CPUs, both GPUs manage to run it reasonably well at 1440p — in the 80 to 130fps range — with Ultra settings. It’s impressive how far FSR 2.1 has come because at one time I didn’t even aware I was using the RX 7800 XT at 4K (due of how Starfield handles non-native resolutions, which isn’t graceful).

Both of the cards can be manually overclocked, but I just set it to Hypr-RX and left it there. There doesn’t appear to be any magic involved; it activates Boost and Anti-Lag Plus for AMD, as well as FSR with Quality set. A Ryzen CPU will benefit from all-AMD technologies like Smart Access Memory to significantly boost performance if you have one. When playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p Ultra settings, for example, Hyper-RX improved frame rates by 14 to 17%.

When discussing AMD GPUs, it’s simple to seem monotonous. Their poor raytracing performance remains their worst flaw, but the largest caveat to that critique is still that many people don’t actually care. Although the RX 7700 XT offers good 1440p performance, the RX 7800 XT appears to be a superior overall option. It offers passable 1440p, outstanding 1440p with FSR, and adequate 4K frame rates for you to get used to.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider gaming test (1440p)