AMD RX 7800XT

When the RX 7800XT was announced, it came as a surprise to no one. With the release of the 4K 7900XT models and the 1080p 7600XT model, and the competition marketing their own mid-range card for 1080p, a clear gap for an affordable 1440p card was in the sights of AMD. And, to the surprise of many who have lived with rising GPU prices, AMD has managed to do so without the price running rampant.

This has resulted in the AMD Radeon RX 7700XT, and the RX 7800XT - we are looking at the latter here. Both cards are aimed at 1440p gamers, but what in the USA is only a minor $50 price change, making it a no brainer to pick the 7800XT, the price difference is a lot more here overseas, however, it is much more on par with the price level of high-end 1440p cards from the past, before the great chip shortage that started more than three years ago, and is declining, but still a frustration for many gamers.

Like its bigger brothers, it has AI accelerators, supports AV1 encoding for the streamers, AMD's FSR upscaling and even some Ray-Tracing. It also supports the new powerful HYPR-RX upscaling system that is a combination of several existing technologies, but as AMD has decided to make this rather sophisticated upscaling available to basically all games released within the last 10 years, and all graphics cards, including the ones made by the competition, this isn't RX 7800XT specific.

It's built on the same RDNA 3 platform as the 7900XT series, has 16GB of VRAM, 60 compute units, 60 Ray Accelerators, 120 AI Accelerators, 3840 Stream Processors and 240 Texture Units. This operates at a max boost frequency of 2430Hz. It provides 64MB of cache, and operates with a 19.5 Gbps/256 bit memory system, and overall, an effective bandwidth of 2700 MB/S, while the power draw is only 263W, only 13 more than last-gen.

The AMD design is subtle, industrial, and on point in black with a few red accents. Very mature, but also saying "serious" at the same time. And the price? Well, this is the AMD reference card, and most cards sold around £398. That's the price level we want for a 1440p focused card. Of course cheaper would be better, but seeing as more is asked for 1080p cards by others, this is the best we can do currently.

Noise levels were reasonable at 42 dB, and with temperatures being 28 degrees Celsius at idle and maxing out at 71 degrees Celsius, sure, it could be a few degrees cooler, but not bad overall.

And now, for the benchmarks. Yes, a few less than normal, but the Ubisoft launcher refused to work and set us back by days.

3D Benchmark

• Time Spy: 18921


• Time Spy Extreme: 9304


• Speed Way: 3773


• Port Royal: Did not work

Total War: Warhammer III

• 1080p: 138.5


• 1440p: 93.3

Dirt 5

• 1080p: 161.6


• 1440p: 137.2


• 4K: 90.0

Cyberpunk 2077

• 1080p: 148.1 / 98.9 Ray-Tracing Ultra with FSR 2.1


• 1440p: 103.8 / 83.6 Ray-Tracing Ultra with FSR 2.1


• 4K: 51.0 /36.6 Ray-Tracing Ultra with FSR 2.1

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

• 1080p: 140.0


• 1440p: 113.0
  <li>4K: 82.0
  

Far Cry 6

<li>1080p: 172.0
<li>1440p: 137.0
<li>4K: 82.0

What is remarkable is that even though it's a lot more expensive in price, the actual competition for this card isn't the 16GB RTX 4060 TI, but the RTX 4070, which depending on model, often is 50% more expensive than the RX 7800XT. No, it doesn't beat its Nvidia rival in all tests, but its on par or even better in a lot of categories, and can even do decent 4K in a few instances. Now can we please continue with this more reasonable price policy?