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 not give us a wedgie and shove
our heads in the to is and you know what
I'm feeling pretty optimistic to the point where I'm even going to
preemptively thank AMD for not treating
me like a high school bully and I'm going to 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 wipe like
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cool get enlisted at the link below AMD
is positioning their new hotness against NVIDIA's RTX 460 TI and RTX 470 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 460 TI may not be enough
all other things aside both of these cards have more than 8 GB 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%
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 when 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 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 LTT Store.com
we're going to 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
this is kind of awkward the last gen RX 6800 XT comes in as a surprisingly close
second with the RTX 470 picking up the bronze though with silver tier 1% lows
which indicates a similarly smooth gameplay experience interestingly atomic
heart has the 470 leading the pack by a fair margin probably indicating poor
optimization for AMD in that particular title given the rest of our results the
76 700 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 470 across all of
our testing the 7700 XT for its part still slots in between the RTX 370 and
470 though it skews a little closer to the 3070 as for the 4060 TI doesn'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 rate 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 NextGen
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 One 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 GB 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 One 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 game playay we originally thought
it might be the game like 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 going to 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 going to be pretty brief but if blender is your
weapon of choice AMD will get the job done but but Team Green is going to 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 460
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 ah
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 going to add more
X's for the 8,000 series is this all part of a back alley deal to make people
think that XFX cards are faster I mean
to amds credit at least every 7,000 series radon to date is our dna3 so
that's something but this inconsistency
makes intergenerational comparison 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 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 Da Vinci resolve where the 6800 XT still
tops the charts for h264 with with the 7800 XT trailing just behind the RTX 470
and the 7700 XT rendering twice as fast
as the 46ti which languishes with the last gen cards we can say basically the
same thing for h265 performance and in av1 encoding the 7800 XT pulls clearly
ahead of the RTX 470 don't mind the 460
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 headro 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 were splitting between
these cards start to feel a lot less important not only does the 460 TI
significantly undercut the 7700 XT for power consumption even the 470 draws
less power maybe though this is just combuster 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 Fidelity FX super resolution 3
is supposedly finally coming and will contain AMD's implementation of fake
frame Generation allaha NVIDIA's dlss 3
we've been waiting nearly a year now for its release and for NVIDIA 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 fores spoken and Immortals of avium so
hopefully we're going to 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 genen 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 dlss 3 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 d
lss3 then AMD recommends that you enable it only to enhance 60fps 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 directx11 and direct X12 title via hyper RX 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 on to something we shall see we can't try it
yet the other new major feature that's coming with FSR 3 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- eling as we know and love it but 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 going to 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 daa
alternative maybe we'll just have to wait for Intel's XC AA for now all we
can do is wait and see if these features are worth turning on if we're ever
allowed to FSR 3'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 moders get going with projects like cyber FSR and then
perhaps most importantly consoles should support all of the above which could
lean to some interesting times ahead if it makes game studios consider rate
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 and it does have slower memory but the performance
is still there especially in product ity 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 going
to 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 $100 that you're not going to have to spend on top of your
new GPU that makes NVIDIA's comparative pricing even worse since their bundle of
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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