AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT, RX 7800 XT Review: Good Buys for 1440p Gaming

AMD's duo of GPUs are built for the 1440p middle ground, and they offer the price and performance to fit neatly into that niche. Starting at $449 for the RX 7700 XT -- though the price of the XFX Speedster Qick 319 card I tested is $460. The step-up Radeon RX 7800 XT is priced at $499 (£479, converts to roughly AU$935). On price they compete roughly with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (around $400) while generally outperforming it. 

Nvidia's RTX 4070 cards, which generally rank higher, start at about $600. There don't seem to be any Nvidia cards in the $400 to $600 gap occupied by these AMD GPUs, though they compete for the same 1440p crowd. 

AMD offers its own model of the 7800 XT on its website, in addition to those of third-party providers, but the 7700 XT is only available from its board partners. 

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

$499 at AMD

Like

• Excellent 1440p and occasional 4K performance as long as you don't care about ray tracing
• DisplayPort 2.1 support

Don't like

• AMD's raytracing performance still lags

XFX Speedster Qick 319 RX 7700 XT

$420 at Amazon

$420 at Best Buy

$422 at B&H Photo-Video

Like

• Excellent 1440p performance as long as you don't care about ray tracing
• DisplayPort 2.1 support

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 you're choosing between these two AMD models and the price difference is $40, you're better off spending more and getting the 7800 XT. It's notably better for 1440p and extends up to 4K play better, so it'll last you longer. (For example, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K with the Highest preset, the RX 7700 XT clocked 65 frames per second while the RX 7800 XT averaged 81fps.)

AMD has also launched its one-click optimization option, Hypr-RX, which it announced in January at CES 2023. It's similar to Nvidia's DLSS 3, using AMD's Boost and Anti-Lag optimization with its Super Resolution upscaling. It requires developer participation, though, because the settings have to be custom-tuned for each game. 

Among other things, the RX 7000 series added support for DisplayPort 2.1, which has the necessary bandwidth to support 165Hz at 8K and 12 bits per color (up from 10 bits) for HDR, and to enable full gamut coverage of Rec.2020 or up to 480Hz in 4K. That's a link bandwidth of up to 54Gbps, up from 20Gbps in DP 1.4a, which Nvidia's cards still use. I can't imagine trying to play in 8K with one of these, but more bandwidth for HDR is always welcome.  

I'm not sure the RX 7700 XT runs hot enough to require the triple-fan cooling of the XFX, but the safety net doesn't hurt if you plan to overclock it. Even the backplate has ventilation, unlike a lot of cards which just have solid slabs. It's a long card and came relatively close to the front fans of my Corsair 4000D midsize tower case. 

My biggest quibble is the positioning of the power connectors, which requires a little too much jiggering near the sharp-bladed grille. If you don't swap GPUs that often, you may not care.

The AMD model of the Radeon RX 7800 XT card, on the other hand, is the typical dual-fan AMD design.

Performance

The RX 7700 XT outperformed the higher-end 7800 XT in some cases, despite all the 7800 XT's incremental spec advantages. The 7700 XT's higher clock speeds may be responsible for those cases where it outperformed the more expensive card without running any hotter. 

Because AMD was a big partner for Starfield's development, and the Xbox uses AMD's GPUs, it's unsurprising that there's no ray tracing in the game. AMD seems to finally be catching up but continues to lag by about 17% (based on 3DMark's DXR test). FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.1 quality is finally at a point where it's really usable and improves performance without noticeable degradation in quality, but it looks awful with ray tracing. That's a shame, because the game's graphics would benefit from it in places. 

Despite many complaints about Starfield's performance on the PC, which comes as part of a bundle on these and other AMD cards and CPUs, both GPUs run it fairly well at 1440p  -- in the 80 to 130fps range -- with Ultra settings. At one point I didn't even realize I'd been running at 4K on the RX 7800 XT (because the way Starfield handles non-native resolutions is... not elegant) which shows how far FSR 2.1 has come.

You can manually overclock both of the cards, but I just set it on Hypr-RX and left it at that. There doesn't seem to be any magic: It turns on AMD's Anti-Lag Plus and Boost and turns on FSR set to Quality. If you've got a Ryzen CPU, it will take advantage of all-AMD technologies, like Smart Access Memory, to further bump up performance. In Cyberpunk 2077, Hyper-RX delivered 14 to 17% improvement in frame rates in 1440p Ultra settings, for instance.

It's easy to sound repetitive when reviewing AMD GPUs. Their biggest drawback continues to be meh raytracing performance, and the biggest caveat to that criticism is still that a lot of people don't really care. While the RX 7700 XT delivers solid 1440p performance, the RX 7800 XT seems like an all-around better buy. It offers decent 1440p, excellent 1440p if you invoke FSR, and sufficient 4K frame rates for you to grow on.