Introduction

AMD finally has their next generation graphics cards in the performance segment! The Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT being launched today fill a vast performance gap between the enthusiast-class RX 7900 series meant for maxed out 4K gaming, and the mainstream RX 7600 designed for 1080p. Both new cards that we review today are meant for the 1440p resolution, which is registering strong growth on the Steam Hardware Survey graphs. The RX 7800 XT should give you significantly higher performance than the RX 7700 XT for a price that's surprisingly not much higher. Across the competitive landscape, AMD considers the RX 7800 XT to be a competitor to the GeForce RTX 4070. The Red team is pricing its new card aggressively, at just $500, which undercuts the RTX 4070 by $100. To sweeten the deal even more, AMD is including the space opera RPG Starfield with this card.



The Radeon RX 7800 XT is based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the rest of the RX 7000 series, and takes advantage of the 5 nm EUV foundry node where it really matters—the compute units and other graphics rendering machinery. The card debuts the new Navi 32 silicon, which is a chiplet-based GPU, just like Navi 31 that powers the RX 7900 series. AMD turned to chiplets to maximize its foundry utilization of the more advanced 5 nm foundry node. It did so, by identifying the specific components of the GPU that benefit the most from the newer node—essentially all the number-crunching machinery—and those components that don't benefit as much, such as the Infinity Cache memory and the GDDR6 memory controllers. These are spun out as memory cache dies (MCDs) built on the older 6 nm node. There are four of these on Navi 32, compared to six on Navi 31, each with a 16 MB segment of the chip's 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit wide portion of the GPU's 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT is designed to max out Navi 32, enabling all 60 RDNA 3 compute units physically present on its GCD (graphics compute die). This works out to 120 AI Accelerators, 60 Ray Accelerators, 240 TMUs, 96 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory, which AMD is using to drive a generous 16 GB of memory. AMD is running their GPU at 2124 MHz Game clock, and 2430 MHz boost, while the memory ticks at 19.5 Gbps for an impressive 624 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD considers the RX 7800 XT a spiritual successor to the RX 6800 XT that the company released as an enthusiast-class product the last time around, pricing it accordingly.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture powering the RX 7800 XT introduces new dual-issue rate compute units, with vastly improved idle SIMD resource utilization, and support for new math formats. The company claims generational IPC uplifts over the RDNA2 compute units to the tune of 17%. Taking advantage of the newer 5 nm node, AMD is also running the shader engines at higher clock speeds than the previous generation. The company also introduced Ray Accelerator, a component inside the CU that accelerates matrix math functions by utilizing the SIMD units, which should accelerate AI DNN building and training. The 2nd generation Ray Accelerator is designed to provide a 50% generational improvement in ray intersection performance. Another interesting change introduced with RDNA 3 is that the GPU's front-end operates at a 10-15% higher clock speed than the shader engines. At its given specs, the RX 7800 XT has a total board power of 263 W, and can make do with two conventional 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

AMD has a reference design graphics card based on the RX 7800 XT which we are reviewing here, there isn't a reference design board for the RX 7700 XT. The reference made-by-AMD (MBA) board uses the same design language as the reference RX 7900 XT. The triple-slot card for the most part looks like a smaller reference RX 7900 XT, but with two fans instead of three. A dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink is ventilated by two axial-flow fans. AMD is pricing the reference Radeon RX 7800 XT at $500. The card will be available on AMD's first-party online store, as well as through the company's board partners, with minimal re-branding.

Besides the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT reference, we have several other custom-design card reviews, as well as reviews for the custom RX 7700 XT.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 9x RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.