Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Following the release ofAMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTandRX 7900 XTX, you might have expected AMD to follow a traditional release cadence and produce an RX 7800 or RX 7700-series card next. Not this time around. Surprisingly, it was the RX 7600 that appeared on shelves next. The RX 7700 XT is built around the Navi 32 chiplet GPU, the same as that of the RX 7800 XT, just with some functionality disabled. Both come with a single 5nm Graphics Compute Die (GCD) and four surrounding 6nm Memory Cache Dies (MCDs) The RX 7700 XT for its part has one of the MCDs disabled.
While AMD still has some catching up to do in ray tracing performance, in most other regards the RX 7800 XT is the better card for your money than anything Nvidia can offer today. Though I still feel many will side with an RTX 4070 instead for a little more cash. The Arc A750 comes with impressive AV1 acceleration for encoding in the new, bandwidth-savvy codec. That's a big deal if you're a streamer or content creator looking to improve the quality of your videos. The A750's ray tracing ability is similarly beefed up compared to the competition's. The RTX prefix is only used to denote cards which house Nvidia GPUs with dedicated ray tracing hardware, but AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs also support real-time ray tracing acceleration. The unlaunching and subsequent rebadging and repricing of the RTX 4080 12GB was the best thing to happen to this third-tier Ada GPU. Now and forever to be known as the RTX 4070 Ti, this is the card that now makes it impossible to recommend AMD's RX 7900 XT.Even at 1080p medium, a relatively tame setting for DXR (DirectX Raytracing), the RTX 4090 roars past all contenders and leads the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti by 41%. At 1080p ultra, the lead grows to 53%, and it's nearly 64% at 1440p. Nvidia made claims before the RTX 4090 launch that it was "2x to 4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti" — factoring in DLSS 3's Frame Generation technology — but even without DLSS 3, the 4090 is 72% faster than the 3090 Ti at 4K. Oh, how I wish I could tell you it was an unreserved 'yes!' But, while this is absolutely the card you should buy if you were previously considering an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT, all because of its gaming performance lead, I don't feel great about making that recommendation. With a price tag closer to the GeForce RTX 3070, yet performance between it and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, most often closer to the latter, the Radeon was a solid alternative but hadn't been my first port of call for this sort of cash for a good portion of its life. That's all changed now that it's often quite a reasonable amount cheaper than the RTX 3060 Ti or anything the newer generation can manage.
Still, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a lot going for it. We're used to seeing GPU generations that arrive on smaller process nodes, redesigned architectures, larger caches, reworked shaders, more memory—the list goes on. But all of that, all at once? That's what RDNA 3 delivers: the whole lot in one fell swoop. One of our criticisms of the RTX 4060 Ti is its weak 8GB and 128-bit memory configuration. The RX 7700 XT's 12GB of VRAM and 192-bit bus is something that’s more appropriate for a 2023 mid-range graphics card. It will hold the card in good stead for longer into the future. There's a bit of a respite in new GPUs, as we haven't had anything launch since last month's Arc A580. We don't expect new cards until the Nvidia 40-series Super parts arrive, whenever that will be (January, probably). There's more to the Radeon RX 6700 XT than a simple halving of silicon from AMD's top RDNA 2 chip, the Radeon RX 6900 XT. In some ways, sure, it's a straight slice down the middle. The RX 6700 XT features 40 compute units (CUs) for a total of 2,560 RDNA 2 cores and is equipped with 64 ROPs—exactly half of the maximum configuration of the Navi 21 GPU—but the card comes with more than its fair share of memory and Infinity Cache.
The RTX 4070 is probably my favourite graphics card from the current Ada lineup, and of both AMD and Nvidia's new generations. It may be pricier than the old RTX 3070, but it's able to keep pace with the RTX 3080, and sometimes even beat it when you bring DLSS 3 to bear. Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPUs from the past four generations of hardware. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are from the latest Nvidia Ada Lovelace and AMD RDNA 3 architectures. AMD's graphics cards perform well without ray tracing, but tend to fall behind once RT gets enabled — even more so if you enable DLSS, which you probably should, though FSR2 is a reasonable alternative. GPU prices are finally hitting reasonable levels, however, making it a better time to upgrade. On the one hand, it's a hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver when given a long leash, and on the other, a slightly tone-deaf release in light of a global economic crisis that makes launching a graphics card for a tight, very loaded minority of gamers feel a bit off. Nvidia absolutely dominates in ray tracing performance, with the RTX 4090 nearly doubling AMD's best AMD RX 7900 XTX in sixth place. Intel's Arc A770 lands at number 28.
We're not talking the cheapest of chips here, either. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is still a high-ish-end card by most counts. But its price tag is slipping into the more affordable end of the market by the week, and that's high up on a list of things we absolutely love to see. Yet as an RTX 4080 competitor the RX 7900 XTX is less convincing. It's rarely able to match the RTX 4080. The RTX 4080 is up to 28% faster in my testing, though it's more like 15% on average. For an RTX card that asks at least 20% more cash than the RX 7900 XTX, that stat is not a dealbreaker, but it does make the XTX's gains more moderate by comparison. What helps the XTX's value proposition is that it has more memory and, on rare occasions, actually beats the RTX 4080. If you're only playing Far Cry 6 then you're laughing with an XTX, but let's be honest, you're not. For our latest benchmarks, we've tested nearly every GPU released in the past seven years, plus a few extras, at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it makes sense, we also test at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All of the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which in our new suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p. It's been designed to beat an RTX 3060 Ti by as tight a performance margin as possible—and you honestly can't argue with the business reasons for doing so—but without DLSS 3 and Frame Generation it certainly doesn't feel like a particularly exciting generational upgrade over the old Ampere card. Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT lands a few percent behind the RX 6600 XT.Nvidia is positioning the RTX 4060 as a capable 1080p card with excellent power efficiency, and support for Nvidia's key technologies, including DLSS 3 with Frame Generation. In fact, it's really pushing DLSS 3 as the killer feature of the RTX 4060. Shoot cards make a memorable reminder of a day’s shooting in the company of likeminded people, whilst enjoying the British countryside. But Matt soon found that shoot captains, and indeed gamekeepers, can often have problems getting them printed in the correct quantity and at the right quality. I get it. It's been tough. You've been waiting for two years to upgrade your old graphics card. You've waited out the GPU supply chain drought, the mining apocalypse, and all the ensuing, brutal price hikes. You've even waited out the temptation to spend on a last-gen GPU even though prices have dropped ahead of this new suite of Nvidia and AMD cards.
Great Deal 
New Comment