Just two weeks ago, at Gamescom, AMD unveiled their new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT Series. Both cards are designed to fill the huge hole in AMD's product stack between the RX 7600 ($250) and RX 7900 XT ($750). While the Radeon RX 7800 XT retails at $500, the RX 7700 XT comes in only marginally cheaper, at $450. In our review coverage we've looked at nine cards today: AMD RX 7800 XT Reference, ASRock RX 7800 XT Phantom OC, ASUS RX 7800 XT TUF OC, PowerColor RX 7800 XT Hellhound OC, Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+, XFX RX 7800 XT Merc 319, ASUS RX 7700 XT TUF OC, Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pulse, XFX RX 7700 XT Qick 319.

Both the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT are built using the new Navi 32 graphics processor. Just like Navi 31, it uses the chiplet design approach that made Ryzen processors so successful. Instead of a single large monolithic die, the processor is made up from several smaller pieces, which are easier to build, with a much lower defect rate. The chiplet strategy on Navi 32 is identical to Navi 31. A central GCD die, which contains all the shaders engines, is surrounded by several MCD dies, which provide the memory interface and L3 cache. On the RX 7800 XT there's four MCDs, to build a 256-bit memory interface, whereas RX 7700 XT uses only three MCDs, resulting in a 192-bit interface. The fourth die is not "missing," but AMD has placed a non-functional dummy die here instead, to provide structural stability.

The PowerColor RX 7800 XT Hellhound is the company's high end model for this release, with the Red Devil being the flagship. It comes with all the bells and whistles like adjustable RGB lighting, dual BIOS, a powerful triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution, dual BIOS and a large factory overclock. Compared to AMD reference speeds, the Hellhound ticks at a gaming clock frequency of 2213 MHz, which is a 4% increase over the 2124 MHz baseline value set by AMD. Averaged over the 25 games in our test suite, at 1440p resolution, this leads to a 3% performance improvement over the AMD reference card—not much, but that's how factory overclocks work these days. Actually, all RX 7800 XT custom designs tested today reach virtually the same performance levels, which can be a good thing, because it really doesn't matter which one you pick, at least when it comes to gaming performance.

Compared to other cards, the PowerColor RX 7800 XT is able to beat NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 by 7%, and on top of that it is $100 cheaper at the same time. AMD's new card is also able to outperform GeForce RTX 3080, one of the most popular cards in the green team's previous generation. The gen-over-gen performance gain (without factory OC) compared to RX 6800 XT is pretty slim though with just 3%. If you're still on the older RX 5700 XT, AMD's flagship from a few years ago, the RX 7800 XT offers double the performance, pretty impressive. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is over 25% slower than the RX 7800 XT. With these performance numbers, the RX 7800 XT is a great card for 1440p gaming, it will easily reach over 60 FPS with maximized settings in all but the most demanding games. If you're willing to dial down details or use an upscaling technology, then 4K with decent framerates is a possibility, too.

As expected, ray tracing performance of RX 7800 XT is lower than its NVIDIA counterparts. With RT enabled, the RTX 4070 is able to beat the RX 7800 XT by around 15% on average, which is not nothing, but not "much slower" or "cannot do ray tracing." The factory overclock definitely helps gain a frame or two, but just like in rasterization it doesn't have that much of an impact. Depending on the game and how demanding its RT effects are, there's some quite big differences though. No doubt, if you're betting on ray tracing, then NVIDIA is the better choice, but I'm not sure if I'd spend $600 instead of $500 just for better RT performance.

NVIDIA's biggest selling point for the GeForce 40 Series is support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. At Gamescom AMD has confirmed that their own FSR 3 Frame Generation implementation is coming, too, finally, but we'll have to wait just a little bit longer. In DLSS 3, the Frame Generation algorithm takes two frames, measures how things have moved in those two frames and calculates an intermediate frame in which these things moved only half the distance. While this approach is definitely not problem-free, especially when pixel-peeping at stills or slowed down video, in real-time it's nearly impossible to notice any difference. As you run at higher FPS and resolution it becomes even more difficult, because the deltas between each frame are getting smaller and smaller. Being able to double your FPS is a huge capability, because it means you can enable ray tracing for free, or game at higher resolutions. Of course you are limited to games with DLSS 3 support, of which there are currently around 40, mostly AAA titles, but not every title will support it. AMD has announced 12 games for FSR 3 and I'm sure more are in the pipe. I'm still surprised that they are not releasing it yet, because it is an important selling point that greatly affects the RX 7800 XT value proposition. Outside of AMD nobody has seen FSR 3 in action, so we don't know how well it works, what it looks like, what's required in terms of game support etc. Still, it's good to see that Team Radeon is definitely hard at work to make up lost ground against NVIDIA. On the other hand, if you buy a GeForce 40 card today, you'll be able to use Frame Generation immediately and it works very well. NVIDIA recently announced DLSS 3.5, which promises to improve the look of denoising during RT rendering, no independent testing available yet either, we'll keep you updated.

NVIDIA hasn't exactly been generous with VRAM sizes on GeForce 40, AMD does a better job here. The RX 7800 XT comes with 16 GB VRAM and the RX 7700 XT has 12 GB. No doubt, these are clearly higher numbers than 12 GB on RTX 4070 and 8 GB on RTX 4060 Ti, but our testing for RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB has shown that VRAM size really doesn't make that much of a difference, especially not at 1440p. No doubt, you can always find edge cases where more VRAM will run better than less VRAM, but for the vast majority of your gaming experience it does not matter. To quote Franz Kafka "Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have," and if that's the case at similar or better pricing, like with the new Radeons, then it's clearly a selling point for AMD, even though I would not consider it an important one.

PowerColor has several decades of experience with AMD Radeon graphics cards, and it shows in the Hellhound. The card is not only fast, but it also comes with amazing fan settings. Under full load the card is whisper quiet, just 25 dBA. If you have any other noise sources in the room, there is no way you will be able to make out the fan noise—at full gaming load. If you want an even quieter gaming experience, then activate the dual BIOS "quiet" mode and you'll be down to only 23.4 dBA, which is virtually inaudible unless you put your ear next to the card, on an open bench, in a quiet room with nothing else running—very impressive—good job, PowerColor. Even with such amazing noise levels, temperatures are still low and perfectly fine. What helps a lot here is that PowerColor's thermal solution is the most powerful one we've tested today as confirmed by our noise-normalized heatsink comparison test that eliminates all variables except for the cooler's performance itself. Just like all other recent graphics card releases, the PowerColor RX 7800 XT will stop its fans in idle, desktop work, internet browsing and light gaming.

Power consumption of the RX 7800 XT is improved over the 6800 XT, by roughly 50 W. AMD's new card consumes around 250 W at full load, which is very manageable for any decent PSU today. PowerColor's factory overclocked Hellhound draws around 20 W on top of that, or 10%, which is significant but not enough to affect anything. NVIDIA's RTX 4070 does run at lower power levels of just 200 W, but it also has only 12 GB VRAM, which consumes less power. While these power differences are real and can't be dismissed, I don't think they are serious enough to affect your buying decision, given current price points. If pricing was much closer it could become a deciding factor though. While usually it's worth thinking about power cost and cooling requirements, our cooler testing for RX 7800 XT shows that the coolers are actually better than on the RTX 4070, so the heat/noise argument doesn't apply in this case. It's actually quite easy to bring RX 7800 XT to the same efficiency levels as RTX 4070. Just take ten seconds and undervolt it a little bit, to 1.05 V, down from the 1.15 V default. You'll save 10 W and gain a few percent in additional performance, because AMD's clocking algorithm has more power headroom. No idea why AMD's default settings run at such a high voltage.

What could turn out to be a great selling point for the new Radeons is their overclocking potential. We've achieved a +13% real-life performance improvement, which is something that hasn't happened in a long time. While overclocking is fairly complicated (a step-by-step guide is on the OC page), the gains are pretty spectacular and you'll be able to get quite close to RTX 4070 Ti performance levels, especially on the custom designs.

AMD has confirmed a $500 price point for the RX 7800 XT, which feels a little bit uninspired, but looking at current market offerings, the price is actually pretty nice. PowerColor has told us that their Hellhound will sell at that same $500 MSRP—no price increase! I'm loving it. While other board partners want $530-$550 for their custom-designs, PowerColor is able to give you a much better cooler that runs whisper-quiet, factory overclock, dual BIOS and RGB lighting at the baseline price. That definitely makes the card the best RX 7800 XT released today. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 costs $600 (+20%), and it's 2% slower in raster, 16% faster in ray tracing, has 4 GB less VRAM and consumes 50 W less power. Its biggest selling point is support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation. As awesome as it is, not sure if that would be worth an extra $100 to me. The $450 GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB has become even less sellable than before. It's 30% slower in raster, 10% slower in RT, and really brings nothing to the table other than DLSS 3—at a cost savings of just 10% over the RX 7800 XT. While RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB has only half the memory size of the 16 GB version, it costs only $390, which could be tempting if you want to save some money, at the cost of some performance. Radeon RX 6800 XT costs $510 currently and has nothing to offer over the RX 7800 XT, maybe if it was much closer to $450. AMD FSR, including FSR 3, works on all cards, including RX 6000 Series. GeForce RTX 3080 can be found for around $470, slightly lower raster performance, slightly higher RT perf, less VRAM, no DLSS 3, definitely not an optimal choice. The is true for RX 6900 XT, too, which goes for $580 and has roughly the same perf levels as RX 7800 XT. It'll be interesting to see whether NVIDIA will respond to the RX 7800 XT release with price cuts. What also works in favor of the RX 7800 XT is that AMD is bundling Starfield for free with their cards, which definitely helps with pricing.