Reviews of the Radeon RX 7700 XT have appeared – a graphics card that makes no sense against the background of the Radeon RX 7800 XT

AMD today launched the Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics cards, and at the same time specialized foreign media published reviews of new products. In this article, we take a closer look at the reviews of the younger Radeon RX 7700 XT, which mostly praise the new product’s performance and call it “GPU for 1440p you want” And “Another great opportunity for AMD to steal market share from NVIDIA“. But at the same time, the price and power consumption of the card are scolded.

Image source: TechPowerUp

The Radeon RX 7700 XT is one of the mid-range accelerators – the recommended price of the card is $449, although there will of course be more expensive offerings. The card is based on the Navi 32 graphics chip with RDNA-3 architecture and 3456 stream processors. The GPU runs at 2544 MHz if we talk about the reference characteristics. The graphics card received 12 GB of GDDR6 video memory with an effective frequency of 18 GHz and a 192-bit bus, giving a bandwidth of 432 GB/s. In addition, there is a 48 MB high-speed cache of the new generation, Infinity Cache.

Note that the Radeon RX 7700 XT will not appear in the reference version, but only in various modifications from AMD partners. In this article we take a look at the ASUS Radeon RX 7700 XT TUF graphics cards from the test TechPowerUpSapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pulse by KitGuru Reviewas well as XFX Radeon RX 7700 XT QICK 319 from Tom’s hardware review.

AMD itself positions the new product as a video card for games with a resolution of 1440p, and reviews confirm that the video card does a good job in this role. According to Tom’s Hardware Benchmarks, the Radeon RX 7700 XT averages over 61 FPS in 15 modern games at a resolution of 2560×1440, with graphics settings set to maximum and ray tracing set to maximum quality where supported. The card sits comfortably ahead of the previous generation GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB as well as the Radeon RX 6800 card. The new card is 16% behind the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 25% ahead of its predecessor, the Radeon RX 6700 XT.

As with other AMD graphics cards, the overall picture of the new AMD is somewhat marred by ray tracing games – where the card still outperforms the Radeon RX 6800 at 1440p resolution, but it’s also significantly weaker than the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and even the version that only has 8GB of storage.

Obviously, the Radeon RX 7700 XT does a great job playing games at 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels), delivers high FPS at maximum quality settings, and performs fairly well even when using ray tracing.

The Radeon RX 7700 XT is also quite capable of handling games with a 4K resolution (3840 × 2160 pixels), but here the average performance drops to around 30 FPS in some games. If you enable ray tracing, you can’t count on a playable framerate at all.

Tests by KitGuru and TechPowerUp largely confirm the above picture of the colleagues at Tom’s Hardware. AMD’s novelty in these reviewers was able to completely overtake the GeForce RTX 4070 in individual games, for example in Cyberpunk 2077 (without ray tracing) and the new Starfield, but of course it was weaker in the vast majority of games. “An average of 25 games from our test set with a resolution of 1440P Radeon RX 7700 XT is significantly faster GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, about 20%‘ writes TechPowerUp.

Reviewers noted the very high power consumption of the Radeon RX 7700 XT graphics card. At the 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions, the graphics card consumes an average of 223, 235 and 239 watts respectively in games (data from Tom’s Hardware), which is significantly higher than the consumption of the Radeon RX 6700 XT and even more than the 181-194 watts for the GeForce RTX 4070 or 150-157W for the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. According to TechPowerUp, the maximum consumption is 265 W, which is even more than the Radeon RX 7800 XT. At the same time, reviewers noted that the GPU’s temperature remains relatively low even under load. For example, in the KitGuru test, the Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pulse heated its GPU to an average of 63 °C and up to 84 °C at its hottest spot. The noise level was only 33 dBA.

Many reviewers called the Radeon RX 7700 XT a good graphics card, but found that AMD missed the price a bit. In terms of price, the card hardly differs from the significantly more powerful Radeon RX 7800 XT. The latter is 16% faster on average at 1440p and offers an additional 4GB of storage for just 11% more (the RX 7800 XT starts at $499).

If we compare it to the competing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, then AMD’s new product is really the main advantage here. However, on the side of the “green” accelerator, higher performance in ray tracing games, as well as support for DLSS 3 with a frame generator and other useful features, the AMD card cannot yet boast of supporting FSR 3, since this technology already available is not released yet. But otherwise, the AMD card looks a lot more attractive for the same price – a 20% difference from traditional rendering is the main benefit.