BUT MUH RAY TRACING AND DLSS THOUGH!
With AMD set to launch the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT in just a few days time it’s only natural to see leaks in relation to publications and their official benchmarking figures of the aforementioned graphics cards, of which figures had surfaced on HD Technologia showcasing both the Radeon RX 7800 XT and the RX 7700 XT across a wide verity of different performance tests.
For reference, the Radeon RX 7800 XT comes equipped with 60 Compute Units totaling 3,840 Stream Processors with 16GB of GDDR6 19.5 Gbps VRAM, with an MSRP of $499 AMD themselves state that this mid-range product is slated to go up against the RTX 4070 which is a whole hundred dollars more expensive and comes packing only 12GB of memory.
The 7700 XT comes with 54 Compute Units, 3,456 Stream Processors, for $449 you’ll get only 12GB of GDDR6 rated at 18 Gbps, across a more limited memory bus width, 192-bit vs 256-bit and AMD themselves state that this is the competitor to the 16GB variant of NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 Ti which can be had from $449 of which the Radeon reportedly dominated in convincing fashion.
When it was initially announced, I was not a fan of the 7700 XT simply on the basis that it should be priced lower in comparison to the $500 RX 7800 XT which easily beats out the $600 RTX 4070 in terms of hardware, performance and value alone, if AMD were to directly compete with the $449 4060 Ti with the 7700 XT it would win more favorability with me personally, however let us see if spending that extra fifty dollars goes a long way in buying the 7700 XT over the GeForce.
Right off the bat let’s take a look at the performance figures across more or less some modern games, minus Grand Theft Auto V which generally should not even be among credible titles to benchmark in the current year, you’ll generally see favoritism towards both Radeons over their equivalent GeForce counterparts.
Sadly there’s absolutely zero system specifications to go off here, we don’t know whether the test machine is running AMD or Intel, nor do we even know exactly what resolution these cards were compared at, cross referencing performance figures roughly with those found elsewhere yields roughly similar figures for either 1080p or 1440p resolution depending on the game, so take these numbers with a grain of salt.
Starting with the Radeon RX 7800 XT versus the GeForce RTX 4070, performance varies wildly from marginal increases of 2-5% while there’s a handful of titles that showcase a larger variation in performance, Resident Evil 4’s remake showcases a 12% gain over the 4070, Hogwarts Legacy shows 15%, both Cyberpunk 2077 without Ray Tracing and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 show a monstrous 23% performance increase for the 7800 XT and Borderlands 3 shows 21%.
For rasterization, the 7800 XT is on average 6.88% faster than the RTX 4070 across the list of 17 different titles, with 16GB of VRAM as opposed to 12GB for a whole hundred dollars less, damn near 7% on average better performance is soul crushing for those dumb enough to have bought NVIDIA.
Secondly, the Radeon RX 7700 XT versus the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti.
There’s hardly any objection to the Radeon’s performance dominance as seen in AMD’s announcement PR slides, it’s a sea of green throughout, minus a marginal 3% performance loss on Dead Island 2.
With several titles showcasing a severe 20+ percentage swing in favor of the RX 7700 XT, with Borderlands 3 and Call of Duty showcasing a staggering 31% margin over the GeForce, on average across all 17 titles the Radeon RX 7700 XT holds a crushing 16% leverage over the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, it’s not even a fair comparison it’s seemingly in a whole other league entirely. Perhaps this is why it costs 12% more, despite the retarded price tag of $450 the Radeon still retains far better value for money than the NVIDIA counterpart.
Now then, let’s talk about pseudo Ray Tracing, because when I think of Ray Tracing in video games my first thought immediately goes towards overpriced mid-range graphics cards. The ideal battle ground for spectacular 30 FPS gaming at QHD resolution, with shiny reflections in puddles of water I really do love cuckolding my frame rate by upwards of 60%.
And to nobody’s surprise the performance swings widely here depending entirely on the game benchmarked, for whatever goddamn reason Cyberpunk 2077 was benchmarked no less than four times in total, especially given how the game itself is more or less an NVIDIA tech demo at this point given how it’s among the first if not THE FIRST game to accommodate whatever revolution to DLSS NVIDIA have come up with.
Anyways, comparing Cyberpunk 2077 with “RT Overdrive” or rather piss hue infused path tracing, you’ll see a staggering 64% and 69% performance drop from both the 7700 XT and 7800 XT respectively, despite how neither graphics card on the board could even consider actual path tracing playable with anywhere from 5-18 fps it’s more or less a tech demo to force gamers into using frame generation to validate their woeful performance.
As you continually drop Cyberpunk’s Ray Tracing setting the performance drops become less severe and actually swing more in favor of the Radeons, but even with Ray Tracing on low I still wouldn’t consider a 13% and 4% advantage a victory, especially not when playing at 63-76 frames per second on average.
The Callisto Protocol showcases a 9% performance loss for the 7800 XT compared to the RTX 4070, with neither graphics card managing 70 FPS while both the 7700 XT and 4060 Ti hold firm at 53 frames per second on average.
Moving into games that aren’t biased towards software based tensor trash, Dead Space shows a 19% advantage for the 7700 XT despite still not hitting 60 FPS and a much smaller 6% gain for the 7800 XT, which goes to show that there’s a lot more RT logic present when moving from AD106 (4060 Ti) to the AD104 core found on the $600 RTX 4070.
While AMD has their Ray Tracing embedded inside the cores themselves, the additional 6 CUs between the 7700 XT and 7800 XT just is not enough.
F1 2023 shows a 5% performance loss for the 7700 XT versus the 4060 Ti and a 14% performance drop for the 7800 XT from the 4070, Forza Horizon 5 shows a 2% performance gain for AMD across both cards.
Surprisingly though Resident Evil 4’s remake shows a 21% performance advantage for the RX 7700 XT and only 8% for the 7800 XT, needless to say, Ray Tracing certainly isn’t AMD’s strong suit which is a given how RDNA 3 has far less logic dedicated to RT than NVIDIA however said logic is actually embedded within the actual cores themselves.
There’s no real sugar coating it, on average for the Ray Tracing titles seen above the RX 7700 XT is on average 5.44% slower than the 4060 Ti, excluding Cyberpunk 2077’s taxing “Overdrive” Path Traced option, the 7700 XT is actually 1.87% faster on average when it comes to Ray Tracing over the equally priced RTX 4060 Ti.
The Radeon RX 7800 XT has it far worse off, with its Ray Tracing performance on average being 11.55% worse than that of the $100 more GeForce RTX 4070, the performance gap drops to only 4.37% when excluding Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive figures.
Neither card is viable for actual Ray Tracing, so I of course don’t really give two shits about the performance figures of them considering how actual FPS figures from both parties aren’t rectifiable for the most part.
And finally we have a crop of synthetic Futuremark benchmarks that were kindly compilated by the folks over at Videocardz.
The list provided does not include the Speed Way benchmark, which is UL’s newest high-end system test. When considering overall performance, the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT seem to surpass their NVIDIA counterparts in most benchmarks, except for one notable exception.
In the Port Royal benchmark, which incorporates ray tracing capabilities, the RTX 4070 appears to achieve higher scores when compared to the RX 7800 XT. However, it is important to note that even in this specific scenario, the RX 7700 XT emerges as the clear winner when pitted against the RTX 4060 Ti as it has shown to do on average albeit marginally across the RT gaming tests.
When comparing graphics scores, on average across all 3DMark performance tests, the Radeon RX 7700 XT is on average 25.85% faster than the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, with the main outliers being 3DMark 11 and Fire Strike Ultra where the 7700 XT not only decimates the equally priced GeForce by over 41% and 35% respectively, it somehow manages to marginally surpass the recorded scores of the RTX 4070 even.
Speaking of which, the RX 7800 XT manages to beat the RTX 4070 on average across all synthetic performance tests by 12.51% on average, with a 6.45% loss on the aforementioned Ray Tracing “Port Royal” benchmark, with Time Spy showcasing a ~8% advantage as opposed to the ~17% gain on Fire Strike.
Overall the performance figures of these new AMD Radeons are more than good enough to combat their respective NVIDIA GeForce counterparts, especially when considering the fact that you’re able to get superior performance in not just vastly superior gaming rasterization but practically identical Ray Tracing performance as well with the RX 7700 XT for the very same price as the 16GB variant of NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 Ti.
While the RX 7800 XT as previously mentioned has roughly the same performance figures as the previous generation RX 6800 XT, which contained far more Compute Units by comparison as the RX 7800 XT as well as the RTX 4070 are effectively utilizing mid-range chips, for $100 savings you can have 33% more VRAM, roughly 7% superior rasterization performance albeit inferior RT performance which is entirely irrelevant unless you’re a simpleton blinded by NVIDIA’s marketing.
I know which graphics cards I’d rather purchase.
