Radeon RX 7800 XT And 7700 XT Review: Midrange AMD Gaming GPUs Put To The Test
Radeon RX 7800 XT & 7700 XT: GPU Compute, Rendering And Encoding Tests
We tested all of the graphics cards represented in this article on an ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO motherboard, equipped with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and 32GB of G.SKILL DDR5 RAM clocked at 6,000MHz. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" defaults, then we disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use and enabled Resizable BAR support. We dialed in memory clock to its optimal performance settings using its EXPO profile, then formatted the solid state drive and installed Windows 11 Professional before performing all updates. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, applications and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
The two Radeon RX 7800 XT cards from AMD and XFX finish right on top of each other in IndigoBench, trading blows with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, depending on the model. The Radeon RX 7700 XT, however, drops in behind an RTX 4060 and perform about on-par with the previous-gen Radeon RX 67x0 cards.
Blender is somewhat of a showcase application for NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. Blender can make use of the RT cores on NVIDIA's GPUs, and as a result, performance is much higher than any competing GPU in a similar class. That said, the application has been updated to use AMD's HIP, which leverages Navi's ray accelerators. Still, there's no catching NVIDIA here, where even the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti dispatched the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT by a wide margin, with every model.
The Blackmagic RAW speed test has the GeForce RTX 4070 dominating the rest of the pack with the more compressed 12:1 test. In the 3:1 test, however, all of the higher-end cards are more evenly matched. Still, despite putting up some decent numbers, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT land about in the middle of the pack overall, well ahead of the GeForce RTX 4060 cards, but trailing cards like the RTX 3060 Ti and 4070.
Are you ready to look at gaming performance? That's up next...
Our Test System Configuration:
Hardware Used: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (4.2GHz - 5GHz, 8-Core) ASUS X670E Hero 32GB G.SKILL DDR5-6000 Samsung SSD 990 Integrated Audio / Network Intel Arc A770 LE Radeon RX 6750 XT Radeon RX 6700 XT Radeon RX 6800 Radeon RX 7800 XT XFX MERC 319 Radeon RX 7800 XT XFX QICK 319 Radeon RX 7700 XT GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 4070 Relevant Software: Windows 11 Pro 22H2 AMD Radeon v23.20.01.05 / v23.8.2 NVIDIA Drivers v531.93 Intel Arc driver v101.4369 |
Benchmarks Used: LuxMark v4 Blender v3.5.0 Blackmagic RAW Speed Test v3 IndigoBench v4.4.15 UL 3DMark UL VRMark Unigine Superposition Company Of Heroes 3 Returnal Cyberpunk 2077 Far Cry 6 GOTY Edition F1 2022 Guardians Of The Galaxy |
LuxMark v4.0 Benchmarks
LuxMark is a cross-platform, OpenCL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's a tool based on the open source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the transportation of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software licensed under the GPL that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max.
The new Radeon RX 7800 XT cards and the Radeon RX 7700 XT perform well here, but ultimately trail their NVIDIA-powered rivals. Versus previous-gen Radeon RX 6000 series cards in the same class, these newest Radeons are somewhat faster here. Save for the beastly Radeon RX 7900 XT though, the GeForce RTX 40 series cards outrun the competitive Radeons.
IndigoBench Rendering Benchmarks
IndigoBench is based on Indigo 4's advanced rendering engine and offers both CPU and GPU rendering modes for its two built-in models. The standalone benchmark is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux and outputs results in M/Samples per second.
The two Radeon RX 7800 XT cards from AMD and XFX finish right on top of each other in IndigoBench, trading blows with the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, depending on the model. The Radeon RX 7700 XT, however, drops in behind an RTX 4060 and perform about on-par with the previous-gen Radeon RX 67x0 cards.
Blender v3.5.0 GPU Rendering Benchmarks
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, and animation, through simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and even video editing or game creation. The developers offer a standalone benchmark tool that will track performance while rendering a handful of models. We used all three of the default models for these tests...Blackmagic RAW Speed Test Results
The Blackmagic RAW Speed Test is a CPU and GPU benchmarking tool that tests the speed of decoding full-resolution Blackmagic RAW frames. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance at various resolutions and bitrates on the CPU or using OpenCL or CUDA on a GPU. We're reporting two results here, both at an 8K resolution, but at differing bitrates and compression levels.The Blackmagic RAW speed test has the GeForce RTX 4070 dominating the rest of the pack with the more compressed 12:1 test. In the 3:1 test, however, all of the higher-end cards are more evenly matched. Still, despite putting up some decent numbers, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT land about in the middle of the pack overall, well ahead of the GeForce RTX 4060 cards, but trailing cards like the RTX 3060 Ti and 4070.
Are you ready to look at gaming performance? That's up next...