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After 1440p ultra, the next most sensible resolution and setting target for the RX 7800 XT is 1080p ultra. It should easily handle any current game at these settings, with room for the future in most cases. CPU and other system bottlenecks can also come into play here, so the margins between the various GPUs will likely shrink compared to 1440p.
Compared to the RTX 4060 Ti (either the 8GB or 16GB variant, as they're basically tied at 1080p), the overall lead for the RX 7800 XT shrinks to 17% now — 8% less than the 1440p lead. As expected, the biggest changes are in the rasterization suite, where a few games clearly hit a CPU limit.
It's interesting to note that the RTX 4070 overall lead actually increases relative to 1440p, from 6% to 9%. That's likely partly due to memory bandwidth becoming less of a factor at 1080p. But overall, the standings don't change too much.
At 1080p ultra in rasterization games, the overall 7800 XT lead compared to the 4060 Ti shrinks to 28%, down from 40%. The biggest factor here comes from Microsoft Flight Simulator, which slams into a CPU limit of around 87–92 fps at ultra settings on the Core i9-13900K. Incidentally, that's also one of the games that shows the largest gains from AMD's 3D V-Cache, so if you happen to be a Flight Simulator devotee, an AMD X3D chip can help a lot.
That's not the only game to show a big shift in relative performance compared to 1440p, though. A Plague Tale: Requiem has a 10% decrease in the margin of victory, and Horizon Zero Dawn has the gap drop by 19%, while most of the other games are 5–8 percent closer at 1080p than at 1440p — again, using the RX 7800 XT and 4060 Ti as the reference points.
The RTX 4070 and 7800 XT are also effectively tied now, with AMD holding a scant 2% lead overall. There's still variation among the games, with the 7800 XT leading by as much as 16% (Borderlands 3) and losing by as much as 9% (Total War: Warhammer 3), but every game runs well north of 60 fps, and only two games (Plague Tale: Requiem and Flight Simulator) fail to break the 100 fps mark.
The RX 7800 XT and RX 6800 XT continue to deliver nearly identical performance, with the overall gap sitting at less than 2% now, and a range of -2% to +10% for the 7800 XT.
Ray tracing still favors Nvidia GPUs, and because it's more demanding, the margins relative to 1440p ultra remain pretty consistent. For example, the overall DXR result still favors the 7800 XT over the 4060 Ti by 3% compared to 6% — hardly worth mentioning the 3% delta. The two biggest changes come from Cyberpunk and Spider-Man, which had a 7% net drop, while the other four games have relative performance within 2% of the 1440p results.
It's the same story elsewhere. The RTX 4070 comes out 30% ahead of the 7800 XT at 1080p ultra in our DXR suite — 3% more than the 1440p result. Likewise, 7800 XT and 6800 XT remain very close, with an 8% gap separating them — the same as at 1440p.
It's worth noting that of the six "heavy" DXR games we tested, two still fail to break the 60 fps mark, and two more don't clear it by much. Cyberpunk 2077 remains the most demanding of the games, pulling just 43 fps on the 7800 XT, while Bright Memory Infinite (the standalone benchmark, not the regular game that is actually far less demanding) gets 51 fps. Minecraft manages 62 fps, and Metro Exodus gets 66 fps, but both of those have 1% lows well below the 60 fps mark at around 45 fps.
This is why upscaling remains an important consideration, and while AMD has FSR 2 that provides universal support for upscaling across all reasonably modern GPUs (we've even tested it on older Intel integrated graphics), the fact remains that DLSS 2 upscaling is both more prevalent and also delivers higher quality visuals and the same goes for Intel's XeSS (when running on the XMX cores, at least).
Unfortunately, there's no universal upscaling solution that leverages the power of AI and deep learning and also runs across all hardware solutions. FSR 2 uses shader calculations and "hand-written" code, with more blurriness than DLSS and XeSS. DLSS, of course, requires an Nvidia RTX GPU and uses Nvidia's tensor cores, while XeSS requires an Arc GPU and XMX cores for the higher quality mode, with DP4a (4-bit integer) support for other GPUs that end up delivering quality more in line with FSR2.
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