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4K ultra will often be too much for the RX 7800 XT to handle, at least when running without any form of upscaling. As with the 1080p medium results, we will only provide limited commentary here. There are certainly games where 4K ultra is viable, and there are other games and settings (like basically everything with ray tracing) where you'll need to adjust your expectations.
Overall, 4K ultra shows the biggest gap between the RX 7800 XT and RTX 4060 Ti. AMD's new GPU now leads by 37% overall. That's partly because the 4060 Ti 8GB card does run out of VRAM capacity in several games, resulting in a relatively massive hit to performance.
For example, in Watch Dogs Legion, the 7800 XT leads by 73%, up from 54% at 1440p and 45% at 1080p ultra — it's one of the games where ultra settings, even without ray tracing, can surpass 8GB of VRAM use. Far Cry 6 has a similar 77% gap between the two cards, compared to 46% at 1440p ultra and 32% at 1080p ultra. Forza Horizon 5, Borderlands 3, Spider-Man, Control, and Bright Memory Infinite also show about a 20% shift in relative performance compared to the 1440p results.
This is the one case where the doubled VRAM of the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can actually show some benefit. However, there's not enough horsepower in the GPU to really take advantage of the extra memory, and raw memory bandwidth doesn't improve. Still, the overall margins between the 7800 XT and 4060 Ti 16GB are closer than on the 8GB card, with AMD holding a 30% lead across the 15-game test suite.
It's also noteworthy that while 8GB of memory clearly starts to run into capacity bottlenecks in our test suite, the same can't be said of 12GB cards like the RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 is still 5% faster than the RX 7800 XT across our full test suite, down from being 6% faster at 1440p ultra — so a 2% net change, but nothing massive.
That's not to say there aren't games and settings where even 12GB of VRAM can prove insufficient, but none of the games in our current test suite fall into that category, and the visual benefits of 16GB versus 12GB are often negligible, at least on games that are coded in a reasonably optimal fashion.
We'll look at a few more games on the next page that may push VRAM use harder than previous-generation games like the ones in our test suite. Otherwise, enjoy the other 4K charts below.
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