Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure Review: Pretty but Expensive

Depending on the games you play, the RX 7700 XT can be more than capable of handling 1440p, or it can struggle — that's usually only in games with lots of ray tracing effects, though. As usual, AMD has stronger rasterization performance and falls behind in ray tracing.

We begin with a global view of performance using the geometric mean of all 15 games in our test suite, including both the ray tracing and rasterization test suites. Then we'll have separate charts for the rasterization and ray tracing suites, plus charts for the individual games.

The Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure and the XFX RX 7700 XT QICK 319 end up with identical overall results, down to the decimal. There's a bit of wiggle room in the various games, but that's almost certainly just margin of error in testing. Accorss our test suite, there's rarely more than a 1% difference, and often less than a 0.5% difference.

Looking at the surrounding GPUs, the 7700 XT lands just 5% ahead of the RX 6800, but 14% behind the RX 7800 XT. It's also 10% slower than the RX 6800 XT (not shown). Against Nvidia, it's 8% faster than the 4060 Ti — both 8GB and 16GB variants still performed the same at our 1440p ultra testing — and 19% behind the more expensive RTX 4070.

Generationally, if you don't look too closely at retail pricing, it's also 26% faster than the RX 6750 XT. That would be a decent jump in performance, and the MSRP is actually lower than the RX 6700 XT / 6750 XT, but both of those cards came out in the dark days of cryptocurrency GPU mining shortages and were heavily influenced by the increased demand at the time. These days, it's a $100 increase in price compared to the 6750 XT, and $130 more than the 6700 XT. You get what you pay for, in other words, with close to linear scaling between price and performance.

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Our rasterization game suite shows aggregate performance of 90 fps. The lowest performing of the games, A Plague Tale: Requiem, just barely hits 60 fps, with 1% lows  of 53 fps. Everything else does better, with minimums mostly at or above 60 fps. The only other exception is Total War: Warhammer 3 where the minimum fps is 48, but that game tends to have periodic stutters while loading data and isn't really dependent on having super high framerates.

The Sapphire and XFX 7700 XT cards remain tied, and the overall standings don't change much, other than the relative margins between AMD and Nvidia GPUs tilt in favor of AMD.

Speaking of which, across our rasterization test suite, the Sapphire card outperforms the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB by 20% overall, with a spread ranging from 4% (Total War: Warhammer 3) to 38% (Borderlands 3). There's not a single case in our test suite where the Nvidia 4060 Ti was faster at 1440p in pure rasterization. That might change if we looked at other games, but in general, AMD easily wins the rasterization battle.

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DXR swings things the other way, with the RTX 4060 Ti cards coming out slightly ahead of the RX 7700 XT. Sapphire's Pure card doesn't offer any additional performance compared to the XFX card, and a couple of the games fail to break 30 fps with full ray tracing enabled (at native resolution — FSR 2 would certainly help where supported).

Like we said, it's the standard story: AMD does great in rasterization, and falls behind in ray tracing. There are of course far, far more games that don't utilize ray tracing, so you can make that argument in favor of AMD if you want. But the more complex the ray tracing (see: Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty with full path tracing), the worse AMD's GPUs tend to perform.

If you're not looking at worst-case performance with full path tracing, things aren't too bad. The Sapphire 7700 XT beat the RTX 4060 Ti in both Metro Exodus Enhanced and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, while falling behind by 2–11 percent in Bright Memory Infinite, Control, and Cyberpunk 2077 (in RT-Ultra mode). Minecraft with full path tracing meanwhile heavily favors Nvidia, with the 7700 XT landing 36% behind the 4060 Ti.

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