Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
AMD might say that the 7700 XT is for 1440p gaming, but plenty of people still have 1080p monitors. CPU bottlenecks mean a lot of the margins shrink a bit here, and the lower resolution also tends to be a bit more favorable to cards with only 8GB of VRAM (RTX 4060/4060 Ti and RX 7600). But there still aren't any significant differences between the Sapphire and XFX 7700 XT cards.
Overall, the Sapphire card lands just a few percent ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti at 1080p ultra — the large L2 cache on the Nvidia GPUs helps overcome the limited bandwidth more at 1080p. The gap is just 3% overall in favor of AMD, and both GPUs easily clear 60 fps in most games (DXR being the potential exception).
If you have a GPU that's several generations old, that's the bigger draw for the RX 7700 XT right now. It's not a significant improvement over the previous generation AMD GPU (RX 6800), but plenty of gamers try to skip a few generations. You can check our GPU benchmarks hierarchy for additional comparisons. For example, the 7700 XT is about 55% faster than RX 5700 XT (looking just at rasterization performance), for example, or twice as fast as RX Vega 64. It's also about twice as fast as the RTX 2060 (and costs $100 more than the 2060's launch price), and twice as fast as GTX 1080.
There's really nothing to add with our rasterization test suite that we haven't said already. Performance is very good overall, averaging 118 fps at 1080p ultra. That ranges from 82–85 fps (A Plague Tale: Requiem and Flight Simulator) at the bottom, to over 150 fps (Borderlands 3, Far Cry 6, and Horizon Zero Dawn) at the top.
There's no difference between Sapphire and XFX here, yet again. Against the 4060 Ti, the lead shrinks to just 12.5% now — noticeable, maybe, but not significant.
Our DXR suite at 1080p ultra does show the one instance where there's a slightly larger gap between the XFX and Sapphire cards. That's in Bright Memory Infinite (the standalone benchmark), and might be due to differences between the pre-launch and 23.9.1 release drivers.
Half of the games can also crest 60 fps, even with DXR enabled, though it's the three "lighter" DXR games in our test suite. It's sort of funny that, four years later, Control has now fallen into the category of being a less demanding DXR game. However, we do need to note an issue with that game on AMD GPUs.
We would routinely encounter massive slowdowns during testing of Control, after a few benchmark runs. This becomes even more common and problematic on the RX 7600 (and other 8GB AMD cards), but it also occurred on the RX 7700 XT. It's probably some sort of memory leak related to driver changes over the years, and we don't recall seeing it about a year ago. Hopefully, this note will get AMD to look into the problem.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
Current page: Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure: 1080p Ultra Gaming Performance
Prev Page Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure: 1440p Ultra Gaming Performance Next Page Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure: Power, Clocks, Temps, and NoiseJarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.
-
hotaru.hino
I would argue a lot of people, if they have the means to buy almost any car they want, will choose one car over another based on its color. Or even ask the dealer for a specific color if it's available.PEnns said:I don't know about you, but the majority of thinking people don't buy a car based on its color!!
About half the reason why I jumped on the motorcycle I bought a while ago was because being a Kawasaki, it didn't come in that obnoxious Kawasaki green (the other half was I was ready to move on from my first bike which it was replacing.) And I would say a non-trivial reason why I chose the car that I did was because I wanted to have matching colors with my bike.
Is it important in the grand scheme of things? No. But I had the choice. And if people didn't really care about color, why do you think that option exists? May as well go the Ford way and paint all cars black; it'll save them a lot in manufacturing. -
Good looks aside, i fear its pathetic 12GB VRAM renders it completely useless for modern gaming.Reply
-
punkncat Wow, future locked thread.Reply
For my own part, these cards are a bit of fresh air in the current market. It still stands that the MSRP on this, the 7800, and it's 6xxx forefathers is a bit confusing from a customer standpoint. For my own part, I love to see and often pick graphics cards as well as other components based solely on them NOT having unicorn puke spewing out of them. -
Geef Quick piece of unrelated info: I bought a ASRock Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GBReply
It is a very quiet card. Even while playing Starfield for several hours at a time. Lots of time tests. ;) -
JarredWaltonGPU
It's why the ability to change your RGB lighting options exists. Default might be rainbow on most cards/mobos, but it's simple enough (usually) to set it to pure red, green, blue, or some other color. That's the crux of the issue. Adding lighting, but limiting it to a single color that can't be changed, is going half-way on a feature.punkncat said:Wow, future locked thread.
For my own part, these cards are a bit of fresh air in the current market. It still stands that the MSRP on this, the 7800, and it's 6xxx forefathers is a bit confusing from a customer standpoint. For my own part, I love to see and often pick graphics cards as well as other components based solely on them NOT having unicorn puke spewing out of them. -
punkncat JarredWaltonGPU said:It's why the ability to change your RGB lighting options exists. Default might be rainbow on most cards/mobos, but it's simple enough (usually) to set it to pure red, green, blue, or some other color. That's the crux of the issue. Adding lighting, but limiting it to a single color that can't be changed, is going half-way on a feature.
I don't disagree, per se, but also that this is a design decision based on what the manufacturer wanted to put forth in regard to their vision of the look they were going for. I feel that it is nice to have choices on this and that manufacturers are giving them, even when spartan.
edit- I would also add that in order to control RBG often involves downloading a companion app that may or may not play right with other lighting apps and so on. Without doubt, open and eating resources albeit a small amount, but have a couple of those running for this and that part to light the way you want adds up. -
AgentBirdnest I would have thought they'd give it blue lighting... cuz, ya know... sapphires. : PReply
I really love those fan blades. Cool angular shapes. Too bad I'd never ever see it when the computer is on, though. : P
I love silence... I'd pay an extra $30, even $50, for a card that has quieter cooling. But between a $480 7700XT with excellent cooling, and a $500 7800XT with adequate cooling... I'd pick the latter. AMD prices the 7700XT so weirdly...
That's awesome! Congrats! : )Geef said:Quick piece of unrelated info: I bought a ASRock Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB
It is a very quiet card. Even while playing Starfield for several hours at a time. Lots of time tests. ;)
I feel like ASRock has really stepped up their game over the last couple of years, and makes some of the most compelling components now. -
nitrium It's also about twice as fast as the RTX 2060 (and costs $100 more than the 2060's launch price), and twice as fast as GTX 1080.Reply
I see neither of those cards in your charts. I know that the RTX 4060Ti is not (quite) twice as fast as an RTX 2060 in many (most?) games. The RTX 4070 is the first 4000 series card that gets there. -
wingfinger I don't care for lighting effects myself.Reply
What I don't like is that marketing and management probably think that they are providing an exciting and desirable product because of the lighting effects, instead of providing a reliable, great performance for the price product.
On a similar note, do people still buy graphics cars be because they are overclocked? I would buy an overlocked card, only because I don't want the lowest bin GPU possible. But, I would be looking for a mild overclock, never a high overclock.