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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.
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