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AMD says the RX 7800 XT primarily targets 1440p gaming, so that's where we'll begin. We expect the normal showing for an AMD GPU: relatively stronger rasterization performance and weaker ray tracing performance. And of course things still vary by game, where some may be more heavily optimized for AMD (i.e. Starfield and Borderlands 3) while others are more optimized for Nvidia (i.e. Total War: Warhammer 3).
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.
There's rarely a massive difference between varying cards using the same GPU, and that's the case here. The Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ consistently outperforms the reference model, but it's still only a few percentage point difference. Overall, Sapphire's card ends up 3.6% ahead of the Made By AMD card.
That's nearly enough to put it on the level with the RTX 4070, even when including some heavy ray tracing games. Depending on what you intend to do with your PC, you can easily be swayed to Sapphire's card or the Nvidia card. Meanwhile, the next step up from AMD represents a 20% improvement in performance for 36% more money, so the 7800 XT manages to carve out a place for itself.
Focusing on the rasterization games doesn't really alter the story, though now the Sapphire card and the reference 7800 XT place well ahead of the RTX 4070, with Sapphire offering 10% more performance. The tables will of course turn when we get to the DXR charts below.
But does the Sapphire care offer enough of an improvement over the reference design to justify the price increase? If you're primarily concerned with raw performance, the answer is now. It's 3.3% faster overall, which is close enough that the only way you'd really spot the difference is via benchmarking. There are reasons to get the Nitro+, though, like aesthetics and cooling, and we'll get to the latter in a couple of pages.
Looking just at the two RX 7800 XT cards, DXR seems to give the Sapphire card a bit more of a lead over the reference MBA design. It's not much more, at 4.0% overall, though several of the games show a 5% delta.
As noted above, DXR tips things in favor of the RTX 4070 rather than the Sapphire card. Where Sapphire was 10% faster at rasterization, it's 18% slower overall with ray tracing. That does include one of the most demanding DXR tests, however, with Minecraft running 72% faster on Nvidia's GPU. Is that due to the superior ray tracing hardware, or simply a case of the game being more optimized for Nvidia? You might think it's the latter, but Intel's Arc GPUs (not shown here) also do quite well in Minecraft with the latest drivers. Basically, the heavier the RT workload, the more AMD's inferior RT Accelerators get punished.
Many other DXR games aren't nearly as heavy, or nearly as favorable to Nvidia and Intel GPUs. Despite using multiple RT effects, Bright Memory Infinite, Control, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales all show the 4070 leading by far narrower margins of 7–17%.
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