Our 1080p ultra tests will shrink the gaps a bit, as CPU bottlenecks start to come into a play a bit more. And if you're only wondering about whether you should pick up the Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ or a reference card — or perhaps another model — you're not going to see any major performance differences.
Overall, the Sapphire card leads the reference 7800 XT by 3.2% at 1080p ultra, a slightly closer margin than before. Nvidia's RTX 4070 does gain some ground, however, as the 12GB and 192-bit interface become slightly less of a limiting factor at 1080p. Sapphire's Nitro+ falls 5.6% behind the 4070 Founders Edition this time.
Of course, average framerates are now above 100 fps for both GPUs, so unless you have a high refresh rate monitor, the current need for this level of hardware to run 1080p is a bit questionable. As more complex games come out, though, their requirements will continue to increase.
For our rasterization suite, Sapphire's card remains just a few percent ahead of the reference design. The RTX 4070 meanwhile trails by just 5% now, at least when we're not including the potential of Frame Generation: higher latency and smoothed out framerates.
There are also several games like Far Cry 6, Flight Simulator, and Forza Horizon 5 where we slam into the CPU wall and there's effectively no difference between many of the fastest GPUs. Just look at where the RX 7900 XT and RTX 4070 Ti land in those games and you can see they're obviously CPU limited to varying degrees — Flight Simulator is practically flat from the RX 7700 XT up through the RTX 4070 Ti.
Unlike some of the rasterization games, none of the DXR games are hitting CPU bottlenecks, even at 1080p. That's no surprise, as ray tracing very much puts the bottleneck on the GPU, at least up until the very fastest cards like the RTX 4090.
The RTX 4070 leads the Sapphire 7800 XT by 25% overall, a slightly bigger gap than at 1440p. Sapphire beats the reference 7800 XT by 3.8% as well. So, again, if you're hoping to see bigger differences between custom cards and reference designs, you'll need to look at aspects other than raw performance.
So let's move on to power, thermals, and noise levels to see precisely what those other aspects might be.
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