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I was surprised how small the Radeon RX 7600 reference card is. In fact, it's pretty much tiny compared to some of the triple slot behemoths we've seen. That alone will impress some buyers with compact cases looking to make use of its impressive display capabilities and media engine. Surely, the Ada-based successor to the RTX 3060 Ti is going to be thegraphics card of this generation for the GPU-thirsty masses. Surely, surely, now it's time to pull the trigger on a new RTX 40-series card. Overall, I'd say there are a few things the RX 7900 XT does well. For starters, it appears to be a good upgrade on even the RX 6950 XT, and considering the price difference between the two at launch, that's a good sign of AMD's progression with the RDNA 3 architecture. The reference cooler on this also seems pretty capable for the price, with temperatures running relatively cool considering its performance.
It's also worth noting that the previous generation of graphics cards do still have something to offer, with something like the GTX 1650 Super able to outpace a more modern RTX 3050 in most benchmarks. There are a few times when the differences between the XT and XTX are minimal, and the performance delta practically non-existent. The XT is also the much more efficient and cooler running of the two. Generally, though, you get what you pay for with the higher-end XTX card, if not a bit more.The AMD RX 7900 XT makes things a little more uncomfortable for both the RTX 4070 Ti and RX 7900 XTX because it's now the same price as the former, and considerably cheaper than the latter. Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 along with the Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless. We're not talking the cheapest of chips here, either. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is still a high-ish-end card by most counts. But its price tag is slipping into the more affordable end of the market by the week, and that's high up on a list of things we absolutely love to see.
It looks like some semi-satirical plastic model made up to skewer GPU makers for the ever-increasing size of their cards. But it's no model, and it's no moon, this is the vanguard for the entire RTX 40-series GPU generation and our first taste of the new Ada Lovelace architecture.We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. ( Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good. Oh, how I wish I could tell you it was an unreserved 'yes!' But, while this is absolutely the card you should buy if you were previously considering an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT, all because of its gaming performance lead, I don't feel great about making that recommendation. You can also see the above summary chart showing the relative performance of the cards we've tested across the past several generations of hardware at 1080p ultra — swipe through the above gallery if you want to see the 1080p medium, 1440p and 4K ultra images. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GT 1030, RX 550, and several Titan cards), but otherwise it's basically complete. Note that we also have data in the table below for some of the other older GPUs. Except for Intel's Arc GPUs. We haven't included them in this graph as the A770 and A750 3DMark results skew higher than their actual gaming performance and would be misleading. The two Intel GPUs generally post frame rate numbers that put them around either the RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti at a pinch. Graphics card MSRP list
Nvidia is positioning the RTX 4060 as a capable 1080p card with excellent power efficiency, and support for Nvidia's key technologies, including DLSS 3 with Frame Generation. In fact, it's really pushing DLSS 3 as the killer feature of the RTX 4060. The RX 7700 XT is built around the Navi 32 chiplet GPU, the same as that of the RX 7800 XT, just with some functionality disabled. Both come with a single 5nm Graphics Compute Die (GCD) and four surrounding 6nm Memory Cache Dies (MCDs) The RX 7700 XT for its part has one of the MCDs disabled. If, however, you're convinced rasterised performance is the only GPU metric worth a damn in this topsy turvy world of PC gaming, then the RX 7800 XT is probably the best upper mid-range graphics card you can buy today. Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPUs from the past four generations of hardware. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are from the latest Nvidia Ada Lovelace and AMD RDNA 3 architectures. AMD's graphics cards perform well without ray tracing, but tend to fall behind once RT gets enabled — even more so if you enable DLSS, which you probably should, though FSR2 is a reasonable alternative. GPU prices are finally hitting reasonable levels, however, making it a better time to upgrade.For the high-end gamer, you've plenty of new cards to choose from. Nvidia has its RTX 40-series led by the RTX 4090, and that thing really is a beast of massive proportions. No seriously, it's huge. Then there's the RTX 4080, which is a bit too pricey for us, and the RTX 4070 Ti. The RTX 4070 Ti also costs a heap more cash than we'd like, but at least it's more reasonable than Nvidia's finest for a perfectly 4K capable card. Every new GPU generation offers new features and possibilities. But rasterized rendering is still the most important metric for general gaming performance across the PC gaming world. Sure, Nvidia GPUs might well be better at the ray tracing benchmarks they more or less instigated, but when it comes to standard gaming performance AMD's latest line up can certainly keep pace. The increase in memory capacity from 16GB to 24GB with the RX 7900 XTX is a bonus, and the ray tracing performance on RDNA 3 is much more convincing to make me part with my money. And that's more than aesthetics, too. The size of the card hints at the efficiency of the 4nm Ada GPU quietly thrumming away inside of it. If you want a powerful, but low power card, the RTX 4070 fits the bill. Which will no doubt make it the darling of the small form factor PC brigade, and deservedly so.
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