AMD announces Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT starting at $449

“I just wish there was an option between the $300 to $400 tags that offered enough performance to push us hard into the 1440p era.” That was the conclusion my colleague Tom Warren reached in reviewing the $399 Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti and $269 AMD Radeon RX 7600.

On September 6th, AMD might be getting closer — and that’s when it ships the new RX 7700 XT at $449 and 7800 XT at $499, with a free copy of starfield to sweeten the pot.

The company claims that both cards can average over 60fps in the latest games at 1440p with max settings and no fancy upgrade tricks — including buggy PC ports like The Last of Us Part One And Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Both GPUs average over 100fps call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II, The company claims.

Things get really interesting on comparisons with Nvidia, where the $450 7700 XT could beat the $400 GeForce 4060 Ti — and the $500 7800 XT could beat the $600 RTX 4070 in point-and-shoot games (and even some sim- X-rays), while leaving a whole hundred dollar bill in your pocket.

Now remember that we weren’t particularly impressed with the generation-to-generation upgrades of any of the Nvidia cards, and we can’t yet say if AMD has made enough improvement to entice gamers away from the previous-generation cards. But as of yesterday, the latest generation 6800 XT still costs more than $530 at retail. Are GPUs headed in the right direction again?

It is still a bit big. Even the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT reference design takes up 2.5 slots as wide as a desktop computer, compared to Nvidia’s two-slot design for the RTX 4070 Founders Edition and below. It requires more power too, up to 265 watts versus GeForce’s 200 watts. Some will appreciate that they’re holding on to a pair of 8-pin PCI-E power sockets.

But they may have it in the memory department, as some of Nvidia’s lower-end GPUs are unnecessarily held back, with the RX 7700 XT having 12GB of GDDR6 and a 192-bit interface for 432GBps of total bandwidth, while the RX comes 7800 XT has a total of 16 GB, 256-bit, and 624 Gbps.

If AMD’s results and prices hold up, these cards could certainly entice gamers like myself away from Nvidia – but keep in mind that GPU prices tend to bend towards what buyers are willing to pay, and its competition can afford to cut prices to maintain market share. . Nvidia just made $6 billion in net profit from its AI chips, and the company hasn’t forgotten where it came from.

In addition to the cards themselves, AMD will also release FSR 3 on September 6th. The latest version of the upgrade technology adds frame generation, which uses machine learning to visualize a new frame among existing ones, much like a more advanced version of motion smoothing on TVs. (Nvidia added this in DLSS 3.0, and AMD calls it “Fluid Motion Frames”.)

FSR 3 also includes “Native Anti-Aliasing”, a new optional mode that uses FSR technologies to combat anti-aliasing and improve game graphics instead of to be upgraded from a lower resolution.

AMD says FSR 3 is already slated Cyberpunk 2077, abandoned, Immortals of Avium, Avatar: Pandora’s Frontier, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Frostbank 2, a team, Starship Troopers: Annihilation, Black Legend: Wukong, Crimson desertAnd Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

starfield It won’t ship with FSR 3, but rather with FSR 2. Incidentally, AMD says Bethesda is welcome to add Nvidia’s DLSS to that game as well.

While FSR is still working on competitors’ graphics cards, as long as game developers add the technology to their games, AMD will also add frame generation to its driver at an unspecified date. This way, you’ll be able to inject extra framerates into any DX10 or DX11 game using your AMD graphics card, without the need for developer support.

On September 6th, the driver will also include Hypr-RX, a single toggle that can automatically turn on FSR (or more limited RSR, when FSR is not supported), Radeon Anti-Lag, Radeon Boost, and other features that affect the image but Performance improvement features. “Our research tells us that 70 percent of customers are willing to compromise on image quality,” says Frank Azure, head of gaming at AMD. (I definitely have friends and family in that 70 percent.) Fifteen games will be validated to start Hypr-RX.

AMD will sell its RX 7800 XT reference design directly at Amazon.com AMD.com With the dual fan cooler you see in the render at the top of this post. Most of AMD’s partners seem to opt for 3-fan coolers. Here are a few of the nicer looking ones, in my opinion.