AMD is taking aim at the 1440p market with two new GPUs that attempt to balance generation-on-generation performance improvements and affordability.
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It’s no wonder where much of this performance is coming from when looking at the specifications for both of AMD’s newest cards, especially when it comes to memory bandwidth. The RX 7800 XT features 16GB of GDDR6 memory over a 256-bit memory bus, giving an effective memory speed of 624GB per second. The RX 7700 XT is pared back but not significantly so, with 12GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit bus for an effective speed of 432GB per second. That’s much higher than the 288GB per second on the RTX 4060 Ti (a figure which Nvidia disputes with its own new calculations), and explains why the RX 7700 XT can seemingly pull so far ahead.
With that in mind, it’s important to note that both of these cards consume more power (265W on average) than the 200W cards they are being compared against. Additionally, these are 2.5 slot GPUs while reference designs for the RTX 4070 are a slimmer 2 slots, which might be important if you’re building a PC with limited space. At least the AMD cards stick to the more commonplace 8-pin power connectors, so there’s not risk of damage from poorly handled 12-pin ones used on Nvidia cards.
The RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT will both be able to leverage AMD’s new FSR 3 suite of tools, including the new software-based frame generation that will work across both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It’s set to launch with Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum later this year.
