AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT vs RX 7800 XT: Which is best for 1440p gaming?

AMD launched the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT on September 8, 2023. They're very similar in price and performance, occupying the mid-range portion of the AMD GPU market. Which graphics card is best for 1440p gaming? The RX 7800 XT is the outright champion when it comes to performance, but the RX 7700 XT is more affordable, allowing those who can't part with $900 access to stable 2K PC gaming.

Price, specs & availability

The AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT have an MSRP of $850 and $900, respectively. This puts both of the graphics cards firmly in the mid-range segment of the market. They're incredibly similar, both being powered by AMD's RNDA 3 architecture and are built using TSMC's 5nm and 6nm manufacturing processes. In fact, both GPUs have the exact same number of transistors, yet the RX 7700 XT comes with six fewer shader units and ray accelerators, which helped AMD to lower the price slightly.

• 	AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT	AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
  Brand	AMD	AMD
  Architecture	RDNA 3	RDNA 3
  Process	5nm, 6nm	5 nm, 6 nm
  Transistors	28.1 billion	28.1 billion
  Shader Units	54	4,608
  Ray Accelerators/Cores	54	60
  AI Accelerators/Cores	108	120
  Stream Processors	3,456	3,840
  Base Clock Speed	2,171MHz	2,124MHz
  Boost Clock Speed	2,544MHz	2,430MHz
  Memory Capacity	12GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6
  Memory Bus	192-bit	256-bit
  Memory Bandwidth	1,995.3GB/s	2,708.4GB/s
  Power Draw	245 W	263W

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT also has 120 AI cores, compared to the 1080 found on the RX 7700 XT. For stream processors, we're looking at 3,840 for the RX 7800 XT and 3,456 (we see what you did there, AMD!) for the RX 7700 XT. Clock speeds are similar, though the RX 7700 XT is able to boost slightly higher. The 7800 XT is able to leverage its extra 4GB GDDR6 VRAM and 256-bit bus, which results in considerably faster memory. It's more powerful, but at a cost of increased draw from the PSU.

Performance

Both graphics cards were designed with 1440p gaming in mind and as such the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7700 is not too different from the RX 7800 XT. There are notable differences in some games, which reflect the higher core counts, more VRAM, and memory bandwidth. But if all you care for is an enjoyable 2K gaming experience, you won't have any problems with either graphics card. We would recommend buying the more expensive RX 7800 XT solely for its increased number of RT cores as ray tracing isn't close to Nvidia's offerings.

Related:AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT vs. Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti

We tested the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT in a variety of games, including Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2. As one can see from the results in the table below, the Radeon RX 7800 XT is the comfortable winner, but it's not vastly more powerful, costing just $50 more.

Ray tracing performance is poor at 2K and abysmal at 4K. AMD has done well with its third-gen ray tracing technology, but it's still not close to Nvidia's offerings with RTX 40 series cards. If ray tracing is important to your gaming experience, we'd recommend looking at Team Green's offerings. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 shows just how powerful Nvidia's GPUs are.

Which is right for you?

If you had to choose between these two GPUs, we'd recommend going with the RX 7800 XT. It uses more power than the RX 7700 XT but almost every other metric is better, including the capacity of its VRAM, the memory speed, and raw compute performance. We'd only recommend the RX 7700 XT if $850 is the maximum you can spend on the GPU, though at that point we'd recommend waiting for promotion periods for when the RX 7800 XT may be discounted.

The RX 7700 XT isn't a terrible GPU purchase. It's only slightly behind the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT yet manages to draw less power and still support the latest ray tracing technologies from Team Red. AMD also unveiled FSR 3, which should also help boost the frame rates possible with this GPU, and while the RX 7800 XT also supports the same technology, this will allow the RX 7700 XT to punch above its weight.

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT has more memory and better performance, but a higher price tag. So long as you don't mind spending an extra $50, you'll be good to go with 1440p gaming. This graphics card was designed for high-fidelity gaming without turning down any in-game settings to maintain stable frame rates. You won't be able to dabble too much into the realm of 4K gaming, but for $900, you'll have no trouble running the latest games at 2K on the best gaming monitors.