AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT: AMD is utilising this week’s Gamescom event in Germany as the setting for their most recent Radeon video card announcements. Gamescom is the largest video gaming trade exhibition in Europe. The Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT, the company’s much anticipated middle members of the Radeon RX 7000 series, were just released. Aimed at the 1440p gaming market and built on AMD’s new Navi 32 GPU, the new cards are intended to fit in the middle of AMD’s product stack, providing gamers who don’t require the cutting-edge performance of the Radeon RX 7900 series cards with a set of powerful RDNA 3 architecture video cards.

However, the announcement of the launch of these cards was just that: an announcement. These cards, as well as AMD’s new Hypr-RX capable drivers, will be available for purchase in a few weeks, on Wednesday, September 6th. That date also happens to be the release date for Bethesda’s ARPG Starfield, for which AMD is the sole PC hardware partner, and which AMD will include alongside the new Radeon cards as part of the company’s latest game package. As a result, the stars are aligning for AMD’s GPU division to have a banner day on September 6th.

AMD forewent the normal top-to-bottom GPU and video card strategy for this generation, instead releasing the top video cards which is Radeon RX 7900 XTX & 7900 X first, followed by the bottom of the stack Radeon RX 7600. As a result, this is one of those uncommon launches in which the middle components, which roughly comprise the “enthusiast” group, are the last to launch. The specific order is generally unimportant, but it means that we’ll know how the AMD cards above and below it perform before the Radeon RX 7800 XT is released.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT is the first to be announced, and AMD will pitch it as their flagship 1440p gaming card.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT contains 7680 ALUs with a nearly full Navi 32 setup. AMD has clocked this part slightly less aggressively than the flagship RX 7900 XTX, yielding a max boost frequency of 2430MHz and an average game clock of 2124MHz. On paper, this translates to an average FP32 compute throughput of 32.6 TFLOPS, however as with the rest of the RDNA 3 family, architectural changes make throughput comparisons with previous AMD cards difficult.

According to the statistics, the Radeon RX 7800 XT provides roughly 76% of the compute throughput of the card that comes next, the RX 7900 XT. However, notably, compared to both RX 7900 series cards, the number of ROPs has been cut in half, resulting in a rendered pixel throughput that is closer to 50%. The actual performance disparity between this card and the 7900 XT shouldn’t be nearly as large as few games are totally ROP-bound, but it emphasises the fact that we’re not looking at something as simple as 75% of a 7900 XT.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT has four active MCDs and is connected to a 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus. While the 7900 series cards have been clocked at 20Gbps, AMD has made the unusual decision to reduce the clock speeds of the Radeon RX 7800 XT to a significantly fractional 19.5Gbps. This provides the final card a total memory bandwidth of 624GB/second. This is supplemented by 64MB of Infinity Cache distributed over the MCDs, accounting for two-thirds of the cache found on AMD’s top cards.

The usage of a 256-bit memory bus allows AMD to easily equip the card with 16GB of VRAM, which will be a significant marketing advantage for the firm when competing with the GeForce RTX 4070 and its 12GB of VRAM on a 192-bit memory bus. As a result, AMD has the lead in both memory capacity and memory bandwidth, however as we’ve seen in the past, this won’t always transfer into a performance advantage for AMD.

In any event, AMD’s massive generational upgrade drive will put the Radeon RX 7800 XT against GPUs that are now four years old, such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT and GeForce RTX 2070. The Radeon RX 7800 XT should roughly quadruple those cards’ performance, making them a more appealing upgrade for system owners whose present 1440p cards are no longer keeping up.

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