Radeon RX 7800 XT And 7700 XT Review: Midrange AMD Gaming GPUs Put To The Test

Speed Way is the most recent addition to the UL 3DMark graphics test suite. Speed Way uses the DirectX 12 Ultimate API and leverages advanced features like DirectX Ray Tracing tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time raytraced reflections, Mesh Shaders, and high resolution textures and artwork…

UL 3DMark Speed Way DX12 Ultimate Benchmarks

The 3DMark Speedway test has the new Radeon RX 7800 XT cards and the Radeon RX 7700 XT, grouped together in the upper third of the chart. All of the cards outrun the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, but the more powerful GeForce RTX 4070 finishes quite a bit ahead. The Radeon RX 7900 XT, however, takes the pole position with this group of GPUs.

UL 3DMark Time Spy DX12 Benchmarks

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from UL. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading. Time Spy is designed to test the DX12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the UL Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

3DMark Time Spy, which doesn't feature any ray tracing, has the new Radeon RX 7800 XT cards outpacing the GeForce RTX 4070, and trailing only the higher-end Radeon RX 7900 XT. The Radeon RX 7700 XT also performs well here, nipping at the RTX 4070's heals, but outperforming the Radeon RX 6800, RTX 4060 Ti and lower-end cards.

UL 3DMark Port Royal Ray Tracing Benchmarks

Port Royal was released as an update to UL’s popular 3DMark suite. It is designed to test real-time ray tracing performance of graphics cards that support Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, or DXR. Although DXR is technically compatible with all DX12-class GPUs, the graphics card must have drivers that enable support for the feature.

The new Radeon RX 7800 XT cards and Radeon RX 7700 XT put up a relatively strong showing in the RT-enabled Port Royal test. Here, the GeForce RTX 4070 notched another victory over the newest RDNA3-based Radeons, but the gap is relatively small -- versus the 7800 XTs at least. All of the new AMD cards outpaced the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, however.

DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) Feature Test

We also tested the cards with UL's DirectX Ray Tracing Feature test. This test is laser-focused on path-tracing performance, and uses few of the card's other resources.

Unlike Port Royal, the Direct X Ray Tracing Feature test is solely focused on ray tracing performance and showcases the strength of Ada's newer RT cores. In this test, there's not catching the GeForce RTX 40 series cards. Heck, even the Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition (16GB) card puts up a better result than any of the Radeons, save for the high-end Radeon RX 7900 XT.

VR Benchmarks: VR Mark & Unigine Superposition

Superposition is the latest benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in too. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some excellent visuals. We ran Superposition's VR Future benchmark to compare the performance of all of the graphics cards featured here.

Unigine Superposition VR Future Test

AMD's latest Navi 32-based Radeons performed very well in our first VR-related benchmark. In this test, the Radeon RX 7000 series cards take the top four spots, with the Radeon RX 7800 XT cards and 7700 XT all outperforming the GeForce RTX 4070. The Radeon RX 7900 XT, however, offers a big performance boost here.

UL VR Mark Blue Room Benchmarks

UL's VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC to run and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Blue Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here, which is currently the most taxing test offered by the tool.


Our results with VRMark are somewhat different than Unigine's. In this test, the Radeon RX 7800 XT cards continued to outpace the GeForce RTX 4070 by a small margin, but the Radeon RX 7700 XT drops down a couple of rungs. Still, the Radeon RX 7700 XT clearly outmatches the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, and previous-gen Radeon RX 67x0 series cards.