AMD announces Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT video cards

AMD presented two new video cards at the Gamescom fair in Cologne. The Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT will be available from September 6 and should serve the 1440p segment in which they will compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070.

With the arrival of the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT, AMD is supplementing its line-up of Radeon RX 7000 cards. This generation, based on the RDNA3 architecture, was first released in late 2022 with the high-end RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX. Six months later, the manufacturer introduced the RX 7600 to serve the entry-level segment. No new Radeons have been released between these segments, while competitor Nvidia has positioned its RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4070 here. As with the RX 7900 XT and XTX, chiplets will be used on the RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT, but for the new duo of video cards this will be in combination with the Navi 32 GPU.

GPU chiplets, what was it again?

AMD has been using chiplets since its RX 7000 series of video cards, similar to how Ryzen processors are constructed. With the GPUs, the largest, central chip is the graphics compute, on which the computing cores (stream processors) are located. The smaller chips placed around this are called memory cache dies. These each contain a 64-bit memory controller and 16MB cache memory. The GCD is connected to MCDs via infinity links. The advantage of this division is that smaller chips are cheaper to produce, and that the MCDs can be made using an older and therefore cheaper production process than the GCD without sacrificing performance.

RX 7800 XT: Lower specs than the RX 6800 XT, smaller chip

Of the two video cards announced today, the RX 7800 XT is the fastest. This model is built around Navi 32, a GPU consisting of a 200mm² GCD surrounded by four MCDs. This results in a 256-bit memory bus, to which 16GB GDDR6 is linked. The entire chip is active on the card, resulting in 3840 stream processors from 60 compute units. That number matches the previous generation RX 6800 and is less than the 72 cu’s that the RX 6800 XT has. It is also noticeable that AMD uses a simpler chip for this segment in this generation, compared to the RX 6800 XT, which received a partially disabled, but much larger chip. The memory bus is the same as its predecessor at 256 bit, but the memory bandwidth is more than 20 percent higher on the RX 7800 XT thanks to faster GDDR6.

AMD positions the RX 7800 XT against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 and gives the card a suggested retail price of 549 euros. The specified total board power of the RX 7800 XT is 263W.

RX 7700 XT: especially in the memory setup

The RX 7700 XT also has the Navi 32 GPU, but has 54 compute units and therefore 3456 stream processors active. That is only 10 percent less than what the RX 7800 XT gets, while no less than 25 percent has been cut from the memory setup. Of the four MCDs placed around the Navi 32 GPU, only three are active on the RX 7700 XT, which means that the memory bus is 192bit with 12GB of VRAM and that the amount of Infinity Cache is only 48MB. Because the memory speed of 18Gbit per second is slightly lower than that of the RX 7800 XT, the RX 7700 XT has only 70 percent of the memory bandwidth. This means that less bandwidth is available per active compute unit on the RX 7700 XT than on the RX 7800 XT, which can hinder performance.

AMD positions the RX 7700 XT against the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and mentions a suggested retail price of 489 euros. The total board power of the RX 7700 XT is 245W. Both the RX 7700 XT and the RX 7800 XT should be available from September 6.

RX 7700 XT RX 7800 XT RX 7900 XT RX 6700 XT RX 6800 XT