Graphics card
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
Introducing a multi-chip RX 6800 XT for less – and Dave James thinks that it’s actually the best £500 GPU around.
SPECS
GPU: Navi 32
Arch: RDNA 3
Process: TSMC 5nm + 6nm
Clock: 2,124MHz (2,430MHz boost)
Mem: 16GB GDDR6, 256bit, 624GB/s
Stream: 3,840
Compute: 60
RT cores: 60
AI cores: 120
ROPs: 96
Cache: 64MB
TGP: 263W, 2x eight-pin
Die: 200 + 150mm²
Trans: 28.1B
Codec: 4K h264, h265/ HEVC, AV1
How much value do you put on ray tracing as a gamer? That’s got to be the question at the forefront of your mind if you’re considering dropping £500 on an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. Because if you are 100% sold on ray tracing, you probably need to consider whether you’re actually willing to pay another £100 for the privilege of extra RT performance and drop the cash on the RTX 4070 instead.
If, however, you’re convinced rasterised performance is the only GPU metric worth a damn in this topsy-turvy world of gaming, then the RX 7800 XT is probably the best upper-mid-range graphics card you can buy today.
Now, apologies for sounding too much like some class-obsessed Victorian English gent, creating strata after strata of card so we can jam the RX 7800 XT somewhere that makes sense. But when graphics card pricing is so ludicrously spread out – with the next Radeon up costing £800 at best – this £500 price point needs some sort of classification of its own.