AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB Review Featuring XFX MERC 319

Ray Tracing & DLSS

Now I’ve probably been a little unfair to NVIDIA in this review, as it’s clear to see that AMD have beaten them in pure rasterisation, but NVIDIA have been more focussed on Ray Tracing and DLSS lately, and maybe the 7800 XT can give a better uplift in these technologies from its RDNA2 counterpart, and maybe NVIDIA can show up as a little more competitive.

What we find here is in Control, the 7800 XT packs another 9% more performance when compared to its predecessor with Ray Tracing enabled and performance is now much closer to the more expensive RTX 4070 though this is a game where NVIDIA can fair better due to DLSS upscaling technology, but the same can be said for games that support FSR which would make AMD look better than NVIDIA.

In Cyberpunk, Ray Tracing takes a huge hit as expected, though we still see an 18% improvement gen to gen, though the RTX 4070 is still 42% ahead, though none are at what I’d called “playable framerates”. FSR comes to the rescue and gives us 65 FPS on the 7800 XT which is an impressive 14% ahead of the 6800 XT though the RTX 4060 manages to match it with a 1 frame per second difference, and then DLSS 3 comes into it’s own, which is an area AMD really need to hurry up on if they want to compete as the 4060 Ti 8GB is a far cheaper card.

In Spider-Man, the 7800 XT still shows a 12% uplift when enabling Ray Tracing compared to the 6800 XT and improves on its upscaling technology too by a smaller 3% which also happens to be enough to beat the more expensive RTX 4070 by a marginal 2%, though DLSS 3 more than makes up for it, so it will be interesting to see what FSR with frame gen brings in the near future.

Watch Dogs: Legion is the last Ray Tracing test we’ve done and again we see a healthy uplift of 13% when going from the 6800 XT to the 7800 XT and this now puts it just 7% behind NVIDIA’s more expensive RTX 4070 so AMD have clearly done a lot of work on Ray Tracing to bring the fight to team green.

As we look at the overall averages for Ray Tracing, the increase from RDNA2 is pretty decent at 12% in the averages and 14% in the 1% lows though what’s more interesting is how this now compares to NVIDIA with the 7800 XT only sitting 9% behind the more expensive RTX 4070 but sitting 29% ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti 8GB, and while the 16GB may perform a little better, it’s still not going to be a match for the 7800 XT, even with it being priced higher, so maybe NVIDIA haven’t got the Ray Tracing market sewn up as much as first thought.