Is the Sapphire 7900 XT a Match for a 240Hz OLED Monitor?

240Hz OLED Gaming

A good GPU needs a good monitor to get the most out of it. There’s no point having a fast graphics card if you’re just running a 60Hz full HD monitor, not unless your goal is to only use 20% of the GPU anyway. So I’ve paired it with the truly fantastic 240Hz OLED AOC AGON PRO AG276QZD Monitor. Without a doubt, this monitor should be able to eat up everything this graphics card can push and then some.

Of course, 240Hz at a resolution of 2560×1440 is a big ask even for the best of the best GPUs, and while the faster frame rate does mean more stress on the CPU, or at least, requires a fast gaming CPU, the GPU requirements works out roughly the same as trying to play at 4K 120Hz. With that in mind, even with something like the 7900 XTX (or the flagship Nvidia cards), you’ll likely not hit 240Hz with max graphics settings without the use of some kind of frame generation and upscaling.

With the likes of AAA shooters such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, you can expect to hit around 200 FPS give or take, so long as your CPU can keep up, but any of the latest gaming CPUs of the last year or two will be fine in that regard. Personally, I’m more than happy with that, but if you did want to push that a bit more to max out the 240Hz, dropping from the Ultra to the High profile is more than enough, or simply enable FSR Quality and you’ll be pushing way beyond 240 FPS with ease.

Single player experiences such as Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, Ratchet and Clank, Dragon’s Dogma, and Alan Wake, for example, will all see around 120-160 FPS without the need for scaling on 7900 XT, so long as you’re not totally silly with extreme graphics settings, and a bit of scaling will keep those figures on the high-end without a drop in fidelity.

Personally, I can barely see a difference to anything above 120Hz/FPS, but the biggest benefit here, of course, is input latency. It starts to become less about the fluidity of motion on screen, and more about response times. You see things sooner, your movements and other people movements are reported to you faster, and it makes a big difference that you can absolutely feel. This monitor has a 0.03ms response time, and while I’ve played on countless 1ms response time monitors, you wouldn’t think you could feel the difference, but you absolutely can, it’s telepathically fast, and with Anti-Lag 2 the Sapphire 7900 XT, you can make the absolute most of it.

Games like Fortnite are obviously popular, but amazingly, it’s still one of the most demanding games out there, so maxing it out, you’re going to see around 100 FPS on a good day. You can get this up to 200ish with scaling, but that can impact visual fidelity if pushed to performance modes. Personally, this is a game I’m OK with running at around high settings and 120-140 FPS rather than impacting the resolution too much. Just avoid the Lumen/Ray Tracing stuff, as it’s a real performance hog.

Competitive games like CS:GO fare much better, as do some of the more optimised games such as the Doom series, F1 2022 and 2023, The Riftbreaker and the likes. With these, seeing FPS in the hundreds is achieved easily enough, and again that brings down input latency, maxes out the refresh rate of the display, and lead to a more competitive edge.

Obviously, AMD Fluid Motion Frames 2 is here now, and we’re working on a video to dive deeper into what that has to offer. I do like frame scaling and frame generation technologies, but understand that they’re a bit of a marmite subject for some gamers. Personally, if you want to get the most out of the flagship ultra-high-refresh-rate monitors, even on the most extreme GPUs these technologies are required to max out the panels.