We’re in that awkward stretch that happens in the second half of a GPU lifespan, where there’s nothing really new on the market, and there’s nothing announced or on the horizon for the next-generation, albeit, we all know something will be coming from the green and the red teams, but likely not until the end of this year or even next year.
So what do you do right now if you want a new graphics card? Well, it’s a pretty good time to buy one, with prices having come down a few pegs, and a lot more than that if you remember the COVID era of GPU shortages. There’s also good stock availability, meaning promotions are more common and most of the more interesting cards are available for next day delivery.
The AMD Radeon 7000 series has been with us for a little while now, but if anything, that’s good for consumers, as it’s given time for brands like Sapphire to mature their products, giving us some impressive looking options to pick from now in 2024.
For the budget concious gamer, it’ shard to ignore the Sapphire Radeon RX 7600 Pulse Gaming 8GB. For Full HD eSports and online gaming, it’s the cheapest entry in their line up right now. It scored a 117 FPS average at 1080p and 79 FPS average at 1440p when we reviewed it a year ago, and I’m sure driver updates have helped improve that over time too.
Available now for just £249.99.
Next up is the XT Gaming OC version, pretty much the same card as the pulse, but with double the VRAM, and a bit of a factory overclock, it’s going to have a little more juice for higher resolution gaming, higher texture quality settings, and in our review, it was about 17% faster than the Pulse on average.
Was £259.99. Available now for just £329.99.
For another £60, you can move up to the 7700 XT series, a more powerful chipset, and with 12GB of GDDR5 memory, it’s a good middle point in terms of VRAM from the two 7600 series cards, but that offsets some of the price of the more powerful chipset. This is getting into mid-range price and performance territory, and will be a great card for those wanting to game at higher resolutions and refresh rates, making it great for ultrawide monitors or higher refresh rate 1440p monitors in general for online gaming and eSports. Check out my review of the RX 7700 XT Pure here.
Was £469.99. Available now for £389.99.
This is the same card, but the more premium NITRO+ version, it comes with a much bigger and uprated cooling solution, allowing the card to run faster, quieter and generally it’ll be able to maintain its boost clocks more often than the Pure, and in my opinion makes one of the best price to performance ratio options available in the Sapphire range right now thanks to the healthy discounts on option right now.
Was £499.99. Available now for £399.95.
The price does leap up a fair bit here again, as we’re now around £200 more than the entry level cards. However, as you might expect it features a much faster GPU with more cores, and much more memory with 16GB of GDDR6. With that in mind, we saw this card hit an average of around 190 FPS with 135 1% lows on average over 15 games, with higher graphics quality. However, this includes in graphically intensive single player experiences too, not just the less demanding eSports titles.
Was £518.99. Available now for £469.99.
For a little more money, you can get the RX 7800 XT in an even better form, again just an uprated cooler design with three fans vs two fans on the beefed up models, but again a much bigger heatsink on the more premium NITRO+ model, allowing the card to run faster, cooler and quieter, but at an additional £60, that is a big jump for some, but it’s about the best card in the AMD range you can get right now before you take a much bigger price leap to the RX 7900XT.
I suspect most high-end PC gamers will have there eye on the RX 7800 XT series, and while the performance difference between the Pulse, Pure and NITRO+ isn’t huge, having handled these cards, there’s a noticeable build quality improvement with each upgrade here, so it really depends on how much you care for the more premium coolers, of if you want to save a few quid, as they’re all great cards. Check out my review of the RX 7800 XT NITRO+ here.
The Pure is available now for £499.99, and the NITRO+ was £569.99, and available now for £529.99.
This is a pretty exciting card, as the RTX 4080 Super is still over £1000, and while for the sake of balance here, the green teams card is fantastic, the RX 7900 XT chipset can go head to head with it all day long, offering surprisingly similar performance for around £200 less. Furthermore, being the NITRO+ edition of this card, it’s the best example of what AMD can do on the high-end side of the market. Ultra-high-refresh-rate and high-resolution gaming are perfectly suited to this card. Maxing out the latest games at 4K, and enjoying advanced features like ray tracing.
Was £899.99. Available now for £719.99.
This card is the ultimate end game of the AMD range right now, and while the price gap has actually widened a little since launch, both the XT and the XTX are now cheaper than they were at launch, which is great to see. My money would still be on the 7900 XT Nitro+ right now, as at £719.99 it’s hard to ignore the performance and value. However, there’s no getting away from the fact that the XTX is a much faster card, which performed closer to the RTX 4090, while the XT performed closer to the 4080 Super. Check out my review of the 7900 XTX GRE here and the review of the RX 7900 XTX Nitro+ here.
Was £989.99. Available now for £869.99.
Now occassionally, AMD like to offer up a little sweetener when it comes to buying a new graphics card in the way of dishing out some game codes, and right they, they have there “This is why we game” promotion.
This isn’t available on all the cards, or from every retailer, but some of them come with the AMD Radeon Game Bundle where you can choose 2 games when you buy an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT or RX 7700 XT graphics card. You’ll be able to select from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Starfield, Lies of P and Company of Heroes 3, giving you significant added value for these cards.
I am curious though, which two of these four games would you choose? I’d likely have Starfield and Company of Heroes 3 myself but if you want to find out more, you can get more information on the promotion here.
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