Sapphire 7900 XT & AOC Q24G2A – A Perfect Upgrade for Competitive Gaming?

RX 7900 XT Performance

If you’re a competitive gamer, and you don’t have to be involved in eSports to say that you are, you can just be the person who likes to win, and well… that’s pretty much most gamers, then upgrading your graphics card is really just part of the solution to getting better performance, and upgrading your monitor can be equally beneficial. However, there’s obviously a lot of sense in doing both! I currently have a Full HD AIO monitor that runs at 60Hz, it’s one I use for a lot of back-end test bench stuff, and a bit of gaming when the other systems are occupied.

Test system:

• NZXT Z690 ATX
• Intel Core i9-12900K 4.9 GHz all P-Core 4 GHz E-Core 1.3v
• AMD Sapphire Pulse RX 7900 XT
• 16GB Crucial DDR4 4400 MHz XMP
• 512GB NVMe SSD
• Thermaltake Tough Power 750W
• NZXT H7 Flow RGB Case

Fortnite

Running Fortnite on the RX 7900 XT Pulse, I can see I’m generating over 130 FPS without the card breaking much of a sweat.

What was apparent was quite a lot of screen tearing, way more than I expected actually. There’s also input latency, even more so if you put on V-Sync to clean up the frames.

CS:GO

This was a much smoother experience, hitting a tasty 350-360 FPS with maxed-out graphics, but again the input latency, resolution and refresh rate mean I’m barely getting the advantage of the faster graphics card.

Valorant

Valorant surprised me, not really played this for a while, but it flew to between 350 and 450 FPS, so performance clearly isn’t an issue on this one. However, again, input latency and resolution are lacking a little bit and not giving me the performance edge you’d want from your GPU upgrade.

Apex

Without making any launcher modifications, Apex hit its 144 FPS cap and stayed there, clearly, the RX 7900 Pulse is plenty powerful for what I need.