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Surely, the Ada-based successor to the RTX 3060 Ti is going to be thegraphics card of this generation for the GPU-thirsty masses. Surely, surely, now it's time to pull the trigger on a new RTX 40-series card. There's more to the Radeon RX 6700 XT than a simple halving of silicon from AMD's top RDNA 2 chip, the Radeon RX 6900 XT. In some ways, sure, it's a straight slice down the middle. The RX 6700 XT features 40 compute units (CUs) for a total of 2,560 RDNA 2 cores and is equipped with 64 ROPs—exactly half of the maximum configuration of the Navi 21 GPU—but the card comes with more than its fair share of memory and Infinity Cache.
On the one hand, it's a hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver when given a long leash, and on the other, a slightly tone-deaf release in light of a global economic crisis that makes launching a graphics card for a tight, very loaded minority of gamers feel a bit off. Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably will come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over the coming year, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing — see our what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria. GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts While AMD still has some catching up to do in ray tracing performance, in most other regards the RX 7800 XT is the better card for your money than anything Nvidia can offer today. Though I still feel many will side with an RTX 4070 instead for a little more cash. But the memory spec on the Arc A750, for a card of its price, is immense. Mostly that's because Intel's Arc A750 is more graphics card than it should be for the money. Intel invested on some beefy specs for its first-generation GPUs, including a massive memory spec, and ultimately the drivers couldn't get to where Intel wanted them to be. That means some games don't play nicely on the Arc A750, but it's not all bad. It also means that the Arc A750 has a lot of untapped potential. It's been designed to beat an RTX 3060 Ti by as tight a performance margin as possible—and you honestly can't argue with the business reasons for doing so—but without DLSS 3 and Frame Generation it certainly doesn't feel like a particularly exciting generational upgrade over the old Ampere card.Nowadays you'll only find older 16-series GPUs with the GTX prefix attached, so it's pretty much RTX all the way. Is ray tracing only for RTX cards? After enjoying several seasons shooting and before that many more beating and working his English Springer Spaniels photographer, writer and author Matt Limb OBE started an ever-growing collection of shoot cards, or as they are sometimes referred to, game cards. We're not talking the cheapest of chips here, either. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is still a high-ish-end card by most counts. But its price tag is slipping into the more affordable end of the market by the week, and that's high up on a list of things we absolutely love to see. For our latest benchmarks, we've tested nearly every GPU released in the past seven years, plus a few extras, at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it makes sense, we also test at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All of the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which in our new suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.
There's no denying it is an ultra-niche ultra-enthusiast card, and that almost makes the RTX 4090 little more than a reference point for most of us PC gamers. We're then left counting the days until Ada descends to the pricing realm of us mere mortals, which is still yet to happen despite the launch of the RTX 4070 Ti. The Arc A750 comes with impressive AV1 acceleration for encoding in the new, bandwidth-savvy codec. That's a big deal if you're a streamer or content creator looking to improve the quality of your videos. The A750's ray tracing ability is similarly beefed up compared to the competition's.The older GTX prefix is now used to denote older Nvidia graphics cards which don't have the extra AI and ray tracing silicon that the RTX-level cards do. This RTX prefix was introduced with the RTX 20-series, and highlights which cards have GPUs which sport both the Tensor Cores and RT Cores necessary for real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
There will be cases where the A750 is way off the mark, and that pretty much rules this card out for anyone on an older system without Resize BAR support, but generally I think it's a savvy buy for its new lower price and definitely a bit of a budget underdog right now. At a time when graphics cards are often underwhelming for the money and dreadfully prescriptive at the lower-end, I'm finding myself getting surprisingly more and more onboard with the Arc A750 as a great option. The RTX prefix is only used to denote cards which house Nvidia GPUs with dedicated ray tracing hardware, but AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs and RDNA 3 GPUs also support real-time ray tracing acceleration. Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 along with the Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless. AMD also has FSR3 coming soon, providing for frame generation. Like DLSS3, it will add latency, and AMD requires the integration of Anti-Lag+ support in games that use FSR3. But Anti-Lag+ only works with AMD GPUs, which means non-AMD cards will likely incur a rather large latency penalty.
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We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. ( Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good. Yet as an RTX 4080 competitor the RX 7900 XTX is less convincing. It's rarely able to match the RTX 4080. The RTX 4080 is up to 28% faster in my testing, though it's more like 15% on average. For an RTX card that asks at least 20% more cash than the RX 7900 XTX, that stat is not a dealbreaker, but it does make the XTX's gains more moderate by comparison. What helps the XTX's value proposition is that it has more memory and, on rare occasions, actually beats the RTX 4080. If you're only playing Far Cry 6 then you're laughing with an XTX, but let's be honest, you're not. The increase in memory capacity from 16GB to 24GB with the RX 7900 XTX is a bonus, and the ray tracing performance on RDNA 3 is much more convincing to make me part with my money. The AMD RX 7900 XT makes things a little more uncomfortable for both the RTX 4070 Ti and RX 7900 XTX because it's now the same price as the former, and considerably cheaper than the latter.
There are a few times when the differences between the XT and XTX are minimal, and the performance delta practically non-existent. The XT is also the much more efficient and cooler running of the two. Generally, though, you get what you pay for with the higher-end XTX card, if not a bit more. After years of massively inflated GPU pricing, is the RX 7600 the card the market has been crying out for? The RX 7600 is easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia. Though it's important not to overlook Intel's Arc cards either. For now, the RX 7600 is touted as being a solid option if you're after a card on a tight budget.
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While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's only 3% faster than the next closest RX 7900 XTX at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 8% at 1440p and then 23% at 4K. Against the RTX 3090 Ti, it's also a major upgrade: 14% faster at 1080p, 27% faster at 1440p, and 51% faster at 4K.
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