Review Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ Review: Big and Quiet

[Admin]

The Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ uses a large triple-fan cooler with superior fans to significantly reduce noise levels. It also adds a bunch of RGB lighting and comes priced $60 higher than the reference design.

Sapphire RX 7800 XT Nitro+ Review: Big and Quiet : Read more

 

[Deleted member 2950210]

The 16 GBs of VRAM alone, are more than enough to instantly make this a better purchase than the pathetic 4070 Ti.

 

[Colif]

At least they didn't describe it as the Sexiest 7800xt, unlike Kitguru

Paying extra for a quieter GPU is probably worth it.

 

[oofdragon]

So... 108fps vs 121fps against the 4070Ti, a difference no one can notice in real gameplay. That missing VRAM though? Even playing at 1440p we know it's not enough already, goes to show how overpriced Nvidias cards really are. So even if the 4070Ti costed $500 right now the 7800XT would still be the better buy. Thats the result of greed and planed obsolescence for you, a behavior I don't fund with my money. My 2 cents though, tight now the 6800XT is still the better buy at ebay around $400, it's virtually the same GPU.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

The obsession with ray tracing is unhealthy, unfortunately all reviewers and influencers have drunk the kool aid. If you didn't know you would think it's some kind of ubiquitous feature across the entire gaming industry.

 

[gg83]

@JarredWaltonGPU why do you think the 6800xt is so close to the 7800xt? And do you think AMD spent a lot of money designing these new cards, or just took this generation off?

 

[hnrich]

May as well just pay the little bit extra to get the cheapest 7900xt.....,. If you are paying more for a 7800xt

 

[PEnns]

The obsession with ray tracing is unhealthy, unfortunately all reviewers and influencers have drunk the kool aid. If you didn't know you would think it's some kind of ubiquitous feature across the entire gaming industry.

And when Nvidia's cards are losing badly, they immediately include Ray tracing in the "reviews" where their cards have some advantage!!

Shameless shilldom.

 

[hnrich]

The obsession with ray tracing is unhealthy, unfortunately all reviewers and influencers have drunk the kool aid. If you didn't know you would think it's some kind of ubiquitous feature across the entire gaming industry.

I think raytracing will become more and more common though, especially to highlight the advantage of pc gaming over consoles. A lot of AAA titles are featuring it now. That and lack of dlss make me reluctant to buy an AMD card. I think fsr2 has pretty poor image quality.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

The 16 GBs of VRAM alone, are more than enough to instantly make this a better purchase than the pathetic 4070 Ti.

But per the article….

-Cons
AMD RDNA 3 isn't as efficient as Nvidia

We get it, loyalty above anything else.

 

[Lamarr the Strelok]

For at least a few years now Nvidia has been more power efficient compared to an AMD card with similar specs.I despise Nvidia right now but it's generally true.I'm on AMD right now and have had Nvidia cards before.
So no. It has nothing to do with 'loyalty'.

 

[Colif]

its all about shifting goal posts. As soon as one catches up in one aspect, its not important anymore and this other thing is more important... you not allowed to win.

 

[-Fran-]

Ugh... I love Sapphire cards, but I hate this iteration of the shroud. That round aesthetic doesn't seem nice to me.

I still love the RX480 shroud the best out of all generations: https://www.guru3d.com/story/sapphire-radeon-rx-480-nitro

The last generation shroud for the Nitro+ cards was ok, but oh well...

Also, I'm almost certain they can get away with a smaller cooler, but they just want to make the coolers bigger due to the increasing gen-over-gen power consumption (not talking efficiency).

All in all, I wouldn't buy this card due to the premium price, but with a discount putting it at BBA (built by AMD, although not quite XD) MSRP or under it, it is a good buy for sure!

And thanks for the review!

Regards.

 

[Colif]

Would you care so much if you didn't have a glass side panel and couldn't actually see card?

You can only see side of cards anyway, so what front looks like doesn't mean a lot. It appears to be similar to mine in that its got a long argb panel along side of card.

NITRO+ AMD Radeon™ RX 7800 XT 16GB

Up to 2565 MHz, 16GB/256 bit DDR6. 19.5 Gbps Effective

www.sapphiretech.com

 

[-Fran-]

Would you care so much if you didn't have a glass side panel and couldn't actually see card?

You can only see side of cards anyway, so what front looks like doesn't mean a lot. It appears to be similar to mine in that its got a long argb panel along side of card.

NITRO+ AMD Radeon™ RX 7800 XT 16GB

Up to 2565 MHz, 16GB/256 bit DDR6. 19.5 Gbps Effective

www.sapphiretech.com

I don't have cases with a window panel in them, so you're 100% right I shouldn't care, but I do xD

Regards 😛

 

[Colif]

Well, that is strange but I can't change you.

I put up with a led strip on my last GPU that I couldn't alter, for 3 years. You get used to it after a while. Now my only regret with current card is I can't change its colors with anything other than the Powercolor app.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Would you care so much if you didn't have a glass side panel and couldn't actually see card?

You can only see side of cards anyway, so what front looks like doesn't mean a lot. It appears to be similar to mine in that its got a long argb panel along side of card.

NITRO+ AMD Radeon™ RX 7800 XT 16GB

Up to 2565 MHz, 16GB/256 bit DDR6. 19.5 Gbps Effective

www.sapphiretech.com

I dont care much for the looks, but I do prefer vertical positioning.

Hence why I'm having such a hard time letting go my old and trusty Cooler Master Elite 120.

 

[Colif]

mine has rgb on front, back and side so there is always going to be some face of it I can't see... without turning PSU shroud into a mirror.

Vertical just mean I can't see back... no way to see it all

Red Devil AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XT 20GB GDDR6 - PowerColor

www.powercolor.com

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

@JarredWaltonGPU why do you think the 6800xt is so close to the 7800xt? And do you think AMD spent a lot of money designing these new cards, or just took this generation off?

I think AMD put a lot of effort into reworking everything for their GPU chiplet architecture. From a performance standpoint, it didn't pay off except for RX 7900 series, because those have more Compute Units (CUs). But chiplets are inherently less efficient and so it hurts there as well.

On a generational basis, 6800 XT had 72 CUs clocked at around 2.25 GHz (often a bit more, but that's spec) while 7800 XT has 60 CUs clocked at 2.43 GHz. Architecturally, the only massive change is the doubling of compute potential, but it seems that's not really leveraged by games. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it's partly that the doubling of compute isn't always useful, and partly just an inability to keep all the compute elements fed with data.

AI (Stable Diffusion) is the only thing where I've really noticed a big jump in RDNA 3 vs. RDNA 2. And note that the "AI Accelerators" in RDNA 3 are just sharing the compute shader stuff, which was also done with RDNA 2 but just wasn't talked about much. Anyway, I think there's more support for this in RDNA3, so that you can issue one "AI instruction" instead of several "shader instructions" to accomplish the same task.

Nvidia's Ada isn't a radical change from Ampere, architecturally (outside of the DLSS 3 / Frame Generation stuff, which is a whole other can of worms), but things were reworked to get much higher clocks, and the switch to TSMC 4N gave a massive improvement in efficiency. AMD did the big clock speed increase last generation, but otherwise CU * clocks seems to be relatively consistent as a performance estimator between RDNA2 and RDNA3.

RX 6800 XT = 72 * 2.25 = 162
RX 7800 XT = 60 * 2.43 = 145.8
So you can see that RDNA 3 does improve, but it's not by a lot. Some of that improvement is certainly due to the doubling of compute per CU as well, which in practice seems to improve gaming performance by maybe 15~20% compared to RDNA2.

RX 6650 XT = 32 * 2.635 = 84.32
RX 7600 = 32 * 2.655 = 84.96
In practice, probably partly because Navi 33 and Navi 23 are so similar, the gains here are even smaller. RX 7600 ends up maybe 5% faster than RX 6650 XT. That's probably again thanks to the doubling of compute, but it's interesting that the benefits here seem quite a bit smaller than with Navi 32 vs Navi 21 above.

 

[gg83]

I think AMD put a lot of effort into reworking everything for their GPU chiplet architecture. From a performance standpoint, it didn't pay off except for RX 7900 series, because those have more Compute Units (CUs). But chiplets are inherently less efficient and so it hurts there as well.

On a generational basis, 6800 XT had 72 CUs clocked at around 2.25 GHz (often a bit more, but that's spec) while 7800 XT has 60 CUs clocked at 2.43 GHz. Architecturally, the only massive change is the doubling of compute potential, but it seems that's not really leveraged by games. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it's partly that the doubling of compute isn't always useful, and partly just an inability to keep all the compute elements fed with data.

AI (Stable Diffusion) is the only thing where I've really noticed a big jump in RDNA 3 vs. RDNA 2. And note that the "AI Accelerators" in RDNA 3 are just sharing the compute shader stuff, which was also done with RDNA 2 but just wasn't talked about much. Anyway, I think there's more support for this in RDNA3, so that you can issue one "AI instruction" instead of several "shader instructions" to accomplish the same task.

Nvidia's Ada isn't a radical change from Ampere, architecturally (outside of the DLSS 3 / Frame Generation stuff, which is a whole other can of worms), but things were reworked to get much higher clocks, and the switch to TSMC 4N gave a massive improvement in efficiency. AMD did the big clock speed increase last generation, but otherwise CU * clocks seems to be relatively consistent as a performance estimator between RDNA2 and RDNA3.

RX 6800 XT = 72 * 2.25 = 162
RX 7800 XT = 60 * 2.43 = 145.8
So you can see that RDNA 3 does improve, but it's not by a lot. Some of that improvement is certainly due to the doubling of compute per CU as well, which in practice seems to improve gaming performance by maybe 15~20% compared to RDNA2.

RX 6650 XT = 32 * 2.635 = 84.32
RX 7600 = 32 * 2.655 = 84.96
In practice, probably partly because Navi 33 and Navi 23 are so similar, the gains here are even smaller. RX 7600 ends up maybe 5% faster than RX 6650 XT. That's probably again thanks to the doubling of compute, but it's interesting that the benefits here seem quite a bit smaller than with Navi 32 vs Navi 21 above.

Incredible response, thank you! Hasn't AMD had another card (Radeon VII) with high compute ability but underutilized in gaming? I think it was an incredible mining card at the time. Or I was dreaming.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

The obsession with ray tracing is unhealthy, unfortunately all reviewers and influencers have drunk the kool aid. If you didn't know you would think it's some kind of ubiquitous feature across the entire gaming industry.

Of course it's unhealthy but it sells GPU's, it's marketing. I personally find RT a non factor for my gaming needs. If it's available it's disabled. I find that the price of these cards and their requirements just swings the pendulum in favor of the consoles. Most AAA games are first designed around the latest consoles then ported to the PC.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Incredible response, thank you! Hasn't AMD had another card (Radeon VII) with high compute ability but underutilized in gaming? I think it was an incredible mining card at the time. Or I was dreaming.

Radeon VII was great for mining Ethereum because it had 1TB/s of memory bandwidth thanks to the dual stacks of HBM2. Compute was decent as well, but Ethereum is less about compute and more about bandwidth.

 

[AgentBirdnest]

Architecturally, the only massive change is the doubling of compute potential, but it seems that's not really leveraged by games. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it's partly that the doubling of compute isn't always useful, and partly just an inability to keep all the compute elements fed with data.

But... but... the TFLOPS! My TFLOPS are bigger than yours!

Seriously - really interesting, informative post! : )

 

[NeoMorpheus]

I personally find RT a non factor for my gaming needs. If it's available it's disabled.

Likewise. I simply havent found a reason to justify the perfomance hit given the almost not existant results produced by enabling RT in the few games that I felt that maybe was worth turning it on.

I find that the price of these cards and their requirements just swings the pendulum in favor of the consoles.

I have a Series X and a 7900 XTX and besides the 30 fps and some missing details in Starfield, I am sincerely having a hard time observing the difference, without looking at the FPS counter.

Most AAA games are first designed around the latest consoles then ported to the PC.

And it looks like they havent even reached a proper utilization level on the latest consoles.

 

[englandr753]

Since the days of the mighty 295x2 made by Sapphire, I gave it a spin and purchased through Newegg and received it excitedly and used it for less than 3 months then it died. I contacted Newegg, they forwarded me to Sapphire no support and they promptly sent a replacement than lasted for about 10 days. I go through the replacement process once more to only receive a 3rd unit that didn't work out of the box. Customer No Support told me at that point they would not send another card and ALSO would NOT refund my money, forcing me to accept a single R9 380x, which was NOT an equivalent value to my 295x. So, after spending nearly 100 in shipping for 3 295x cards and waiting for about 2 months to receive replacements, they ripped me off with the crappy value replacement. I quickly sold the 380 on eBay to get Sapphire's products out of my hair. That was around 2015. Needless to say, I haven't and won't be buying another Sapphire product again. I see some have had good luck with their products. Maybe the channel I purchased through Newegg sucked. I know Newegg went under the gun for these types of experiences from Steve with Gamers Nexus and supposedly cleaned up their act a bit so hopefully these bogus sales channels don't exist anymore.