2023 was an interestingly big year for technology. Coming off the heel of the increased prices of NVIDIA 30 series graphics cards during the pandemic, we have entered into what I call the “second wave” or “refresh” of the 40 series generation. With a ton of people questioning the validity of their product within the market for the first time in a long time, NVIDIA is facing solid criticism for their ability to deliver a product that delivers proper price for power.
With Intel coming into the ring again with their Arc series cards, proving to be a valid platform for cost-conscious players and AMD coming in with a little bit of a higher price-to-performance value, it is easy to look at what NVIDIA is bringing to the table and walk away from it entirely. While it might seem strange, folks are opting for AMD 6600 XT graphics cards over some of the newer options from NVIDIA.
As we begin the year of 2024, people have been asking me for advice on what they should consider when upgrading their current system or building a new one. Perhaps the biggest question I get asked: “Is AMD as bad as folks are making it out to be?”
Well, after a couple of months playing around with an ASUS TUF RX 7800 XT, I have some very interesting results. Although, I don’t want to just show you a graph focusing on the rasterization performance, as those could be found in any video review out there. Instead, I want to tell you what I found with words and a brief explanation.
Realistic Expectations
NVIDIA has always been a huge name in the market, if not, the most popular brand out there almost by default. Over the last few years they have put a huge emphasis on technologies like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), Ray Tracing, Reflex, and more. But, it comes at a rather steep price- especially coming off the pandemic with exuberant pricing structures. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to upgrade but not wanting to spend almost $800 for a decent experience.
There is a caveat there as PC gaming is a whole different beast. Chances are, if you are a PC gamer and tech enthusiast, you are already aware of what I am going to say. A “decent experience” is relative to your expectations as a gamer. Folks wanting a 4K gaming experience on a 27” monitor with 240 Hz refresh rate will spend way more money than someone who is absolutely fine with a 1080p 120 Hz experience. Hell, some folks are fine with a 60 Hz refresh rate- something that is borderline heretical to say.
When looking at rasterizations performance, it’s nice to know that a graphics card will give you 240 Hz performance, but how important is that to you? How important is DLSS- a technology that only works on a handful of games at the moment? What about Ray Tracing? These are all equally important questions, and they aren’t designed to pre-load my experience with the AMD RX 7800 XT.
…but it also kinda is…
Swapping Over
Going from an RTX 3070 Ti to the RX 7800 XT is a rather interesting experience as the changes are both immense in terms of software. NVIDIA has their GeForce Experience while AMD has the Adrenaline software, both designed to manage your system’s settings. While the GeForce Experience mainly focuses on the installed graphics card, AMD’s Adrenaline software allows you to manage your GPU as well as your AMD-based CPU. After some time with the baseline software, getting used to AMD’s approach is useful.
The only problem is how AMD manages their software. When I tried to play Enshrouded, the display flickered uncontrollably. This lead me to believe that my drivers needed updating, but the software didn’t allow me to update. Something felt a bit odd and I discovered that this old build didn’t have the “update drivers” option. After re-downloading the necessary software again, my drivers were up to snuff. Enshrouded looked absolutely great with max settings.
Another aspect to get used to is the terminology between both NVIDA and AMD. For example, NVIDIA has DLSS and AMD’s has FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), both at the core are designed to do the same thing but there is a caveat. NVIDIA’s DLSS is a closed-platform concept while AMD’s FSR is open source, allowing others to toy around with the technology and deliver their own solutions.
While FSR has had its own growing pains, thanks to the open source concept, the technology has grown. Plenty of games have started to support it. Much like DLSS, FSR can only support select titles. It doesn’t mean your games will look worse, but it does mean that as both of these technologies evolve, so will your games.
Aside from the driver issue, jumping over to team red is rather seamless. Aside from making sure the GPU will fit in your case, all you need to do is remove your old drivers and just reinstall AMD’s. One huge plus side is that AMD’s GPUs utilize standard PCIe connectors. Sure, you might need to run three cables from the power supply, but it has been much easier to use over NVIDIA’s proprietary 16-pin (12+4) connector which has caused it’s own brand of discourse, setting entire computer systems on fire and leading multiple companies blaming each other (as well as the user) for the flames.
Performance
When it comes to rasterization performance, the 7800 XT provides a really smooth experience. I have seen refresh rates up to 144 Hz, the maximum my display can handle, with a wide range of games. Granted, the 3070 Ti was also able to handle a lot of the games I threw at it. The only major difference came to some titles where I was pushing the resolution while keeping up with the enhanced graphical fidelity.
My current build that I tested these games features an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, a 2TB Samsung EVO 980 PRO SSD, all on an ASUS TUF X570-Pro motherboard with a 750W power supply. The monitor I am using is the BenQ MOBIUZ EX3410R, which features a nice ultra-wide 34” 3440 x 1440 1000R curved panel with 144 Hz refresh rate, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, and 1ms response time. I also have a secondary ASUS 15” USB-C 1080p portable display that is plugged directly into the motherboard and using AMD’s integrated graphics engine.
Now that my system has all its specs put on the floor, let’s take a look at the games that I tested on the 7800 XT. I have played a handful of low- and high-demanding titles which include World of Warcraft, Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Elden Ring, Armored Core 6, Halo Master Chief Collection, Balder’s Gate 3, and Cyberpunk 2077. What I have found in each game is rather interesting but I’d like to really focus on a couple of titles to keep this whole thing a bit more condensed.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
I’m actually massively surprised by how well the 7800 XT was able to handle this game at max graphics. With smooth fidelity, I found myself having to take occasional breaks because the game just ran too smooth. In some instances I did find a fair share of jagged lines and stair casing, but after playing around with some of the internal anti-aliasing effects, I was able to get a much deeper and cleaner view.
A common theme with most games running on AMD hardware is toying around with the settings as a lot of the games I did play suffered from this slight stair casing effect. Call of Duty’s guns looked smooth and the amount of blurring effects were minimal. I got a nice, clear picture on my display, but some of the backgrounds just really stood out with the jagged edges. That was until I fixed a core issue caused by AMD’s drivers.
Prior to that fix, I found myself having a blast while maintaining a really high frame rate around 120 fps. Smooth frame rates during first person shooters are so incredibly important, and I am glad to see that the PC optimization team really did a great job ensuring this game ran smooth even if the drivers weren’t fully up to date.
After I had everything properly updated, Call of Duty ran even smoother. The jagged edges were gone and the details started to really pop. If you have anything remotely shiny, that really showed off well here. The enhanced smoothness and visual effects really popped off the screen with high-quality details. Rocks looked rocky, blood looked bloody, and enemies looked pretty good while they blasted me in the face.
In one of the best rounds I have ever played in the franchise, I ran around this Greek-themed seaside village and was able to make out the extreme details found even with my camera whipping around trying to aim at the two dudes who happened to walk into my peripheral vision.
Aiming down sights and taking one out with an SMG and quickly swapping to my pistol to finish off the other in a rare double-kill scenario did something to my brain that made me forget all about my core focus here- which was assessing the game on a visual standpoint to a point that gamers would care about. Funny enough—when you have some great moments in games like this, quality begins to slip into the back of your mind. In that instance, I was happier knowing that I performed a bit above my own abilities. This happened a handful of times within the round, coming close to a triple kill. I was quickly ego-checked by my inevitable death, which is just a part of the cycle, but I digress.
What Call of Duty did suffer from was the amount of shader loading that would occur within the menus. As the saying goes, “with great resolutions comes great loading sequences,” as I found myself staring at a packed screen, waiting for a percentage tracker to finish clocking down. Downloading these shaders also caused a performance hit, and while I appreciate them loading in the background, it can easily cause stuttering or other performance hits. For a twitch shooter, this is absolutely not a great side-effect of playing this game on PC.
Baldur’s Gate 3
I don’t think I could go much further without gladly mentioning my favorite game of 2023- Baldur’s Gate 3. On the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, the game looked amazing. It took some tweaking, but the 7800 XT absolutely knocked the performance aspect out of the park- for the most part. I was actually quite impressed with the performance here speaking that Baldur’s Gate 3 could run a bit rough even on consoles.
Frame rates stuck around the 60 fps mark which is fine for most people as this isn’t a twitch shooter. It is a tactical, slower paced game that focuses on character design and development, so it is key that the finer details within clothing and other artifacts maintains a smooth look. I can gladly say, it works well. Armor and shadows have a fine, smooth edge with realistic color reflections that look incredibly spectacular.
In busy areas such as the city of Baldur’s Gate, the 7800 XT was able to keep up with the events occurring around it. I didn’t have to turn down the graphics to make Astarion’s hair look like a cotton ball on a tip, something I had to do on the Steam Deck. I was able to turn everything up to the max, which made everything stand out. I rarely experienced any sort of slow-down that I didn’t experience with the 3070 Ti.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is a massive game to say the least. I’m honestly surprised it even made it on the Xbox One and PS4 generation of consoles. With max settings, Cyberpunk is one of the most demanding games ever released. NVIDIA uses this game to measure the performance of all their graphics cards, but AMD is also able to squeeze ample performance out of this title.
Even on NVIDA graphics cards, I was pushing 60 fps smoothly. When I tried to raise the refresh rate, I started running into a few performance issues, which is understandable for the type of game this is. Other than that, I didn’t experience the same issues I had with Call of Duty when it comes to stair-casing objects.
I did notice at first without FSR, the quality of the lighting effects was rather low. Overhanging streetlights in particular showed the weakness in stock performance. After playing around with plenty of the settings, I was able to obtain a clearer picture. It took a while, but I was able to capture some of the best screenshots ever when I fine-tuned the GPU’s overclock settings from a global default “power save” mode to a full-out “hyper” mode which optimized every game I loaded up. Once again, cities are not the easiest thing to render and somehow Cyberpunk 2077 was able to graphically perform up to my own personal bar.
Halo Infinite
I decided to jump into this game because it is one of Microsoft’s flagship titles that seems to work incredibly well and is designed around AMD architecture. While it is nice and convenient, it does suffer from the one persistent issue that I have seen with a handful of games, which I will talk about later. Aside from that issue, Halo Infinite ran surprisingly smooth. It maintained a 60+ frame rate and was able to handle light illuminating effects rather well. Shadows seemed fine, and most of all, it provided a crisp detail.
Much like Call of Duty, I found myself running around these highly-detailed maps and taking in each environment. The more advanced looking facilities mixed with the rough exterior terrain didn’t present any issue when running between the two. Some larger arenas didn’t suffer from the type of texture pop-in as I expected, usually an effect of low draw distance. Halo Infinite looked real solid and performed well above my expectations once I got around that one persistent issue.
After a few rounds, I once again let my mind shut-down as I fully engrossed myself in the gameplay of Halo Infinite. Once again, after I was able to wrap up the technical issues I was experiencing, I fully embraced what 343 Studios was able to deliver on a technical level. Granted, I didn’t get a chance to try out the forge mode, I am interesting in leveraging the various effects and capabilities of that engine and manipulate lighting to create darker and more dreadful looking environments. For now, death-match and firefight would have to do.
Rundown
There are a few games I wanted tot talk about in greater detail but there is no real reason to. Games like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft are designed to run on any sort of machine. While Final Fantasy 14 can get a bit rough when you get into major cities on really low-end systems, it still maintains ample performance when you get away from the clutter. World of Warcraft runs so well on anything that I am surprised we haven’t seen it run on a mobile device natively.
Forza Horizon 5 is a rough game to test because it ran so well on Xbox Series X to me that it is almost a 1:1 experience. Aside from the ultra-wide monitor, I didn’t see much difference in performance with the 7800 XT with high to ultra settings. The thing with Forza is how the detail really comes out when you’re sitting still. In the race, it all comes down to your immediate surroundings which looked great. The only issue rises when you have a graphics card with 8GB of VRAM as Forza really maximizes all that memory and warns you that you’re reaching maximum utilization.
When it comes to FROMSOFTWARE and their PC support, it could be better. Both Armored Core 6 and Elden Ring both look good. Details in Armored Core 6 look great and it offers a real smooth experience, and while Elden Ring does look good too it does suffer from an odd dip in frame rates which happen randomly and has caused several deaths in my latest runs. Also, Elden Ring only supports a 16:9 aspect ratio, giving me the dreaded black bars on my monitor. Not ideal, but it runs smooth.
The Issues
Now, I’ll admit, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the technological fence. While AMD is great, there is an odd situation I discovered when starting up some graphically demanding games for the first time and that is the initial poor performance.
I know that the 7800 XT can handle almost everything I have thrown at it, as proven, but in some cases the game fails to load above 30 fps or even 10 fps. After changing settings and restarting my games, it finally evens out. Halo Infinite and Palworld are both titles that were affected by this. Call of Duty also takes a huge in-menu performance hit for some reason while the in-game performance is great, which is a real head-scratcher for me. People want to slam on titles for having “bad UI” haven’t seen how archaic Call of Duty’s can get— an article for another time.
I’ll also reiterate the fact that AI-infused resolution scaling with FSR isn’t perfect nor is the ray tracing. They don’t really come close to what NVIDIA is able to provide on their platform, but when you have a graphics card that is as powerful as the 7800 XT or anything above a 4080, you don’t really need to use those technologies all that much as these cards can support these games natively. As for ray tracing as a stand-alone tech, I don’t personally use it, even on the NVIDIA graphics cards as it can reduce general performance of your games.
Conclusion
Buying the right graphics card is a difficult decision because there is so much to consider and the more information you absorb, the more difficult it is to make a choice. Folks could easily feel like they are choosing the wrong card and experience a type of buyers remorse.
As of January 2024, the Steam Hardware Survey results have NVIDIA taking up the first ten spots with the most powerful card being a 4060 Ti Laptop Graphics sitting at 2.5%, which should already tell you everything you need about the way games are going. Pair this with the 1080p resolution result sitting at 59%, it should start to make sense, or get the gears turning at the very least. You don’t need the latest or greatest to enjoy PC gaming, but if you want some extra power behind your setup or plan on leveraging 1440p gaming, with ample VRAM, you can grab yourself an AMD RX 7800 XT for around $520 USD, right around the price of a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X when it isn’t on sale. If you want to laugh, there are more people using Intel and AMD integrated graphics then there are folks using any high-end graphics card currently out in the market.
PC gaming can get fickle at times but that is what makes PC gaming fun to me. I like tuning my games and playing around with settings. Some folks do not enjoy it and that is fine. Knowing that most games can easily handle high and ultra graphics settings is a joy to me, and if you are looking to jump into the world of PC gaming, hopefully tinkering around will be a joy to you too.
