Igor’s lab did the task of simulating the RX 7800 XT to see what the performance would be like.This was done using AMD’s New Radeon Pro W7800 For graphics cards, half of the memory is occupied. According to Igor’s simulation results and theoretical calculations, this theoretical 7800 XT is roughly between the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, or between Nvidia’s competitors his RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti. position.
The Radeon Pro W7800 is part of AMD’s W7000 series workstation GPUs, featuring the latest RDNA 3 GPU architecture. The GPU features 70 compute units using AMD’s Navi 31 die, with 32 GB of memory and a total board power rating of 260 W. For this reason, the W7800 is currently the best candidate for simulating a theoretical RX 7800 XT. That’s because it features the same 256-bit memory interface as the rumored RX 7800 XT. Disabling half of the VRAM should be pretty close to a future GPU replacement.
Igor provided two different test scenarios. The first was to physically simulate a 7800 XT where he artificially disabled half of the memory, leaving the GPU with 16 GB of his GDDR6 VRAM. The second used theoretical calculations derived from the power efficiency results of the RX 7900 XT. The latter was done to give a “more accurate” picture of his RX 7800 XT’s performance in the real world, as the W7800 is tuned for efficiency rather than performance.
It goes without saying that both scenarios are performance estimates at best. There are multiple issues such as the final clock speed, number of cores, whether the “disabled” VRAM really mimics his 16GB card, drivers, etc. Igor he tested in 1080p, 1440p and 4K. W7800’s “simulation” and “calculation” results are relatively close, the simulation results are similar to his RX 6800 XT, but the calculation results are similar to his RX 6900 XT. By the way, in our GPU benchmark tier, the 6900 XT is about 7% better than his 6800 XT. Here’s his 1440p graph overall:
Igor used nine games for testing, two of which have ray tracing enabled (Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition). If the RX 7800 XT’s performance is similar to his measurements, we can see why AMD is in no rush to bring his RX 7800 XT to market. More efficient than RDNA 2 GPUs, but not as much performance improvement. With this, depending on the price, there’s little reason to upgrade to his new RDNA 3 GPU. RX 6800 XT Pricing Now Starting at $519.
I must reiterate that Mr. Igor’s predictions are likely not entirely accurate. The specs of the RX 7800 XT remain confidential for now, so we don’t know what it will be in terms of compute units, shaders, caches and GPU clocks. The W7800 will also use a trimmed Navi 31 GCD with 70 CUs while rumor has it that the RX 7800 XT will use he Navi 22 GCD with 60 (possibly 64) CUs. Depending on the final clock, consumer cards may or may not provide better performance than Igor’s simulation results.
Another issue is drivers. Workstation drivers are less optimized for gaming and tend to be optimized for professional applications. Gaming-tuned drivers can significantly improve performance.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we also don’t know what the estimated RX 7800 XT price will be. Considering the rumored specs, $600 is probably the highest AMD can ask, and it could sell for less. Even if it only had the same performance as the existing RX 6800 XT, if it offered the same price, lower power consumption, and a few new additions (such as AV1 encoding support), it would still be good enough. could be.
Unfortunately, there is little reason to expect significant performance improvements from generation to generation. The RX 7600 barely outperforms its predecessor, the RX 6650 XT, and both cards use 32 CUs with 8GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The RX 7900 XT outperforms the RX 6950 XT by about 17% in our tests, with 84 CUs and 20 GB of memory compared to 80 CUs and 16 GB of memory. Reducing the number of CUs to 60-64 theoretically reduces performance by about 25%.
We expect the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT hardware to ship within the next month or two. Performance may not be significantly higher than existing parts, but it should be more efficient, and additional architectural changes make it (slightly) more competitive with Nvidia’s RTX 40 series. . We plan to test every new GPU in the wild.
