AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT vs. Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti: Which is the better 1440p gaming card?

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is Team Red's new $500 competitor to the RTX 4070 lineup of graphics cards. With a cheaper price tag and more VRAM, it is an interesting option in a market plagued with demand issues. Moreover, Nvidia has faced severe backlash for price-to-performance ratios this generation, which has led to poor sales of the latest graphics cards. This turns our attention to the last-gen RTX 30 series lineup, which is available at more sane prices.

The RTX 3070 Ti is the highest-end 1440p gaming card from the last gen. Although it was scalped for most of its existence, the GPU can be bought for pretty good prices these days. This makes it an option worth considering in the mid-range.

In this article, we will compare the RX 7800 XT to the RTX 3070 Ti and try to determine the better buy for playing the latest and most demanding video games in the market.

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The RX 7800 XT dominates the RTX 3070 Ti in gaming performance

Specs

The RX 7800 XT is a new $500 video card from Team Red. It is based on the latest RDNA 3 architecture that brings better efficiency and performance to the masses. The RTX 3070 Ti, on the other hand, is a $600 offering from the last-gen. Based on the Ampere architecture, its functioning is completely different from the new AMD GPUs.

It isn't possible to draw any conclusions by looking at the specs sheet of the two GPUs. Since they are based on different architectures, the graphics cards can deliver more or less performance irrespective of what the core counts say. However, a rough overview of what the GPUs bring to the table is as follows:

	AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT	Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti
Graphics processor	Navi 32	GA104
Shading units/CUDA cores	3840	6144
TMUs	240	192
ROPs	96	96
Compute Units	60	N/A
Tensor cores	N/A	192
RT cores	60	48
Base clock	1295 MHz	1575 MHz
Boost clock	2430 MHz	1770 MHz
Memory size	16 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6X
TDP	263W	290W
Price	$500	$600

The new GPU is cheaper and more power efficient than the last-gen Nvidia counterpart. Now, let's look at how performance in video games stacks up.

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Performance difference

The RX 7800 XT is way more capable than the last-gen RTX 3070 Ti. The difference is significantly large in high resolutions like 1440p and 4K, where the limited 8 GB VRAM of the 70-class graphics card bottlenecks the capabilities of the GA104 graphics processor.

Thus, in some cases, the new AMD RX 7800 XT came out to be twice as fast as the last-gen 3070 Ti while playing video games. YouTuber Mike Benchmark tested the two cards in 4K, where the difference between these two high-performance graphics is delineated pretty well. A detailed chart of observed framerates is as follows:

	AMD RX 7800 XT	Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti
Cyberpunk 2077	67	37
Assassin's Creed Valhalla	82	46
Red Dead Redemption 2	94	45
Watch Dogs Legion	73	41
Horizon Zero Dawn	105	74

Thus, the new AMD RX 7800 XT is the better buy for playing the latest video games. Although the RTX 3070 Ti might seem like an appealing choice, the extra VRAM and added hardware capabilities make all the difference for the new Team Red graphics card.