AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

The best $500 GPU around

- DAVE JAMES

HOW MUCH VALUE do you put on ray tracing as a PC gamer? That’s got to be at the forefront of your mind if you’re considering dropping $500 on an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. If you are sold on ray tracing, you probably need to consider whether you’re willing to pay another $100 for extra RT performance and drop the cash on the RTX 4070 instead.

If, however, you’re convinced that rasterized performance is the only GPU metric worth a damn in this topsy turvy world of PC gaming, then the RX 7800 XT is probably the best upper mid-range graphics card you can buy today. We effectively now we have four graphics cards capable of very similar frame rates: the RX 7800 XT here, the RTX 4070, and then the RTX 3080 (which is pretty much end-of-life now), and RX 6800 XT from the previous generation.

The reductionist way of looking at the RX 7800 XT is that this new generation of Radeon GPU is delivering the sort of performance we had to pay $650-$700 for last time around, but that’s still a pretty tantalizing way of looking at things. By offering frame rates akin to both the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080, this price point is looking more potent than ever before.