The release of the “red” 9000-series devices, focused exclusively on the middle performance class, is approaching, and NVIDIA will release junior GeForce 50 models. However, retail prices for new products will not stabilize soon, and products of the outgoing generation will remain on sale for some time. We present the final review of the AMD accelerator from the Radeon RX 7000 series – again using the example of a product from Acer, which has established itself as a manufacturer of affordable entry-level and mid-price video cards.
⇡#Specifications, prices
The hero of the review belongs to the inexpensive implementations of Radeon RX 7800 XT. The minimum cost of the device on Yandex Market is about 79 thousand rubles, but in large chain stores it can be bought for a smaller amount – from 64,999 rubles. In terms of gaming performance, the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC is a direct analogue of the formally more productive and more expensive AMD accelerator – Radeon RX 7900 GRE, and in the coordinates of NVIDIA solutions, it occupies a position between the GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER.
The device has a gentle factory overclock and operates at exactly the same clock speeds as its sister model, the Predator BiFrost Radeon RX 7800 XT OC: compared to the reference specifications, the Game Clock and Boost Clock are increased by 130 and 135 MHz, respectively.
⇡#Design
The 70th and 80th models of the Radeon RX 7000 series are built on different versions of the same graphics processor – Navi 32 – so the Radeon RX 7800 XT in the Acer Nitro version is visually indistinguishable from the Radeon RX 7700 XT of the same name. The device takes up 2.5 expansion slots in the PC case, and the full length and height (including the mounting plate) are 282 and 145 mm. There is no LED backlight.
There is also no usual ventilation window in the protective plate on the back side of the PCB. The cooling systems of the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT under the Acer Nitro brand are also identical. The radiator is blown by two fans with an impeller diameter of 95 mm. At low load on the GPU, they, as expected, stop.
The radiator itself is a classic design with five 6mm heat pipes that run through two lamella blocks and converge under the polished GPU heat sink plate. There are separate growths on the radiator fins to cool the video memory chips and VRAM components.
The Acer Nitro has a plastic backplate, so it does not take part in cooling the PCB.
⇡#Printed circuit board
All modifications of the Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT under the Acer or Predator brands are assembled on the same printed circuit board. The power supply system in this case contains 14 phases: ten serve the GPU core, one – the SoC section and three more – VRAM chips. Each of the three VRMs is equipped with an MPS MP2856 PWM controller and MP87995 transistor assemblies with a rated current of 50 A (the Predator BiFrost version uses 70-ampere power stages). The video card receives external power via two old-style eight-pin connectors.
Samsung’s GDDR6 chips, labeled K4ZAF325BC-SC20, have a standard bandwidth of 20 Gbps, of which the Radeon RX 7800 XT only uses 19.5.
⇡#Test stand, testing methodology
In most games, the average and minimum (we indicate the 1st percentile of the distribution) frame rates are derived from the array of rendering times of individual frames or the instantaneous frame rate obtained using the built-in benchmark. The exceptions are games that do not have a built-in benchmark, and tests using frame generation: in these cases, we use the OCAT program to capture inter-frame intervals.
The power of video cards is recorded separately from the CPU and other PC components using the NVIDIA PCAT device. The load for testing power and noise levels is Cyberpunk 2077 at a resolution of 3840 × 2160 and maximum graphics quality settings (without ray tracing), as well as the FurMark stress test with the most aggressive settings (resolution 3840 × 2160, MSAA 8x). All parameters are measured after the video card has warmed up, when the GPU temperature and clock frequencies stabilize.
⇡#Test participants
The following video cards took part in performance testing:
- Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC (1624/2565 MHz, 19.5 Gbps, 16 GB);
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE (1270/2245 MHz, 18 Gbps, 16 GB);
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER (1980/2475 MHz, 21 Gbps, 12 GB);
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (1920/2475 MHz, 21 Gbps, 12 GB).
Note: The base and boost frequencies of the GPU are shown in brackets.
⇡#Clock speeds, power consumption, temperature, noise and overclocking
The GPU clock speeds on the Acer Nitro board are moderately increased compared to non-factory overclocked Radeon RX 7800 XT models: in the gaming test, the Navi 32 chip’s frontend maintains a frequency of around 2.9 GHz, while the shader domain is content with a typically lower 2.5 GHz for this architecture.
But at the same time, the power consumption of the video card has been increased to 278 W, which means that the appetite of the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC is much higher than that of the next model in the current AMD line – the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, not to mention competing offers from NVIDIA.
The GPU temperature does not exceed 71 °C (91 at the hot spot) even under stress. But the VRAM chips heat up to 88 °C – this temperature is acceptable and safe, but far from ideal.
But the video card works quietly: the noise level at a distance of 30 cm from the fans is only 33 dBA under gaming load.
The Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC firmware allows for a 15% increase in power reserve, but the key to overclocking Navi chips is the supply voltage regulation. We managed to achieve stable GPU operation at a maximum voltage of 1.05 V instead of the original 1.15 V and simultaneously raise the upper limit of the clock frequency from 2,585 to 2,860 MHz. The actual increase in the frontend and shader domain frequencies under gaming load reached 203 and 173 MHz, respectively.
As a result of overclocking, the graphics card’s power consumption in games changed insignificantly, as did the related performance indicators – component temperature and noise level. On the contrary, under FurMark stress conditions, power consumption jumped to 366 W, the GPU hot spot temperature reached 99 °C, and the noise level approached 40 dBA.
⇡#Game tests (1920 × 1080)
The Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC’s performance is more than enough for most rasterized games at 1080p. Only in Black Myth: Wukong did the average frame rate drop below 60 FPS, but the same fate befell the Radeon RX 7800 XT’s rivals. The rest of the benchmarks showed an unconditionally comfortable frame rate of at least 90 FPS.
In relative terms, the Acer graphics card is only 5% FPS behind the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and Radeon RX 7900 GRE, and its advantage over the basic version of the GeForce RTX 4070 and Radeon RX 7700 XT is 10 and 24%, respectively.
⇡#Game tests (2560 × 1440)
At 1440p, our review hero still delivers comfortable frame rates in all titles except Black Myth: Wukong.
The increased load helped the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC reduce the gap with its key competitors, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, to 4 and 3% FPS, respectively. At the same time, the gap between the Acer accelerator and the Radeon RX 7700 XT increased to 25%, and the GeForce RTX 4070 fell behind by 12% in average frame rate.
⇡#Game tests (3840 × 2160)
Tests at 2160p without frame upscaling are optional for the Radeon RX 7800 XT, since only the most undemanding projects can count on a frame rate of 60 FPS.
Even on a 4K screen, games still benefit from the 12GB of VRAM that the Radeon RX 7700 XT and GeForce RTX 4070 have, so the relative comparison results haven’t changed much. The hero of the review came within 4 and 2% of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE and GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, respectively, and its advantage over the Radeon RX 7700 XT and GeForce RTX 4070 increased to 28 and 15% of the average frame rate.
⇡#Ray-traced gaming tests
Despite the shortcomings of the RDNA 3 architecture, the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC copes well with traced games at least in 1080p mode, but provided that “full ray tracing” is not used – as in Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2 and Black Myth: Wukong. By the way, the latest Indiana Jones and the Great Circle update opened up path tracing to video cards based on AMD and Intel chips, and in the price category under consideration, only the “red” devices have the 16 GB of VRAM required for this function. It’s a pity that the performance of the Navi 32 chip itself (as well as the cut-down Navi 31 XL in the Radeon RX 7900 GRE) is only enough to capture screenshots.
If we exclude the 4K test results, which are not relevant for all the compared devices from a practical point of view, 12 GB of video memory did not prevent the GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER from beating the Acer graphics card by 50-52 and 74-77% FPS, respectively. At the same time, the pre-overclocked Radeon RX 7800 XT outperforms the Radeon RX 7700 XT by 20-22%, and the Radeon RX 7900 GRE provides a 4% bonus frame rate at best.
⇡#Gaming tests with ray tracing and frame scaling
FSR with a moderate scaling factor (Balanced) allows the Radeon RX 7800 XT to reach 60 FPS in hybrid rendering games even at 4K, and frame rates in Alan Wake 2 come close to that mark at 1080p.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle aside, upscaling eliminates the VRAM bottleneck on NVIDIA accelerators. But the updated DLSS based on transformer neural networks, as it turns out, does not always work as fast as the previous version. Because of this, the hero of the review confidently outperforms the GeForce RTX 4070 in Hogwarts Legacy (and at maximum resolution, the RTX 4070 SUPER). Nevertheless, according to average results, the two varieties of the GeForce RTX 4070 outperform the Acer graphics card by 51–62 and 72–85% of the frame rate.
In the red camp, the Radeon RX 7800 XT’s performance is 19-27% higher than the Radeon RX 7700 XT’s, while the Radeon RX 7900 GRE’s advantage is within 7%.
⇡#Overclocked gaming tests
Overclocking the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC yielded a modest 6% increase in average frame rate even at 4K, the most performance-sensitive resolution for graphics cards.
⇡#Summary results of gaming tests without ray tracing
⇡#Summary results of gaming tests with ray tracing
⇡#Summary results of gaming tests with ray tracing and frame scaling
⇡#Conclusions
Moderate factory overclocking of the Acer Nitro OC and an updated list of gaming benchmarks did not fundamentally change the position of the Radeon RX 7800 XT among the closest in price offerings from AMD and NVIDIA. This model has noticeably better performance than the Radeon RX 7700 XT, which costs slightly less, and is almost as good as the clearly overpriced Radeon RX 7900 GRE. As for the “green” accelerators, in rasterized games, the Acer Nitro Radeon RX 7800 XT OC can be equated to the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. Plus, in its category, only the Radeon RX 7800 XT can offer 16 GB of VRAM. The only obvious drawback of existing AMD graphics cards is the low ray tracing speed: here the Radeon RX 7800 XT cannot compete even with the basic version of the GeForce RTX 4070.
The Acer Nitro’s cooling system, which is quite small by modern standards, is quieter than the coolers of the devices we used for comparison, despite the serious power consumption of the Navi 32 chip. Custom GPU overclocking in addition to the factory one provides a modest performance boost (on average, about 6% at 4K resolution), but has virtually no effect on the graphics card’s operating parameters if combined with undervolting.