AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6700 XT GPU faceoff: Battle of the current and previous gen 12GB graphics cards (2024)

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• Performance
• Pricing
• Features, Technology, and Software
• Power and Efficiency
• Verdict

The RX 7700 XT is AMD's latest generation GPU to take on the "x700" series nomenclature. Despite being a successor to the RX 6700 XT and RX 6750 XT, these two older GPUs are still readily available at competitive prices, providing viable alternatives to the newer part and making this a good time to compare all three GPUs in a three-way faceoff.

The RX 6700 XT is the oldest card of the bunch, launching in 2021 at the height of the GPU shortages. The card's original MSRP was $479, and it was designed to compete with the RTX 3060 Ti, but for the next year and a half neither GPU sold for anywhere close to MSRP. These days, thankfully, prices are far more reasonable, and the RX 6700 XT represents a solid midrange AMD GPU that supports all of today's modern features: hardware-accelerated ray tracing, VRS, mesh shaders, and very fast clock speeds (something that is now common on all modern GPUs). It was a huge step up from the 5700 XT it replaced, though it didn't fare well in our initial review due to the supply restrictions that plagued the 2021 GPU market.

The RX 6750 XT arrived in 2022 as a refreshed variant of the RX 6700 XT, featuring slightly higher GPU clock speeds, higher memory clock speeds, and a slight bump in power consumption to match. In our original review, we felt the RX 6750 XT was a largely unnecessary refresh and were underwhelmed with its massive 15% price hike over the RX 6700 XT — it launched with a $539 MSRP, near the end of the Ethereum-mining craze that caused massively inflated GPU prices. Thankfully, the RX 6750 XT has seen massive discounts since 2022 and now tends to start at close to $300, giving it a more positive standing in this faceoff.

Note that technically, the 6750 XT 'replaced' the 6700 XT, but supplies of the older card haven't entirely dried up yet. Depending on current online pricing, the 6700 XT can still be the better pick of the two cards, so we felt it would be useful to include its results as an additional point of reference for this faceoff.

The RX 7700 XT is the newest GPU of the bunch, boasting the more power-efficient RDNA 3 architecture. The 7700 XT represents an evolution in design over the 6700 XT, doing the same things in general, only better. It also adds new WMMA instructions to boost FP16 throughput, useful for AI workloads. The biggest improvement to the 7700 XT is its performance, but similar to the RX 6750 XT, high launch pricing left a sour taste in our mouth with our original review.

Two or three years after the Navi 22 parts launched, and one year after their Navi 32 successor, prices have changed drastically for all three GPUs. Let's see how they stack up as we discuss performance, pricing and value, features, technology, software, and power efficiency — and as usual, those are listed in order of generally decreasing importance.

When it comes to raw performance, theRX 7700 XT wipes the floor with the two RDNA 2 GPUs. The enhancements in AMD's RDNA 3 architecture enable the 7700 XT to have a sizeable lead at all resolutions in both rasterized games and ray-tracing titles.

Taking a looking at the RX 6700 XT at 1080p, the RX 7700 XT boasts a 20% lead in rasterized games and a 33% lead in ray tracing titles. Combined, our 19-game geomean results in a 26% lead for the RDNA 3 GPU. 1440p increases the performance margins even more in favor of the RX 7700 XT. In our 11-game rasterized geomean, the 7700 XT outperforms the 6700 XT by 26%. In our ray tracing geomean, the lead extends to a colossal 39% in favor of the RDNA 3 GPU. All in all, the 7700 XT boasts a 32% performance advantage in our 19-game geometric mean that gives equal weighting to each title.

The RX 7700 XT performance basically plateaus at 1440p, with effectively the same margins at 4k. It's still 28% faster in rasterized games and 40% faster in ray tracing titles, with a 33% lead overall — only 1 to 2% better than the 1440p results. Just as critically, many of the games now fall below 60 fps at 4K, with only three breaking that mark, and seven of the games fall below 30 fps. Even though it's much faster than the prior generation 6700 XT, the 7700 XT needs upscaling or lower quality settings in a lot of demanding games to manage 4K gaming.

Moving over to the newer RX 6750 XT, most of the results don't change much. The refreshed card boosts overall performance by 6–7 percent compared to the 6700 XT, which means the 7700 XT still easily outpaces it. The RX 7700 XT holds a healthy 18% lead over the 6750 XT at 1080p (13% at 1080p medium), and that increases to 23% at 1440p and 25% at 4K.

Gaming Performance Winner: RX 7700 XT

There's not much more to say here, as we're looking purely at AMD GPUs. Across our test suite, the RX 7700 XT is obviously the clear winner for performance. The GPU's architectural advantages combined with a substantial increase in shader counts provide a big performance boost over the two RDNA 2 cards. The RX 6750 XT's increased clocks only yield minor improvements over the vanilla 6700 XT and can't close the gap with the 7700 XT.

Current day pricing varies considerably between the RX 7700 XT, RX 6750 XT and RX 6700 XT. Officially, the RX 7700 XT now has a $399 MSRP, down $50 from its launch price. Street pricing can change on a daily basis, with the least expensive cards currently starting at $379 for the Acer Nitro 7700 XT at the time of writing (it's also available from Newegg for the same price). We've seen short-term sales drop the price as low as $359, but most SKUs are right at the $400 mark, with some premium variants priced in the $410-$430 range.

The RX 6750 XT and RX 6700 XT often come with similar prices, starting around $300. Currently, the cheapest RX 6700 XT costs $279 while the least expensive RX 6750 XT costs $299. Since these are both older cards, you can expect prices to fluctuate even more than on the 7700 XT, but both bottomed out at $279 according to our GPU price index. Either way, both cost significantly less than their MSRPs as well as the 7700 XT. There are some models priced in the $310 to $350 range, though relatively few RX 6750 XT and 6700 XT models are available these days — and we expect supply to continue to diminish in the coming months.

Given that the 6750 XT officially replaced the 6700 XT when it launched, with the latter being phased out, pricing can at times favor the newer and faster model. Considering it's about 7% faster than the original Navi 22 card, we'd want the 6700 XT to be priced about $20 lower to be worth considering — which is precisely where it lands at the time of writing. The 7700 XT meanwhile currently has a healthy price premium of around 25–35 percent, depending on which prior generation GPU you look at. That means that ultimately it offers slightly less bang for the buck at current prices, though factoring in the costs of other PC components means it's not a bad idea to pay more for the faster card.

Pricing Winner: RX 6750 XT / RX 6700 XT

The RX 7700 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6700 XT may look similar at first glance, as they all have the same 192-bit wide memory interface and 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Power requirements are also about the same with all three GPUs in the 230–250 watts power bracket. But there are plenty of differences once you start digging a little deeper.

The RX 7700 XT has some important architectural upgrades courtesy of RDNA 3. While the chiplet-based design doesn't inherently boost performance, AMD can use up to four MCDs (Memory Cache Dies) with the central GCD (Graphics Compute Die), and the GCD has up to 60 CUs (Compute Units) available. Contrast that with the maximum 40 CUs in the older Navi 22 GPU and there's a big gap in potential performance.

For the 7700 XT, AMD enables 54 CUs with 3,456 shader cores, a 35% increase over the 40 CUs / 2,560 shaders in both the 6700 XT and 6750 XT. The CUs have some improvements in both ray tracing and AI workloads, the latter courtesy of the new WMMA (Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate) instructions, which helps explain the earlier performance results.

Memory bandwidth hasn't improved much, gen over gen, and the Infinity Cache actually got smaller, dropping from 96MB in Navi 22 to just 48MB in Navi 32. However, AMD optimized some aspects of the caching algorithms to make better use of the available space, and also boosted cache bandwidth, ultimately delivering similar results. That explains the lack of a 35% (or greater) boost in performance in most workloads.

The 7700 XT has 18 Gbps GDDR6 with 432 GB/s of bandwidth, the same as the RX 6750 XT. The RX 6700 XT on the other hand uses 16 Gbps GDDR6 and thus only has 384 GB/s of bandwidth. Considering the lack of bandwidth or capacity improvements, the smaller 48MB Infinity Cache on the 7700 XT clearly isn't holding the GPU back in any major way.

The RDNA 3 architecture also has other enhancements, including more powerful CUs that double the potential compute per CU. This doesn't always show up in gaming performance, but again AI workloads definitely benefit. The 7700 XT has a theoretical 35 teraflops of FP32 compute and 70 teraflops for FP16, while the 6750 XT only offers 13 teraflops FP32 and 27 teraflops for FP16. RX 6700 XT comes in fractionally below those peak values at 13 / 26 teraflops.

Besides the core enhancements, RDNA 3 and the RX 7700 XT also have a newer video codec engine (VCE) that now supports AV1 encoding and decoding. It's not the most important aspect of a GPU for most people, but it's one more feature that RDNA 2 lacks. The same goes for DisplayPort 2.1 54 Gbps output: RX 7700 XT has that and RX 6750/6700 XT don't.

When it comes to software, there's effectively no difference between the two generations of hardware, other than the potential support for AV1 encoding on the 7700 XT. AMD's other software technologies including Anti-Lag, FSR, and Hyper-RX all work on both the RX 6750/6700 XT and the RX 7700 XT. There are a few features that are RX 7000 exclusive, such as borderless windowed mode support in AMD's latest iteration of Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF 2), but that's a rare and not massively important exception.

Features, Technology, and Software Winner: RX 7700 XTAs with pricing and performance, this category has an obvious winner in the RX 7700 XT. While all three GPUs might be comparable on the software side of things, the 7700 XT's newer architecture and added features means it's better than the RX 6700 XT and RX 6750 XT.

The above tables show full performance and power data for our test suite, along with some other details including power efficiency (FPS/W) and value (FPS/$). The important things here are the raw power consumption and efficiency, though we've used this data in our earlier price and value discussions. Power ends up being somewhat similar between the three GPUs, ranging from around 200W to as much as 260W, depending on the GPU and resolution.

The RX 6700 XT pulls the least power of the three cards, with an average power consumption of 204W at 1080p medium, 209W at 1080p ultra, 216W at 1440p ultra and 220W at 4k ultra. Interestingly, the RX 6750 XT pulls the most power: 238W, 244W, 255W, and 262W at the same four resolutions/settings. The RX 7700 XT lands in the middle, with average power consumption of 213W, 219W, 236W, and 243W. But that's only part of the story.

While the RX 6700 XT uses the least power, it's also the slowest of the three cards. The 6750 XT meanwhile boosts average performance by around 7% but increases power use by 18%, making it the least efficient card overall. RDNA 3 wasn't a massive improvement in efficiency, unlike Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture, but it does offer some gains and the RX 7700 XT ultimately ends up delivering about a 20% improvement in performance per watt over the 6700 XT, and a 30% increase compared to the RX 6750 XT. Those higher clocks and memory speeds meant AMD had to go further outside the sweet spot on the voltage and frequency curve for the refreshed card.

Winner: RX 7700 XT

Even though the RX 6700 XT technically pulls the least amount of power, we're giving this one to the RX 7700 XT because it only uses slightly more power while delivering significantly higher performance. The newer RDNA 3 GPU offers better efficiency, and that's more important than a relatively small 10–20 watt (when comparing the 7700 and 6700) difference in raw power consumption.

Unsurprisingly, the RX 7700 XT comes out as the winner of this faceoff. Its newer RDNA 3 architecture enables higher performance, new features, and improved efficiency. The price is higher, but not so much that it would really hinder most people looking at upgrading to a mainstream graphics card.

Pricing of course ends up as the most volatile of all the categories. Current prices favor the RX 6700 XT, but we've often seen it selling for the same $300 as the 6750 XT. As supplies of the previous generation Navi 22 GPUs continue to dry up, we expect to eventually see prices increase. The newer RX 7700 XT on the other hand could potentially drop more in pricing, so check online prices if you're looking at an AMD GPU upgrade.

Generally speaking, all three GPUs remain viable, with the deciding factor being the price and performance you're chasing. There's not much of a gap between the 6700 XT and 6750 XT in performance, but if they're priced the same, go for the slightly faster 6750 XT. But if you can spare the additional $80 or so, bumping up to the RX 7700 XT gets you a faster, more efficient card with some additional features. What's interesting, and something we'll discuss in a separate faceoff in the near future, is that the RX 6700/6750 XT still end up being clearly superior in performance to the newer RX 7600 XT and RX 7600 — AMD made some big cuts for the lower tier Navi 33 cards, so that discounted prior generation GPUs remain the better value, while supplies last.

We didn't love the RX 7700 XT at launch, mostly because it was only $50 cheaper than the RX 7800 XT while cutting performance and VRAM capacity. With current street prices now showing more like a $100 gap between the cards, it's now far more enticing and carries on AMD's legacy of offering a good overall value for mainstream gamers looking to play at 1440p.

Aaron Klotz

Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.