The GPU Market: A Deep Dive into Performance and Pricing

It's been about $100 above where the 4070 TI is right now, so let's take a look at the differences between the two GPUs. The 470 TI has some advantages when it comes to rate tracing, particularly at lower resolutions like 1080p. This advantage starts to evaporate as you go on higher resolutions, which is just an architectural choice made by AMD.

AMD has been doing better in terms of architectural choices, and one of the reasons for this is that they're focusing on ray tracing. The 4070 TI might also have a feature set Advantage, depending on what games you play. If you plan to spend hours playing games like Cyberpunk 2077, then Nvidia's ray reconstruction might be worth considering, as it offers a potential slight performance bump and changes how the game looks in terms of image quality.

On the other hand, AMD has FSR 3 and fluid motion, which are their own frame generation technologies. However, they're not as widespread at this point as Nvidia's DLSS (deep learning super sampling) technology. Nvidia also has Reflex, which is another feature that provides better performance in certain games. But when it comes to the 7900 XT, our original thoughts on its positioning were clear: it was a greedy upsell.

At the time of its launch, the 7900 XT was positioned as an upsell for people who were buying either card. This strategy didn't work out as well as expected, and the XTX and XT cards ended up being more distant from each other than they were at one point. However, with the price changes, the gap between the three cards has narrowed again.

In terms of value, the 6950 XT is still a great option for high-end buyers who are looking to save money. It's around $600 and offers significant performance advantages over the 7900 XT. But if you're willing to give up a couple percentage points of performance for the savings, then the 6950 XT might be the way to go.

Ultimately, the 7900 XT is in a better position competitively than it was at launch, but that excitement has worn off with the price drop. The $720 price point that we were excited about at first has been pushed down again, making it less exciting for buyers. However, this review will continue to monitor the market and provide updates on how the different GPUs are performing.

We're planning to revisit some of the older cards in the lineup, including the 10-series and 20-series cards. If you have a specific GPU that you'd like us to revisit, please let us know by upvoting it in the comments below or subscribing to our channel. This will give us more information on what people are interested in seeing revisited, and we can make sure to prioritize those cards in future reviews.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enamd's RX 7900 XT has finally become the competitor it should have been sort of it's time to do a revisit because the pricing has been shuffling a lot lately and depending on which price we're looking at it's become a lot more competitive than it was it's been all over the place though we bought this RX 7900 XT hellhound by powercolor when it was $720 that was a $30 instant promo stacked on top of a $750 Baseline price apparently that was an incredibly narrow window though because by the time we finished our in-depth testing of the card and writing the review which was only about 2 weeks the price had changed and not just the promo price the entire price on all the US retailers we checked the price climbed from 720 discounted and 750 Baseline to new $800 Baseline that's down from $900 MSRP so in either case it's reduced it's just that change took us by surprise because every retail listing we saw gave us the impression that 750 was going to be the new Baseline price because that was the strike through number the the number that's normally a lie that retailers just put there and they strike it through and they say no it's this price that was the one that was stricken through it's gone up from there so uh we're skeptical whether the price may have just briefly been bumped up before Black Friday to then drop down again to the price we bought this card at but we'll see what happens when we hit Black Friday in a few weeks and either event though the price is lower than it was a year ago when we reviewed the 7800 XT so it is time to do a revisit on this and the price we bought it at that be $180 decline from the launch MSRP or if you were to buy it right now it's a $100 drop from launch MSRP and both are a big shift so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Lexar Thor memory lexar's new Thor ddr5 and ddr4 RAM includes a heavyduty aluminum heat spreader while retaining a relatively low profile form factor for PCs with air cooler clearance the Lexar Thor memory supports both Expo and Intel XMP timings and is available from ddr5 5600 to ddr5 6000 cl32 learn more at the link in the description below at launch we called the card a greedy upsell and we said that AMD was out of touch with its own pricing of the 6950 XT which at the time and still today was the better value of the two but the 6950 XT is almost gone and it won't be restocked at this point either way with the price drop and then climb despite our immeasurable disappointment from which our days were ruined will Forge ahead with the video rewrite anyway and we'll approach this from two perspectives one is the Assumption of an $800 Baseline and the other one is the Assumption of a $720 $750 Baseline if it comes back down and for those of you in Europe we have some price data for you as well we get to either price would put the 700 XT in close competition with nvidia's RTX 470 TI that that's going to be our main point to focus on today is the value and the head-to-head comparisons so this piece is meant to be more of a convenient buyers guide looking at some quick top level Recaps relative scaling percentages against the most nearby and relevant competitors to the 7900 XT and especially the hellhound model that we tested here uh so we'll start with the prices as of October 30th and then we'll briefly look at the prices from a couple weeks ago when we bought the car first off looking at camel camel camel a price comparison engine we happened to buy the cards right in this narrow dip it didn't last long but the $850 Baseline seems to be Vanishing so that's at least a move in the right direction doing a quick search on newag and Amazon uh using first party only shipped and sold cards and factoring in instant promos but ignoring mail and rebates and gifts we end up with the prices you're seeing now most recently the 7an XT it seems to land around $800 that's unfortunate it's still better but again if you look at the column for October 13th it was much cheaper just a few weeks ago this was mostly reflected on Amazon as well but new EG was the best place to find those prices at that time looking at the 4070 TI the prices are largely unchanged this past month for both major retailers in the US overall the 4070 TI can commonly be found for around $800 so the 7900 XT at its new price is the direct competitor and as of October 30th it doesn't have a big pricing Advantage if it drops back to 720 it it will but it's not there right now the few $770 470 TI that we found out there would have a slight pricing Advantage here finally looking at the 470 non TI you'd be able to find this card for around $550 with relative ease or definitely at 600 plus in the US but there's a more important alternative in this price class and it's a close competitor to amd's 7900 XT the 6950 XT is almost completely gone at this point we found five total first-party listings between newag and Amazon they appeared to have a couple units in stock at least we'll link them below but AMD is almost definitely not making this card anymore and it's on its way out it's unfortunate though because at $600 it's a killer price compared to the 7800 XT and the 4070 TI but we still need to look at how the 700 XT is today especially since again these cards will be replaced by the 79 XT we also pulled up the RTX 480 and we were shocked at how expensive it has remained we also found it poetic that Newegg confused an RTX 470 TI with an RTX 480 considering that's what it was originally called and we know not all of you are in the US so we did our best to aggregate some data for Europe as well Galls helped us with this they catered to Germany Austria and Switzerland and provide mountains of pricing data and trend line information we asked Galls to utilize its price trend data to help us show the price reduction since launch and they were awesome to quickly get us this chart this chart includes 19% value added tax plus European pricing and it's in Euros so for our Americans in the audience Europe has bigger number it's leveled off in terms of the decline but it's still lower than launch a guol shared data with us that showed the best priced 700 XTS in its regions including the XFX MC with 32 offers and Sapphire poles powercolor might not have the same distribution advantages in Europe because hellhound is €20 over the XFX card there now this data is from just before the recent price hikes in the US so we're not sure if that's also true in Europe now we'll go over the quick competitive comparisons before we go over the more detailed charts this chart shows a top level recap of average FPS scaling across several recently tested scenarios a bar to the right is Improvement for the 7900 XT and a bar to the left is percentage performance reduction against the 4070 ti so if the bar goes left then the 470 TI is winning uh remember percent math is a little funny so we position these in a way that is generally showing percent in increase unless the loss is just so big that it shows up like this the rx700 XT has the majority of Victories here and most of them are double digit the skylines 2 test was particularly wild although that game is one of the worst optimized games we've ever tested in a long time but it's still a valid test because it's a real scenario even if the game just isn't built that well in rate tracing test the 700 XT runs 3% to 9% worse the lower Nvidia advantages are at 4K here where nvidia's are architectural choices have limited the 470 TI's ability to continue scaling the 4070 TI also had breakouts and rasterization and Final Fantasy at 1080P and 1440p the card scaled further before it hit the CPU limit the 700 XT seemed to encounter a mixture of driver overhead limitation and CPU limitation for these lower resolutions in this game it appears there's a driver overhead advantage in this particular title with this CPU for NVIDIA in Counter-Strike 2 Nvidia just has a legitimate Advantage right now so this establishes that Nvidia for the most part maintains a rate tracing Advantage but AMD holds a strong advantage in rasterization and in higher resolution testing specifically its overall capabilities at 4K are relatively speaking greater than the 4070 TI and that's due to some architectural choices that Nvidia made this past generation so the biggest disadvantage of the 7900 XT originally was the price that was resolved in a huge way where it was less of a question as to how the value was when was $720 $750 so if you see that price come back and nothing else around it really moves then it once again becomes a very good value comparatively right now the 700 XT and the 4070 TI are about the same price but if you want really R Trace heavy and that's most of what you play then you should more strongly consider the 4070 TI than you might if you were largely on rasterized gaming or especially at rasterized in 4k gaming let's look at the 470 versus the 700 XT we're adding this so so that you know what you'd gain by spending an extra $270 or so the 700xt maintains an advantage in the 40 to 50% range for many of these games when at 4K the 1080p results are often CPU bound hence the lower scaling in R tracing we're seeing a maximum 29% Advantage for the 700 XT the 470 holds a 6% lead in Final Fantasy 14 for our testing indicating the same CPU bound Behavior Advantage we saw in the 470 TI but only at 1080p overall then whether we look at the cheapest or the average cost from our earlier pricing tables the price increased to $720 to $750 would be about 35 to 38% or so for the 700 XT over the 470 that is and that's for a 40 to 50% increase in 4k and 1440p performance or if we look at the new pricing of $800 the 700 XT is about 45% more expensive so it loses some of that value Advantage it had but it's still a lot better than the $900 price that it was originally at we'll next look at the 7800 XTX against the 7800 XT the pric in here was as low as $890 with General availability at $900 now it's generally available at $950 with several cards boosting over a grand we're not sure what happened but everything jumped for amd's card prices for these two cards here's a comparison chart the bar represents percent uplift for the XTX over the XT generally speaking we're seeing about a 20% uplift at 4K for the upgrade 1440p tends to be around 15% and 1080p is less reliable because again a lot of these games start truncating the results as of the October 13th pricing that would have been a $170 or so increase to buy the XTX or 24% more money cheapest to cheapest in exchange for 20% more 4K performance that's for the XTX now at $800 Baseline for the XT against $950 Baseline for the XTX that's A9 % cost increase so it's gotten closer this isn't as linear as we see lower down the stack so you're starting to pay for the just the best premium for the XTX remember you'd also need to begin considering the 4080 if you're in this pricing because it starts to pop up nearer the XTX than the XT although you could always keep playing the but if I just spend $100 more a game and you'd eventually end up at the 490 if you talked yourself into that overall we'd say that the value of the 700 XT is improving as opposed to its original value positioning against the XTX where it was more clearly an upsell but again it's tough to make a hard call when the prices are jumping so much if we were at that 720 to 750 range of the XT and the range of the XTX we showed then we'd say the XT is the better value right now but as the prices grow closer to each other we start falling back into that upsell potential scenario that's a better spot than the XT was in at launch at least for relative value against competitors but it was nearly an undeniable victory at the price 2 weeks ago other than the 6950 XT as an alternative but we want to make sure the cheapest options are actually any good so we ran some basic thermal power and frequency tests on the hellhound because that was the cheapest one and we wouldn't want to save a few bucks if it's a bad card so let's look at that this card has dual V bios which is typically a feature associated with much more expensive cards so it's actually great to see this gives you a backup in case the firmware ever gets bricked it gives you some more flexibility if you did want to try and modify this and overclock it with a custom V bios and it should also just be a quality of life Improvement so quickly evaluating the frequency here we found the ocv BIOS ran at about 2484 MHz when at steady state so it drops around 90 MHz from the start of the test due to heat gain the silent V bios appears to work this time we've had issues with power color messing that up in the past and the clocks drop to 2390 MHz this is a big reduction but it's intended to reduce fan speed by reducing Heat load from the GPU so that's the trade for silent mode we'd strongly recommend starting with OC mode though which is default from the factory if the fan speed bothers you you can always set it to silent after that you would just reboot in between thermal performance has long been a challenge for partner models with amd's more recent Generations mostly for the hotspot thermals in this test the ocv BIOS had the card running at about 70° CSUS Edge temperature with hot spot at about 84° it's well within spec far better than we've seen on on some of the reference designs it's not the best performer we've encountered and it's less capable than say the Nitro overall but it's also the cheapest we've tested so far and it's still performing in a way that doesn't concern us when it comes to thermals the silent V bios doesn't really change the temperature much that's because powercolor dropped the frequency so we're trading some frequency for lower fan speed however the fan speed actually only came down by a couple percentage points here so there's more that they could do to properly capitalize on the word silent and their vbios naming although we did notice some odd hysteresis uh behaviors with the fan speed in general so power color could do more tuning there for power consumption the rx700 XT reference card was at about 3133 Watts when we first reviewed it with an overclock Landing it at 362 Watts the hellhound ran at 309 Watts for silent V bios and 330 on the default ocv bios but without us overclocking that would naturally increase it further so it's a little bit over over the reference 7900 XT but that's expected for a partner model in most instances the RTX 4070 TI ran at 290 watts in the tough default performance Fe bios which is significantly lower than the 330 we're seeing on the default for hellhound so that alongside some of the rate tracing disadvantages is one of the other disadvantages of going with the 700xt rather than a 4070 TI you're trading some of that RT performance and some of that power and performance efficiency for the price as as for the 7800 XTX the reference model pulled about 351 Watts when stock the point of this revisit was again to provide the sort of head-to-head top level recap as a buyer guide leading into the end of the year when a lot of people are building PCS but we know a lot of you like a flood of data with a ton of charts uh so we're going to look at a couple of the full gaming charts with all of the cards we've recently tested on them and to get these in complete depth if you want every single one of them you can check out our recent RX 7800 XT review or our a580 use for all of them but let's speed through a couple of them here well look at Starfield first this one has had an overall AMD Advantage for gpus in Starfield at 4K High we had the 700 XTX at 74 FPS average and the 7900 XT at 64 FPS average that's a 15% improvement with the XTX the 480 is left in the Dust by the XTX which has a 27% lead and the XT has an 11% lead this depends a lot on the game of course so remember it won't always look like this the XT shows that it can definitely be a 4K gaming card especially without rage racing against something cheaper like the 7800 XT we're seeing that the 7900 XT has about a 32% lead for about $300 more money that's a sharp loss in performance per dollar with the 700xt as compared to the 78 XT but it also moves performance into a different category where you're going to start changing settings with that reduction at 1440p the 700 XT and XTX are about the same that's because we're now approaching a CPU bind in this title so let's move on just because brand new data let's briefly look at the impressively buggy City skylines 2 which has bugs as bad as inverse Graphics settings at higher presets we just ran a full benchmark test and graphics comparison for this game that you can find on the channel if you want more this starts at 1080P and don't get us wrong it won't go up from here the game is functionally unplayable at high resolutions it's like 2009 all over again before the patch the 700 XT was around 60 FPS average with these settings lows are all over the place but that's the game and it's universally true for the cards the XTX is about 11% better here the lead over the 4070 TI is about 30% as we showed earlier the 7800 XT Gap is similar it's $300 less once again and that would land you at 46 FPS average with these settings instead the 480 is down at 57 FPS average we'll briefly look at F1 2022 now but using raate tracing for the testing at 1440p and Ultra with raate tracing the 700 XT ran at about 85 to 86 FPS average that has the hell just behind the 4070 TI here so we're seeing the ranks flip as expected the 4070 TI holds an advantage with rt tests it's about 5% for the 4070 TI the XTX is about 14% ahead of the XT here in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K High the 700 XT ran at about 123 to 127 FPS average that has the XTX about 177% ahead the RTX 480 is roughly tied with that with the 490 establishing a ceiling the 4070 TI isn't too far back with the 700 XT ahead by 5% to 88.5% depending on which card you look at the 6950 XT remains compelling value here with nearly equal performance to the 4070 TI but a $200 cheaper price we'll quickly look at balers Gate 3 now this game isn't intensive enough for a card like the 700 XT to be fully leveraged and established a significant lead over some of its closest Alternatives but that's kind of the point we're showing this game because it shows you that scenario at 4K Ultra the 700 XT is CPU bound and rank to alongs side the 700 XTX the RTX 480 and the RTX 490 the 4070 TI and the 6950 XT are nearby we wanted to show this chart again because it helps put into perspective what you really need if you're playing less intensive games like this one you could save a lot of money by dropping down to something like a 6800 XT a 7800 XT or an RTX 470 or even lower than this you don't have to buy this highend either all these cards are relatively highend but the cost reduction is massive so those are the broken out fully detailed charts with all the cards on them and again you can get more of these in our 7800 XT or a580 reviews if you want all of them but we've shown you the condensed head toad charts within some of them around a dozen games for the percent scaling already in a much faster fashion earlier getting into the concluding thoughts here on the 7900 XT it's definitely a different position than it was a year ago first up though a quick note if all this has been helpful to you please head over to store. Gamers access.net and grab one of our 3D debug coaster packs these help help fund our data collection and our testing directly and you get a highquality pack of useful PC Hardware themed coasters in return each pack comes with four distinct drink coasters all using a soft and flexible material with great texturing these include a motherboard with PGA socket and seven segment debug power and reset buttons on it and a vrm heat sink molded into the coaster design and it's all spaced precisely to support your glass wear and drinks the level of detail we achieved on these when we were designing them is crazy even the memory module coaster has small pin holes next to the dim pins there's also a SATA SSD coaster where we designed into the border the pins for the SATA drive and there's a GN logo with a smoothly transitioned gradient these are easy to clean highly durable and they'll keep your tabl stylish and protected from condensation and they help us keep running in-depth pieces like this so head over to store Gamers access.net to grab a pack and thank you for your support and purchases cuz it helps us keep doing all of this content as we've continued to increase our depth of things back to the 7900 XT recapping the value at the temporary price the 7900 XT was one of the best values for a high-end current generation gaming card so just briefly here we're ignoring the presence of some of the last gen stuff that has been on and off available uh we were excited about the card at $720 the powercolor hellhound was easy to recommend relatively speaking and even at 750 it wasn't too bad but those prices didn't last the the only reason it's worth repeatedly mentioning this is because again we're highly suspicious of the price climb in such close proximity to Black Friday which if you don't know if you don't live in the US it's our most sacred holiday here in America where we celebrate consumerism it's coming up soon and we wouldn't be surprised if the cards drop again and if they do and if the competition doesn't similarly drop in say the 4070 TI then the 7900 XT would become the best value in its price class for a current gen card currently however that award remains with the 6950 XT which won't last sadly but at $600 these are one of the best cards you can buy right now at the highend there are only a few left at us retailers that we found at Major retailers we link the ones we found below uh but unfortunately because it's last gen AMD almost certainly isn't going to make more of them and more likely because it cannibalizes their sales H it's just doesn't seem like they're going to keep making cards that undercut their their current alternative to the 6950 XT by hundreds of dollars if you do happen to grab one though the differences between these are often plus or minus 5% from the 700 XT with the max range at around 10% Although our enthusiasm around the 700 XT has tempered with the price reincrease it is now still in direct competition with the 4070 TI whereas with the original MSRP it would have been about $100 above where the 4070 TI is is right now so a couple things to recap here the 470 TI has advantages in rate tracing particularly when at lower resolutions like 1080p that Advantage starts to evaporate as you go on higher resolutions which is just a an AR again an architectural choice where AMD is doing better there right now kind of odd because it used to be the case that Nvidia would do better there the 4070 TI might also have a feature set Advantage it depends on what you play so if you play games like like a cyberpunk is going to be a major title for you that you plan to spend 100 plus hours in or something like that you should really consider Nvidia because it has Ray reconstruction which we did a whole separate video on now uh we have some examples of where it really doesn't look good so you'll want to look at that in detail and and check if it's actually a feature you care about but if you think it looks good overall then it's a potential slight performance bump at least in that title uh and it changes how the game looks in a way that's difficult to compare head-to head because now it's getting into image quality additionally nvidia's got wider adoption of features like dlss frame generation so you'll need to research those and see if you care about them we have some videos on all this stuff and uh AMD does have FSR 3 and fluid motion now which is its own frame generation just not as widespread at this point and then nvidia's got reflex to consider as well AMD has anti-ag plus kind of but it retracted it it'll come back probably anyway our original thoughts on the 7900 XT were clear uh we said it was a greedy upsell and at the original laun positioning it absolutely was cuz they were trying to push people to the XTX if they were buying either Card unfortunately the price changes have contracted the XTX and XT closer together once again they were briefly more distant but they've come back closer uh we also noted in the original review that the 6950 XT and the 6900 XT were far better values the 6900 XT is basically gone at this point we couldn't really find any new in stock from a first party uh the major retailers we look at but the 6950x remains around at $600 and is our first choice at this sort of high end if you're okay giving up a couple percentage points of performance for significant Savings in price now ultimately the 7900 XT is in a far better position competitively than it was at launch and it's worth considering now at the very high end and we're going to keep looking at these over the next month or so as we kind of recap the gpus that have been out this year or the last year uh and help you figure out which one to buy at different price points but in the very least it's better positioned we'd probably maybe h a little bit to see if that price comes back down to 720 CU again you know this whole video was done and we were excited about it at $720 it's an expensive video card like in an absolute sense it's very expensive especially compared to the old days of $500 $600 flagships but compared to the other offerings on the market it was an exciting price drop and it's just it's hard to be quite as excited now again with that feeling of the rug was pulled where it was like cool we got it for 720 bucks let's tell everyone about this and look at it and see if it's worth it and that's not the price anymore so uh anyway it's still down we'll see if it comes down again but hopefully that recap helps you get back up to speed on the market thanks for watching and if you have other cards you want us to look at specifically in the next month or two let us know cuz we're doing revisits right now so we have the bandwidth for it uh and when I say that I mean not just like current stuff but if you want us to revisit a 10 ser Ser card 20 30 series cards let us know which ones upvote each other so we can see what people have that they would be most benefited by us revisiting because uh for those of you who are in a position where you want to upgrade you probably want to know how the positioning compares to what you have now and the more people who kind of let us know that they have XC card the more uh likely we are to see that and then be able to test it and do a revisit for you so leave the comments below subscribe for more as always go to store. gamas access.net to grab one of those coaster packs to help us out directly and you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus we'll see you all next timeamd's RX 7900 XT has finally become the competitor it should have been sort of it's time to do a revisit because the pricing has been shuffling a lot lately and depending on which price we're looking at it's become a lot more competitive than it was it's been all over the place though we bought this RX 7900 XT hellhound by powercolor when it was $720 that was a $30 instant promo stacked on top of a $750 Baseline price apparently that was an incredibly narrow window though because by the time we finished our in-depth testing of the card and writing the review which was only about 2 weeks the price had changed and not just the promo price the entire price on all the US retailers we checked the price climbed from 720 discounted and 750 Baseline to new $800 Baseline that's down from $900 MSRP so in either case it's reduced it's just that change took us by surprise because every retail listing we saw gave us the impression that 750 was going to be the new Baseline price because that was the strike through number the the number that's normally a lie that retailers just put there and they strike it through and they say no it's this price that was the one that was stricken through it's gone up from there so uh we're skeptical whether the price may have just briefly been bumped up before Black Friday to then drop down again to the price we bought this card at but we'll see what happens when we hit Black Friday in a few weeks and either event though the price is lower than it was a year ago when we reviewed the 7800 XT so it is time to do a revisit on this and the price we bought it at that be $180 decline from the launch MSRP or if you were to buy it right now it's a $100 drop from launch MSRP and both are a big shift so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Lexar Thor memory lexar's new Thor ddr5 and ddr4 RAM includes a heavyduty aluminum heat spreader while retaining a relatively low profile form factor for PCs with air cooler clearance the Lexar Thor memory supports both Expo and Intel XMP timings and is available from ddr5 5600 to ddr5 6000 cl32 learn more at the link in the description below at launch we called the card a greedy upsell and we said that AMD was out of touch with its own pricing of the 6950 XT which at the time and still today was the better value of the two but the 6950 XT is almost gone and it won't be restocked at this point either way with the price drop and then climb despite our immeasurable disappointment from which our days were ruined will Forge ahead with the video rewrite anyway and we'll approach this from two perspectives one is the Assumption of an $800 Baseline and the other one is the Assumption of a $720 $750 Baseline if it comes back down and for those of you in Europe we have some price data for you as well we get to either price would put the 700 XT in close competition with nvidia's RTX 470 TI that that's going to be our main point to focus on today is the value and the head-to-head comparisons so this piece is meant to be more of a convenient buyers guide looking at some quick top level Recaps relative scaling percentages against the most nearby and relevant competitors to the 7900 XT and especially the hellhound model that we tested here uh so we'll start with the prices as of October 30th and then we'll briefly look at the prices from a couple weeks ago when we bought the car first off looking at camel camel camel a price comparison engine we happened to buy the cards right in this narrow dip it didn't last long but the $850 Baseline seems to be Vanishing so that's at least a move in the right direction doing a quick search on newag and Amazon uh using first party only shipped and sold cards and factoring in instant promos but ignoring mail and rebates and gifts we end up with the prices you're seeing now most recently the 7an XT it seems to land around $800 that's unfortunate it's still better but again if you look at the column for October 13th it was much cheaper just a few weeks ago this was mostly reflected on Amazon as well but new EG was the best place to find those prices at that time looking at the 4070 TI the prices are largely unchanged this past month for both major retailers in the US overall the 4070 TI can commonly be found for around $800 so the 7900 XT at its new price is the direct competitor and as of October 30th it doesn't have a big pricing Advantage if it drops back to 720 it it will but it's not there right now the few $770 470 TI that we found out there would have a slight pricing Advantage here finally looking at the 470 non TI you'd be able to find this card for around $550 with relative ease or definitely at 600 plus in the US but there's a more important alternative in this price class and it's a close competitor to amd's 7900 XT the 6950 XT is almost completely gone at this point we found five total first-party listings between newag and Amazon they appeared to have a couple units in stock at least we'll link them below but AMD is almost definitely not making this card anymore and it's on its way out it's unfortunate though because at $600 it's a killer price compared to the 7800 XT and the 4070 TI but we still need to look at how the 700 XT is today especially since again these cards will be replaced by the 79 XT we also pulled up the RTX 480 and we were shocked at how expensive it has remained we also found it poetic that Newegg confused an RTX 470 TI with an RTX 480 considering that's what it was originally called and we know not all of you are in the US so we did our best to aggregate some data for Europe as well Galls helped us with this they catered to Germany Austria and Switzerland and provide mountains of pricing data and trend line information we asked Galls to utilize its price trend data to help us show the price reduction since launch and they were awesome to quickly get us this chart this chart includes 19% value added tax plus European pricing and it's in Euros so for our Americans in the audience Europe has bigger number it's leveled off in terms of the decline but it's still lower than launch a guol shared data with us that showed the best priced 700 XTS in its regions including the XFX MC with 32 offers and Sapphire poles powercolor might not have the same distribution advantages in Europe because hellhound is €20 over the XFX card there now this data is from just before the recent price hikes in the US so we're not sure if that's also true in Europe now we'll go over the quick competitive comparisons before we go over the more detailed charts this chart shows a top level recap of average FPS scaling across several recently tested scenarios a bar to the right is Improvement for the 7900 XT and a bar to the left is percentage performance reduction against the 4070 ti so if the bar goes left then the 470 TI is winning uh remember percent math is a little funny so we position these in a way that is generally showing percent in increase unless the loss is just so big that it shows up like this the rx700 XT has the majority of Victories here and most of them are double digit the skylines 2 test was particularly wild although that game is one of the worst optimized games we've ever tested in a long time but it's still a valid test because it's a real scenario even if the game just isn't built that well in rate tracing test the 700 XT runs 3% to 9% worse the lower Nvidia advantages are at 4K here where nvidia's are architectural choices have limited the 470 TI's ability to continue scaling the 4070 TI also had breakouts and rasterization and Final Fantasy at 1080P and 1440p the card scaled further before it hit the CPU limit the 700 XT seemed to encounter a mixture of driver overhead limitation and CPU limitation for these lower resolutions in this game it appears there's a driver overhead advantage in this particular title with this CPU for NVIDIA in Counter-Strike 2 Nvidia just has a legitimate Advantage right now so this establishes that Nvidia for the most part maintains a rate tracing Advantage but AMD holds a strong advantage in rasterization and in higher resolution testing specifically its overall capabilities at 4K are relatively speaking greater than the 4070 TI and that's due to some architectural choices that Nvidia made this past generation so the biggest disadvantage of the 7900 XT originally was the price that was resolved in a huge way where it was less of a question as to how the value was when was $720 $750 so if you see that price come back and nothing else around it really moves then it once again becomes a very good value comparatively right now the 700 XT and the 4070 TI are about the same price but if you want really R Trace heavy and that's most of what you play then you should more strongly consider the 4070 TI than you might if you were largely on rasterized gaming or especially at rasterized in 4k gaming let's look at the 470 versus the 700 XT we're adding this so so that you know what you'd gain by spending an extra $270 or so the 700xt maintains an advantage in the 40 to 50% range for many of these games when at 4K the 1080p results are often CPU bound hence the lower scaling in R tracing we're seeing a maximum 29% Advantage for the 700 XT the 470 holds a 6% lead in Final Fantasy 14 for our testing indicating the same CPU bound Behavior Advantage we saw in the 470 TI but only at 1080p overall then whether we look at the cheapest or the average cost from our earlier pricing tables the price increased to $720 to $750 would be about 35 to 38% or so for the 700 XT over the 470 that is and that's for a 40 to 50% increase in 4k and 1440p performance or if we look at the new pricing of $800 the 700 XT is about 45% more expensive so it loses some of that value Advantage it had but it's still a lot better than the $900 price that it was originally at we'll next look at the 7800 XTX against the 7800 XT the pric in here was as low as $890 with General availability at $900 now it's generally available at $950 with several cards boosting over a grand we're not sure what happened but everything jumped for amd's card prices for these two cards here's a comparison chart the bar represents percent uplift for the XTX over the XT generally speaking we're seeing about a 20% uplift at 4K for the upgrade 1440p tends to be around 15% and 1080p is less reliable because again a lot of these games start truncating the results as of the October 13th pricing that would have been a $170 or so increase to buy the XTX or 24% more money cheapest to cheapest in exchange for 20% more 4K performance that's for the XTX now at $800 Baseline for the XT against $950 Baseline for the XTX that's A9 % cost increase so it's gotten closer this isn't as linear as we see lower down the stack so you're starting to pay for the just the best premium for the XTX remember you'd also need to begin considering the 4080 if you're in this pricing because it starts to pop up nearer the XTX than the XT although you could always keep playing the but if I just spend $100 more a game and you'd eventually end up at the 490 if you talked yourself into that overall we'd say that the value of the 700 XT is improving as opposed to its original value positioning against the XTX where it was more clearly an upsell but again it's tough to make a hard call when the prices are jumping so much if we were at that 720 to 750 range of the XT and the range of the XTX we showed then we'd say the XT is the better value right now but as the prices grow closer to each other we start falling back into that upsell potential scenario that's a better spot than the XT was in at launch at least for relative value against competitors but it was nearly an undeniable victory at the price 2 weeks ago other than the 6950 XT as an alternative but we want to make sure the cheapest options are actually any good so we ran some basic thermal power and frequency tests on the hellhound because that was the cheapest one and we wouldn't want to save a few bucks if it's a bad card so let's look at that this card has dual V bios which is typically a feature associated with much more expensive cards so it's actually great to see this gives you a backup in case the firmware ever gets bricked it gives you some more flexibility if you did want to try and modify this and overclock it with a custom V bios and it should also just be a quality of life Improvement so quickly evaluating the frequency here we found the ocv BIOS ran at about 2484 MHz when at steady state so it drops around 90 MHz from the start of the test due to heat gain the silent V bios appears to work this time we've had issues with power color messing that up in the past and the clocks drop to 2390 MHz this is a big reduction but it's intended to reduce fan speed by reducing Heat load from the GPU so that's the trade for silent mode we'd strongly recommend starting with OC mode though which is default from the factory if the fan speed bothers you you can always set it to silent after that you would just reboot in between thermal performance has long been a challenge for partner models with amd's more recent Generations mostly for the hotspot thermals in this test the ocv BIOS had the card running at about 70° CSUS Edge temperature with hot spot at about 84° it's well within spec far better than we've seen on on some of the reference designs it's not the best performer we've encountered and it's less capable than say the Nitro overall but it's also the cheapest we've tested so far and it's still performing in a way that doesn't concern us when it comes to thermals the silent V bios doesn't really change the temperature much that's because powercolor dropped the frequency so we're trading some frequency for lower fan speed however the fan speed actually only came down by a couple percentage points here so there's more that they could do to properly capitalize on the word silent and their vbios naming although we did notice some odd hysteresis uh behaviors with the fan speed in general so power color could do more tuning there for power consumption the rx700 XT reference card was at about 3133 Watts when we first reviewed it with an overclock Landing it at 362 Watts the hellhound ran at 309 Watts for silent V bios and 330 on the default ocv bios but without us overclocking that would naturally increase it further so it's a little bit over over the reference 7900 XT but that's expected for a partner model in most instances the RTX 4070 TI ran at 290 watts in the tough default performance Fe bios which is significantly lower than the 330 we're seeing on the default for hellhound so that alongside some of the rate tracing disadvantages is one of the other disadvantages of going with the 700xt rather than a 4070 TI you're trading some of that RT performance and some of that power and performance efficiency for the price as as for the 7800 XTX the reference model pulled about 351 Watts when stock the point of this revisit was again to provide the sort of head-to-head top level recap as a buyer guide leading into the end of the year when a lot of people are building PCS but we know a lot of you like a flood of data with a ton of charts uh so we're going to look at a couple of the full gaming charts with all of the cards we've recently tested on them and to get these in complete depth if you want every single one of them you can check out our recent RX 7800 XT review or our a580 use for all of them but let's speed through a couple of them here well look at Starfield first this one has had an overall AMD Advantage for gpus in Starfield at 4K High we had the 700 XTX at 74 FPS average and the 7900 XT at 64 FPS average that's a 15% improvement with the XTX the 480 is left in the Dust by the XTX which has a 27% lead and the XT has an 11% lead this depends a lot on the game of course so remember it won't always look like this the XT shows that it can definitely be a 4K gaming card especially without rage racing against something cheaper like the 7800 XT we're seeing that the 7900 XT has about a 32% lead for about $300 more money that's a sharp loss in performance per dollar with the 700xt as compared to the 78 XT but it also moves performance into a different category where you're going to start changing settings with that reduction at 1440p the 700 XT and XTX are about the same that's because we're now approaching a CPU bind in this title so let's move on just because brand new data let's briefly look at the impressively buggy City skylines 2 which has bugs as bad as inverse Graphics settings at higher presets we just ran a full benchmark test and graphics comparison for this game that you can find on the channel if you want more this starts at 1080P and don't get us wrong it won't go up from here the game is functionally unplayable at high resolutions it's like 2009 all over again before the patch the 700 XT was around 60 FPS average with these settings lows are all over the place but that's the game and it's universally true for the cards the XTX is about 11% better here the lead over the 4070 TI is about 30% as we showed earlier the 7800 XT Gap is similar it's $300 less once again and that would land you at 46 FPS average with these settings instead the 480 is down at 57 FPS average we'll briefly look at F1 2022 now but using raate tracing for the testing at 1440p and Ultra with raate tracing the 700 XT ran at about 85 to 86 FPS average that has the hell just behind the 4070 TI here so we're seeing the ranks flip as expected the 4070 TI holds an advantage with rt tests it's about 5% for the 4070 TI the XTX is about 14% ahead of the XT here in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 4K High the 700 XT ran at about 123 to 127 FPS average that has the XTX about 177% ahead the RTX 480 is roughly tied with that with the 490 establishing a ceiling the 4070 TI isn't too far back with the 700 XT ahead by 5% to 88.5% depending on which card you look at the 6950 XT remains compelling value here with nearly equal performance to the 4070 TI but a $200 cheaper price we'll quickly look at balers Gate 3 now this game isn't intensive enough for a card like the 700 XT to be fully leveraged and established a significant lead over some of its closest Alternatives but that's kind of the point we're showing this game because it shows you that scenario at 4K Ultra the 700 XT is CPU bound and rank to alongs side the 700 XTX the RTX 480 and the RTX 490 the 4070 TI and the 6950 XT are nearby we wanted to show this chart again because it helps put into perspective what you really need if you're playing less intensive games like this one you could save a lot of money by dropping down to something like a 6800 XT a 7800 XT or an RTX 470 or even lower than this you don't have to buy this highend either all these cards are relatively highend but the cost reduction is massive so those are the broken out fully detailed charts with all the cards on them and again you can get more of these in our 7800 XT or a580 reviews if you want all of them but we've shown you the condensed head toad charts within some of them around a dozen games for the percent scaling already in a much faster fashion earlier getting into the concluding thoughts here on the 7900 XT it's definitely a different position than it was a year ago first up though a quick note if all this has been helpful to you please head over to store. Gamers access.net and grab one of our 3D debug coaster packs these help help fund our data collection and our testing directly and you get a highquality pack of useful PC Hardware themed coasters in return each pack comes with four distinct drink coasters all using a soft and flexible material with great texturing these include a motherboard with PGA socket and seven segment debug power and reset buttons on it and a vrm heat sink molded into the coaster design and it's all spaced precisely to support your glass wear and drinks the level of detail we achieved on these when we were designing them is crazy even the memory module coaster has small pin holes next to the dim pins there's also a SATA SSD coaster where we designed into the border the pins for the SATA drive and there's a GN logo with a smoothly transitioned gradient these are easy to clean highly durable and they'll keep your tabl stylish and protected from condensation and they help us keep running in-depth pieces like this so head over to store Gamers access.net to grab a pack and thank you for your support and purchases cuz it helps us keep doing all of this content as we've continued to increase our depth of things back to the 7900 XT recapping the value at the temporary price the 7900 XT was one of the best values for a high-end current generation gaming card so just briefly here we're ignoring the presence of some of the last gen stuff that has been on and off available uh we were excited about the card at $720 the powercolor hellhound was easy to recommend relatively speaking and even at 750 it wasn't too bad but those prices didn't last the the only reason it's worth repeatedly mentioning this is because again we're highly suspicious of the price climb in such close proximity to Black Friday which if you don't know if you don't live in the US it's our most sacred holiday here in America where we celebrate consumerism it's coming up soon and we wouldn't be surprised if the cards drop again and if they do and if the competition doesn't similarly drop in say the 4070 TI then the 7900 XT would become the best value in its price class for a current gen card currently however that award remains with the 6950 XT which won't last sadly but at $600 these are one of the best cards you can buy right now at the highend there are only a few left at us retailers that we found at Major retailers we link the ones we found below uh but unfortunately because it's last gen AMD almost certainly isn't going to make more of them and more likely because it cannibalizes their sales H it's just doesn't seem like they're going to keep making cards that undercut their their current alternative to the 6950 XT by hundreds of dollars if you do happen to grab one though the differences between these are often plus or minus 5% from the 700 XT with the max range at around 10% Although our enthusiasm around the 700 XT has tempered with the price reincrease it is now still in direct competition with the 4070 TI whereas with the original MSRP it would have been about $100 above where the 4070 TI is is right now so a couple things to recap here the 470 TI has advantages in rate tracing particularly when at lower resolutions like 1080p that Advantage starts to evaporate as you go on higher resolutions which is just a an AR again an architectural choice where AMD is doing better there right now kind of odd because it used to be the case that Nvidia would do better there the 4070 TI might also have a feature set Advantage it depends on what you play so if you play games like like a cyberpunk is going to be a major title for you that you plan to spend 100 plus hours in or something like that you should really consider Nvidia because it has Ray reconstruction which we did a whole separate video on now uh we have some examples of where it really doesn't look good so you'll want to look at that in detail and and check if it's actually a feature you care about but if you think it looks good overall then it's a potential slight performance bump at least in that title uh and it changes how the game looks in a way that's difficult to compare head-to head because now it's getting into image quality additionally nvidia's got wider adoption of features like dlss frame generation so you'll need to research those and see if you care about them we have some videos on all this stuff and uh AMD does have FSR 3 and fluid motion now which is its own frame generation just not as widespread at this point and then nvidia's got reflex to consider as well AMD has anti-ag plus kind of but it retracted it it'll come back probably anyway our original thoughts on the 7900 XT were clear uh we said it was a greedy upsell and at the original laun positioning it absolutely was cuz they were trying to push people to the XTX if they were buying either Card unfortunately the price changes have contracted the XTX and XT closer together once again they were briefly more distant but they've come back closer uh we also noted in the original review that the 6950 XT and the 6900 XT were far better values the 6900 XT is basically gone at this point we couldn't really find any new in stock from a first party uh the major retailers we look at but the 6950x remains around at $600 and is our first choice at this sort of high end if you're okay giving up a couple percentage points of performance for significant Savings in price now ultimately the 7900 XT is in a far better position competitively than it was at launch and it's worth considering now at the very high end and we're going to keep looking at these over the next month or so as we kind of recap the gpus that have been out this year or the last year uh and help you figure out which one to buy at different price points but in the very least it's better positioned we'd probably maybe h a little bit to see if that price comes back down to 720 CU again you know this whole video was done and we were excited about it at $720 it's an expensive video card like in an absolute sense it's very expensive especially compared to the old days of $500 $600 flagships but compared to the other offerings on the market it was an exciting price drop and it's just it's hard to be quite as excited now again with that feeling of the rug was pulled where it was like cool we got it for 720 bucks let's tell everyone about this and look at it and see if it's worth it and that's not the price anymore so uh anyway it's still down we'll see if it comes down again but hopefully that recap helps you get back up to speed on the market thanks for watching and if you have other cards you want us to look at specifically in the next month or two let us know cuz we're doing revisits right now so we have the bandwidth for it uh and when I say that I mean not just like current stuff but if you want us to revisit a 10 ser Ser card 20 30 series cards let us know which ones upvote each other so we can see what people have that they would be most benefited by us revisiting because uh for those of you who are in a position where you want to upgrade you probably want to know how the positioning compares to what you have now and the more people who kind of let us know that they have XC card the more uh likely we are to see that and then be able to test it and do a revisit for you so leave the comments below subscribe for more as always go to store. gamas access.net to grab one of those coaster packs to help us out directly and you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus we'll see you all next time\n"