The huge hole in AMD’s graphics card lineup shouldn’t be too far away from being plugged. Just last week Powercolor erroneously set its RX 7800 XT Red Devil webpage online, giving us a look at the card and its near complete specifications. Details regarding the RX 7700 XT have been more elusive, but now we’ve got an indication that it is coming soon too.
A product listing was spotted by @momomo_us at the Eurasian Economic Commission (via VideoCardz). It reveals a list of ASRock graphics cards, two of which are RX 7800 XT 16GB models. They are joined by another three RX 7700 XT 12GB models. The five cards will make up part of ASRock’s Phantom Gaming, Steel Legend and Challenger sub-brands.
The RX 7700 XT cards carry a 12GO suffix. In ASRock parlance, that indicates 12GB of VRAM and surely a 192-bit memory bus. That’s certainly a favorable configuration compared to the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti, though of course it’s just one of many factors that determine performance.
Given last week’s complete Powercolor RX 7800 XT leak, and ASRock’s RX 7700 XT listing, the launch of the cards surely isn’t far away. Just a week ago, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su promised new “enthusiast-class” graphics cards before the end of October. It looks like the wait won’t be that long, although the RX 7800 XT launch is likely to take place first.
Both the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT are needed to plug the huge gap between the $269 RX 7600 and the high end $899 RX 7900 XT. AMD has been using RX 6000-series cards to fill that gap.
If the RX 7700 XT is to be a success, it’ll need to compete with the RTX 4060 Ti, or if not, it’ll need to be cheaper. At the same time, the RX 7800 XT should be an RTX 4070 competitor, though the RTX 4070 Ti looks to be a bit beyond it. It’ll all come down to an appropriate price/performance ratio in the end. At least we know AMD’s challengers will have superior memory configurations compared to their Nvidia counterparts.
We won’t have to wait too long to know the answers to all of these questions. Let the battle resume!