It's another day in the world of desktop GPUs, and we have another leak, this time a 3DMark run for AMD's soon to be released RX 7700 XT graphics card.
This comes from well-known leaker HXL on X (formerly Twitter), and as ever with spilled benchmarks, take it with a good old heap of skepticism.
In this case, we don't have a screenshot of the benchmark, but we are told that the RX 7700 XT hits around 17,000 in Time Spy. (Note that a grab is provided, but it's from CPU-Z showing the graphics card's spec).
Okay, so taking that 3DMark score at face value, as VideoCardz - which spotted the above tweet - points out, comparing to the results from other GPUs shows that the 7700 XT is around 33% faster than its predecessor the 6700 XT.
That's an impressive difference for the new RDNA 3 mid-ranger, but we must be careful not to get carried away, even if this leak is showing an authentic benchmark.
For starters, a single benchmark sheds a limited amount of light on the performance capabilities of any GPU, and this is a synthetic gaming test to boot. What we really need is real-world gaming, and even then, an individual result isn't enough - we want a whole raft of benchmarks to get a proper idea of what any graphics card is capable of.
On the NVIDIA side of the equation, a comparison can be drawn between the RX 7700 XT and NVIDIA RTX 4070, with the AMD graphics card not being too far behind Team Green's upper-mid-range GPU. In fact, NVIDIA's graphics card is only about 5% faster here, which is not much difference at all.
There's certainly more difference in the price tags, with AMD launching the RX 7700 XT at an MSRP of $449 in the US, whereas the RTX 4070 has a suggested retail price of $599 - so it's a third more expensive.
All eyes on the 7800 XT?
That said, we'll have to see where prices for custom 7700 XT boards land - there is no reference model from AMD, although Team Red is making one for the 7800 XT. And with that 7800 XT retailing at only $50 more, it might make more sense to plump for the higher-end AMD mid-ranger here, seeing as it has a decent bump in core specs (stream processors, VRAM).
What we do have, of course, is benchmarks from AMD's launch of the 7700 XT, though naturally a company's own testing also must be regarded with some caution (due to cherry-picking tests, and potentially component choices or other parameters).
AMD compared the 7700 XT to the 4060 Ti, of course, claiming around 15% to 25% gains (mostly) in some common popular titles at 1440p.