Introduction

ASRock’s Radeon RX 7800 XT Phantom Gaming is the company’s top custom-design of the swanky new performance segment graphics card by AMD. The new Radeon RX 7800 XT and its sibling the RX 7700 XT, also launching today, fill a big price-performance gap between the mainstream RX 7600 and the enthusiast RX 7900 series. They are both designed for maxed out AAA gaming at 1440p, with the RX 7800 XT offering more memory, a few more shaders, and little more future-proofing. The Phantom Gaming line of graphics cards from ASRock denote style and substance. For gamers, they provide a card that looks like it’s from a segment above, with flashy RGB lighting, and enthusiasts can enjoy low noise from the massive cooling solution, features such as dual-BIOS, and a factory overclock. Phantom Gaming leads ASRock’s RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT series, there’s no Taichi OC for these GPUs. Besides Phantom gaming, you are offered the Challenger OC value custom-design, and the Steel Legend that slots in between the Challenger OC and Phantom Gaming.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT is firmly a new-generation graphics card, based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture by AMD. There are generational performance improvements to be had, thanks to the new dual-issue rate compute units that offer a 17% IPC increase over RDNA2 right off the bat; the new AI accelerator that provides matrix-math capabilities to the compute units; the new 2nd generation Ray accelerator that comes with several improvements and a claimed 50% improvement in ray intersection performance; and the multi-draw indirect accelerator, which promises significant performance uplifts for DirectX applications that are made aware of it. The RX 7800 XT also uses the contemporary 5 nm EUV foundry process, at least where it matters.

At the heart of the RX 7800 XT is the new Navi 32 GPU, which uses a chiplet design, much like the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series. All of the logic-heavy graphics rendering and number crunching machinery that tangibly benefit from the switch to 5 nm are localized to the graphics compute die (GCD), while those components that don’t benefit as much, such as the Infinity Cache and GDDR6 memory controllers, are spun off into tiny 6 nm chiplets called memory cache dies (MCDs), each with a 16 MB segment of the Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of the GPU’s 256-bit wide memory bus. The same MCDs used in Navi 31 are also found in the Navi 32, albeit 4 in number compared to 6 on the bigger GPU. This way, AMD has reduced development costs, and maximized its 5 nm wafer utilization. There isn’t one big MCD because breaking them down into smaller chiplets lets AMD minimize costs on its 6 nm wafer (smaller dies equal higher yields); and scale them between the 384-bit Navi 31 and the 256-bit Navi 32.

The RX 7800 XT maxes out the Navi 32, enabling all four MCDs, and all 60 compute units physically present on the GCD. This results in a 256-bit wide memory interface that AMD deployed 16 GB of 19.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory on; 64 MB of Infinity Cache; and over on the GCD, 3,840 stream processors, 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. On the reference spec, the GPU runs at 2124 MHz Game clocks, with its front-end operating at 10-15% higher clock speeds than the shader engines; but ASRock has given the RX 7800 XT Phantom Gaming a factory overclock of 2254 MHz. ASRock is pricing this card at $530, a $30 premium over the $500 baseline price.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 9x RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.