Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For the Merc 319 7800 XT Black, we have already taken a look at the reference Radeon RX 7800 XT, and with that, I am excited to see how the overclock that XFX has given this card will affect performance. Especially with our reference testing seeing the overclocked XFX 6800 XT ahead of the 7800 XT, it will be interesting to see if the Merc 319 7800 XT Black can catch up. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black has a game clock of up to 2254 MHz which is 130 MHz over the reference card. Then for the boost clock the Merc 319 7800 XT Black can run up to 2565 MHz which is 135 MHz over the reference card.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black is well out in front of the reference 7800 XT in all three of the Fire Strike tests with a 6% improvement in the base Fire Stike, 4.2% in the Extreme test, and 3.8% in the Ultra test. This helps bring the Merc 319 7800 XT Black closer to the 6800 XT but wasn’t enough to catch all the way up here.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In the base Time Spy test the Merc 319 7800 XT Black improved on the reference cards score by 4.9% and that was enough to catch up and just barely pass the XFX 6800 XT. In the Time Spy Extreme test the improvement was 4.6% but this time it wasn’t enough to catch up to the 6800 XT but it is a lot closer.
For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the Merc 319 7800 XT Black improved on the stock clocked reference 7800 XT by 4.5% which pushed it up over the 6800 XT. For the Port Royal test the reference 7800 XT was already ahead of the 6800 XT and the Merc 319 7800 XT Black improved on that even more with an improvement of 4.9%, pushing it up near the RTX 4070s which are all sitting above the 6800 XT/7800 XT.
We don’t have a full section looking at AMD's AI processing just yet, but I did run the 3Dmark FSR 2 performance tests. With this test, I ran all four of the performance levels and also have the FSR 2 off numbers as well. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black improved around 1 FPS over the reference card in almost all of the tests. But more importantly, this test gives us a look at the performance that FSR 2 can get you. At 4K the Merc 319 7800 XT Black with FSR 2 off averaged just 26 FPS but nearly doubled that by turning the highest quality FSR 2 on. The balanced setting gained 9 FPS over that putting performance over 60 FPS. But the most impressive is the ultra-performance setting where it averaged 117 FPS, a huge improvement over the 26 FPS base performance.
The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the Merc 319 7800 XT Black wasn’t able to catch up to the XFX 6800 XT but the overclock was enough to pass the RTX 4070 Amp Airo. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black improved by 4.6% in total.
