Leaked 3DMark score shows AMD RX 7700 XT is close to matching NVIDIA's RTX 4070 GPU

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.