Enlarge / The specs of AMD’s Radeon RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT. (credit: AMD)

AMD has been slower than Nvidia to fill out its next-generation GPU lineup, and for months there has been a huge gap between the Radeon RX 7900 XT (currently retailing between $750 and $850) and the Radeon RX 7600 (holding steady at $270ish). Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda’s upcoming “Skyrim in space” title, Starfield.

AMD kept the prices of both cards under wraps while pre-briefing members of the press about the announcement, which is unusual but not hard to explain. AMD’s RX 7600 launch was spoiled a bit by Nvidia, which preempted the 7600’s announcement by offering a more powerful GeForce RTX 4060 at the same $299 price that AMD had planned for the 7600. This prompted AMD to cut the 7600’s price to $269 before it was even announced; we’ll have to wait and see if Nvidia chooses to change its prices in response to the new Radeon cards’ launch.

The full lineup of RX 7000-series graphics cards. AMD pictures a reference version of the 7700 XT, though it won’t be selling one. (credit: AMD)

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia’s $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti.