With Black Friday coming up, I'm planning to finally upgrade my trusty 1070.

There are already some deals starting to happen - for example: the Sapphire Nitro+ 7800 XT going for $500 on Amazon right now.

After looking at specs and comparisons, I was surprised to see the 4070 Super generally performing notably better than the 7800 XT despite having 4GB less VRAM.

Would the 7800 XT be more future proof due to the VRAM amount? Or is the 4070S just a better fit (if the budget allows) due to performance and DLSS, etc?

This post is partially a question for my own upgrade, but I'm mainly interested in better understanding the roles of VRAM and clock speeds in modern gaming to help understand why one card would be "better", in comparisons like the 7800 XT vs the 4070S.

Current system specs: -Ryzen 5600 -MSI Tomahawk B550 -32GB 3600 MHz DDR4 -1000w PSU -EVGA 1070 -1440p/165Hz FreeSync monitor