SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Video Card Review

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Conclusion

In our review today we got to take a hard look at one of SAPPHIRE’s new offerings in the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA 3 GPUs. We ran the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT through its paces in 4K gaming with and without Ray Tracing. We also selected our toughest games and tested them at 1440p. The comparison we chose was the ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti O12G-GAMING Edition which is directly price competitive. We also overclocked the SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 7900 XT as high as we could possibly push it.

Performance

As was demonstrated in our previous Radeon RX 7900 XT review here, the 7900 XT is a very fast card in plain rasterized gaming. Again, remember these cards are running games at 4K with all the settings as high as they will go, just no Ray Tracing. The SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 7900 XT outperformed the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti by an average of 15%. When upscaling was enabled the gain was 24%. That’s a nice boost right there.

When Ray Tracing is enabled both our cards choked. In all but Far Cry 6 the results were simply unpleasantly poor. In a few cases with upscaling the RTX 4070 Ti was marginally playable, the SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 7900 XT never made it that far, except F1 2022. Overall the RTX 4070 Ti was 16% faster in Ray Traced gaming, but 4K is simply too much to ask it seems.

To evaluate performance further, we also test the cards at 1440p. One can see a dramatic improvement in playability at this resolution. Once again, the only thing that changes is the resolution. The cards are still asked to perform at the highest settings with Ray Tracing enabled. The RTX 4070 Ti still holds a 24% advantage, but the SAPPHIRE PULSE RX 7900 XT has very fast frame rates when upscaling is utilized where possible. This demonstrates that you can enjoy RayTracing with just a small compromise, one set is all you need to adjust for the most part.

Overclocking

The use of AMD Adrenalin software to overclock is marked by a good deal of trial and error. Maybe even more than one usually has to contend with. This is due to the fact that the manual settings for GPU frequency are not precise, but rather a “maximum” which will never be reached. So when overclocking, we just keep pushing the slider to the right and waiting for something to happen.

Voltage is pegged in the software, so it is essentially a non-starter to help you. At any rate, the VBIOS has complete control there. We saw in our previous review that the “power” slider will increase GPU frequency, but has no effect on the in-game frame rate until coupled with the GPU frequency increase. New information does however suggest that manual lowering of the GPU voltage (VCore) may be beneficial, as discussed in the Overclocking section.

So what happened? We did achieve a maximum slider frequency of 3400MHz, but the video card was unstable in Cyberpunk 2077. We settled on a 3350MHz “maximum” slider clock which equated to a real-world dynamic clock of 2720MHz which was a 10% uplift over the SAPPHIRE factory setting of 2450MHz. In practicality, our best boost in game testing was 5% over the default frequencies and hovered around 3-4% mainly.

This video card seems very fit for overclocking as noted by the excellent temperatures. The drawback is the power limits put in place by AMD. The fans are noisy the higher you go beyond 50%. They are very good at cooling but the noise would be obvious, even enclosed in a PC case.

Final Points

In this review, we had the opportunity to spend time with the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT video card. We used the ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 4070 Ti as a comparison. Both cards had strong showings in certain circumstances. The SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT was very capable at 4K plain raster. It was unplayable at 4K with Ray Tracing. It does well at 1440p Ray Traced with FSR enabled. What it all comes down to is what sort of gaming you are after and how excited you are about Ray Tracing.

Interestingly, if you look here and review all the data, the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon 7900 XT is almost identical in results to the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT video card. From plain raster to Ray Tracing to 1440p to temperature the results are within the margin of error.

Before recent price sales online, pricing did not favor the Radeon RX 7900 XT over the RTX 4070 Ti, since the RTX 4070 Ti does have faster Ray Tracing performance right now. However, now that the Radeon RX 7900 XT pricing has come down, and we can find the custom factory-overclocked SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT at the same price as the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT, the SAPPHIRE card does offer some performance advantages.

We found the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT to be superior to the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti in rasterization performance, without Ray Tracing. If you are just maxing your games, and leaving off Ray Tracing for the most part, the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT will offer a very enjoyable gameplay experience. If Ray Tracing is a must, there are games where the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti will handle it better. In any situation, FSR can be applied on the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT to improve performance with Ray Tracing, making 1440p with Ray Tracing a usable selection.

The SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT also offers more VRAM (20GB) than the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (12GB), which may work out to a better gameplay experience, with fewer constraints in future games over time, especially with Ray Tracing. It really comes down to what you want in your gaming PC for around $800, but we think the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XT would be a good option at this price point.

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REVIEW OVERVIEW

Gaming Performance
8
Power efficiency
8
Build and Cooling
8
Price and Value
9

SUMMARY

This review is about the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT video card. Overall this is a card positioned in the middle of the product stack from SAPPHIRE. Gaming performance is great in raster performance and is good at 1440p with FSR. This is a custom-build from SAPPHIRE which has cooling that is more than satisfactory, though the fans can be on the noisy side on automatic, compared to the reference card. Currently, the price is identical to the competition and the reference AMD model making it a strong consideration in this category of video cards.
Rick Patterson
Rick is an avid gamer that enjoys the latest and greatest video cards in his rigs. For the past few years, he's shared that expertise with The FPS Review's audience as a GPU reviewer.

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This review is about the SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT video card. Overall this is a card positioned in the middle of the product stack from SAPPHIRE. Gaming performance is great in raster performance and is good at 1440p with FSR. This is a custom-build from SAPPHIRE which has cooling that is more than satisfactory, though the fans can be on the noisy side on automatic, compared to the reference card. Currently, the price is identical to the competition and the reference AMD model making it a strong consideration in this category of video cards.SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT Video Card Review