Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pure, and its sibling, the RX 7800 XT Pure, debut a new brand of custom-design graphics cards by Sapphire that denote a mostly-white product aesthetic. In terms of design and features, these cards are positioned between the Pulse series, and the premium NITRO+ series. Across graphics card brands, we’re seeing increased efforts to design cards around the white aesthetic—PowerColor Hellhound Spectral White, Galax EX White, ASUS TUF Gaming White, and ASRock Steel Legend, just to name a few. The new Radeon RX 7700 XT is designed to occupy a vital price-point and along with the RX 7800 XT, fill a vast performance gap between the mainstream RX 7600 and the enthusiast-class RX 7900 XT. The RX 7700 XT is designed to power maxed-out AAA gaming at 1440p, and high refresh-rate 1080p e-sports gaming.

The Radeon RX 7700 XT is firmly a next-gen product, meaning that it’s based on the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture by AMD, and uses the contemporary 5 nm EUV process, at least where it matters. Along with its sibling, the RX 7700 XT debuts the new Navi 32 silicon, which is a chiplet-based disaggregated GPU, just like Navi 31 that powers the RX 7900 series, albeit slightly scaled down. AMD identified all of the components of the GPU that don’t benefit as much from the switch to 5 nm, such as the Infinity Cache, and the GDDR6 memory controllers, and spun them off into 6 nm chiplets called the memory cache dies (MCDs), each with a 16 MB segment of Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of the GPU’s 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface. All the number crunching and graphics rendering components are localized to a central 5 nm silicon called the graphics compute die (GCD).

The new AMD RDNA3 graphics architecture introduces the third generation RDNA dual-compute unit that offers a 17% IPC increase over RDNA2, introduces dual-issue instruction rate, support for new math formats, and debuts the AI accelerator, a specialized component that makes the CU crunch matrix math. RDNA3 also introduces the company’s 2nd generation Ray accelerator, which offers a 50% increase in ray intersection performance over RDNA2 thanks to several hardware-level optimizations. Another important change is that the GPU’s front-end now operates at a 10-15% higher clock speed than the shader engines, resulting in better energy efficiency.

The Radeon RX 7700 XT is carved out of the Navi 32 GPU by enabling 54 out of the 60 compute units physically present on the silicon, and enabling three out of its four MCDs. On the GCD, this results in 3,456 stream processors, 108 AI accelerators, 54 Ray accelerators, 216 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. Since there are 3 MCDs in use, the GPU has 48 MB of Infinity Cache, and a 192-bit memory interface, which AMD pairs with 12 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, resulting in 432 GB/s of memory bandwidth on tap.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7700 XT Pure is not a whitewashed RX 7700 XT Pulse. While the Pulse comes with a 28 cm long cooler, the Pure is 32 cm long and features three fans instead of two. The cooler shroud, fan impellers, and backplate make up the card’s paint-job, the PCB underneath is still black. Sapphire added a few premium touches such as the ability to easily detach the cooler shroud holding the fans without disturbing the heatsink underneath; a red illuminated Sapphire logo, and a nifty factory overclock. The RX 7700 XT Pure comes with overclocked speeds of 2226 MHz Game clock (vs. 2171 MHz reference), and 2584 MHz boost (compared to 2544 MHz reference). The card is configured with 240 W total board power, and draws it through a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The company is pricing the RX 7700 XT Pure at $470, a small premium over the $450 baseline price for the RX 7700 XT.

Short 5-Minute Video Overview

Our goal with these videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.