Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse is the company’s value custom design offering based on the swanky new performance segment GPU by AMD. Sapphire is one of the oldest AMD board partners, and its Pulse line of graphics cards has had a long legacy of giving gamers a solid board design at MSRP or close to it, covering all bases such as low cooler noise and decent overclocking potential. There’s none of the glamour from Sapphire’s premium NITRO series, but the Pulse is designed with enough design heft to not look cheap when installed in your rig. The cooling solutions of Pulse series graphics cards tend to be highly capable, with a focus on low noise. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is this generation’s flagship GPU from AMD, and given that the company has withdrawn from the enthusiast segment, it could focus its efforts on making its performance segment offering the best there is in its segment, at an attractive starting price of $600.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is mainly designed to max out games at 1440p with ray tracing and 4K Ultra HD gameplay at fairly high settings, with ray tracing enabled. With the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture powering the Radeon RX 9070 series, AMD made a concerted effort at vastly improving the ray tracing performance, reducing its performance cost, given that ray tracing is no longer a novelty, but something almost every AAA game is expected to implement it. AMD also worked to significantly improve and specialize the AI acceleration capabilities of its GPUs, and is introducing the new FSR 4 performance enhancement suite. The new FSR 4 technology implements an AI ML-based upscaling algorithm that’s more accurate and greatly improves image quality at every performance setting. For now, AMD has made FSR 4 exclusive to the Radeon RX 9000 series.

The RDNA 4 graphics architecture is designed to maximize performance per die-area, so AMD could design a lean and potent silicon purpose-built for the segment. To do this, the company claims to have achieved a significant gain in performance per CU (compute unit) over the previous RDNA 3 architecture. It also claims to have nearly doubled the ray tracing performance of its new RT accelerators over the previous generation, with the introduction of additional ray intersection hardware, and many other updates to the RT pipeline.

The Radeon RX 9070 series is based on the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon. Unlike the Navi 31 and Navi 32 chips powering the RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 series, the Navi 48 is a traditional monolithic silicon built entirely on the TSMC N4P node. In comparison, its predecessors were chiplet-based GPUs in which the GCDs were built on the 5 nm TSMC N5 node, while the memory controllers and Infinity Cache were spun off to MCDs built on the 6 nm TSMC N6 node. The Navi 48 features 64 compute units, all of which are enabled on the RX 9070 XT. These work out to 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, and 256 TMUs. AMD has given the Navi 48 a healthy 128 ROPs.

The memory size given to both RX 9070 series SKUs is 16 GB, across a 256-bit wide memory bus, however these use slower 20 Gbps GDDR6, while NVIDIA has moved on to faster GDDR7. This move is probably driven by cost, and to maximize AMD’s ability to wage price-wars against NVIDIA in the segment. The company claims to have made strides with its new out-of-order memory management and texture compression, which should help it overcome the lack of generational growth in memory bandwidth.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT comes with a fairly hefty triple-slot cooling solution (considering its MSRP positioning). The cooler uses a trio of the company’s latest AeroCurve axial airflow fans. It also features two aluminium fin-stacks that are skewered by five 6 mm-thick heat pipes that pull heat from the GPU over a copper baseplate. The cooler features a structural reinforcement that counteracts bending of the graphics card over time. The cooler shroud is designed to make it easy to remove the fans for cleaning, or for replacement. Complementing the cooler shroud is a solid metal backplate. The card comes with 2400 MHz Game Clock, and hence sticks to the AMD reference specs. Sapphire is pricing the RX 9070 XT Pulse at AMD MSRP of $600, but it’s currently sold out everywhere, and scalped to around $900.