Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. For the Sapphire 7900 XT Pulse, it does have a small overclock over the stock 7900 XT so I am curious to see how it compares, I also want to keep an eye on how it compares to the 4070 Ti as well which is Nvidia’s direct competition.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The Sapphire 7900 XT is right with the stock 7900 XT in the base Fire Strike benchmark with little gap between the two. The Fire Strike Extreme has more of a performance difference which was enough to push it up just past the RTX 4080. Then in the Fire Strike Ultra test, the Sapphire 7900 XT really stands out compared to the stock 7900 XT and is right with the stock RTX 4080.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. These are DX 12 based and the Sapphire 7900 XT improved on the stock 7900 XT by 2.9% which is about as big of a gap as you would expect to see for an overclock and much more than the overclock itself would do, I would guess that cooling and power profiles are playing a part as well. In Time Spy Extreme the Sapphire 7900 XT is 2.8% out in front of the reference 7900 XT and for both tests, it wasn’t enough to get anywhere near the RTX 4080 which is way out ahead here but it is out in front of the 4070 Ti.
For ray tracing performance, I ran both the 3DMark Port Royal test which is ray tracing focused as well as the new 3DMark Speed Way test which tests all future-looking features including ray tracing. In Speed Way, the Sapphire 7900 XT improved on the reference card by 3.3% which was enough to push it up near the 3080 Ti but still well behind the 4070 Ti which has better RTX performance that helps in this future-looking benchmark. Then in Port Royal, the 7900 XT Pulse is once again behind the 4070 Ti but it did best the stock 7900 XT once again.
The last test was using the Unigine-based Superposition benchmark and I tested at 1080p with the extreme detail setting as well as the 4K optimized setting. In the extreme detail setting the 7900 XT Pulse improved in performance compared to the reference 7900 XT in both benchmarks. In the 4K test, this was enough to jump out ahead of the 3090 Ti where the 1080p Extreme result is already out in front.
