AMDs RX 9070 launch, even through availability issues and questions on pricing has been exciting. I previously took a look at the stock-clocked Steel Legend and was impressed. Sapphire also sent over their stock-clocked RX 9070 XT Pulse and while I was impressed with ASRock’s offering, if anyone can outdo it, Sapphire can. Over the years they always still manage to find a way to impress so I’m excited to see what the RX 9070 XT Pulse has to offer and to see how it performs. So let’s dive in and see what sets the Pulse apart before getting to testing!
Product Name: Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse
Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT?
The most interesting thing about AMDs new RDNA 4 architecture was the change in focus from the higher end to targeting the larger upper mid-range market with a targeted price of around $700. With that where some architectures are only focused on how to get the best possible performance, AMD wanted to find the best performance per dollar. RDNA 4 compute unit features an enhanced memory subsystem, improved scaler units, dynamic register allocation, increased efficiency per CU, and clock speeds that are a lot higher than RDNA 3. With all of that, they were able to improve performance per compute unit and offer (according to them) performance similar to their previous generation RX 7900 Series but with a lower compute unit count which helps keep the costs down.
They upgraded their Raytracing Accelerators to their third-generation design with a second ray intersection engine and optimized some of the overhead needed to execute raytracing calculations. This doubled the capabilities when compared to RDNA 3. They also have their 2nd generation AI Accelerators as well to improve performance in AI-accelerated games, content creation, and generative AI. They did this by adding new math pipelines for AI calculations, adding support for new data types like FP8, and support for inference optimization techniques like structured sparsity.
Exclusive to the new RDNA 4 cards, they also introduced FSR 4. FSR 4 improves image quality over FSR 3.1 with an ML-based algorithm designed to improve temporal stability, better preserve detail, and reduce ghosting. By utilizing features that were already part of the FidelityFX API when game developers integrated FSR 3.1, FSR 4 will be available on over 30 games at launch on the 9070 and 90070 XT. It’s always good when the game developers don’t have to push updates out to support!
I touched on it before that AMDs focus was on increasing value but one of the slides in their presentation caught my eye where they highlighted that they are aiming for 4k gaming at a 1440p price. They have the RX 9070 series targeted to sit in between their RX 7800 XT and XTX and the RX 7900 GRE for launch pricing with both 4K and 1440p gaming being possible.
Both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT have a lot fewer compute units than any of the 7900 Series cards but how do they compare to each other? The regular RX 9070 has 56 CUs to the XT’s 64. The same can be seen with the raytracing accelerators and for the AI accelerators, those numbers are just doubled up. The RX 9070 has a boost clock of 2.52 GHz and the XT is significantly higher at an impressive 2.97 GHz. You can see how much the clock speed changes things with the AI performance included in the chart, the XT has 14% more AI Accelerators but it does 33% more performance due to the clock speeds as well. Both cards have 16GB of VRAM which is needed for 4k gaming and both cards run on PCIe 5.0 at x16. They have DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b connections. Then for power with the lower clock speed, the RX 9070 has a board power of 220 watts whereas the XT is 304 watts.
Before getting into testing I also ran GPUz to double-check that our clock speeds match up with the specifications. The Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse has a stock clock speed and GPUz confirmed that with it’s 2970 MHz boost clock. I tested the RX 9070 XT Pulse with the Beta prelaunch 24.30.31.03 Adrenalin driver provided by AMD and the card's BIOS version is noted just in case we need to reference that in the future.
Packaging
Sapphire is always so consistent with their packaging which makes it easy to spot them on a shelf if you have seen them before. For the RX 9070 XT Pulse, the right side of the card has a black background which includes the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT model branding, AMD has dropped their red wrap-around for this black branding this generation and it looks great. The black goes well with Sapphire's blue branding for the RX 9070 XT Pulse. The right side has the Sapphire Pulse logo and then in the top left corner you also have the Sapphire logo by itself, I’m not sure why the logo needs to be there twice. The left side of the front has a black background with multiple shades of blue and the Pulse zig-zag line like you would see pulse telemetry on medical machines. The 16GB VRAM is there in the bottom left corner as well. On the back, the AMD wrap-around is there in black again and it highlights some of their key features. Then on the right in the blue Sapphire has a proper picture of the RX 9070 XT Pulse which is great to see. They do list out specifications but the only thing there is the display connections. Those are important to know, and I get that packaging is designed before clock speeds are set, but I would like to see the card dimensions listed as well as the power connections needed. Anyone who is looking at the box is most likely shopping in person and those shoppers will want to know what the card looks like, if they can power it, will it fit, and will it hook to my monitor.
Inside you will find a brown cardboard box. This box opens up and has a layer of foam sitting on top of everything. Below that the documentation is sitting on top and then the RX 9070 XT Pulse and its accessory box both have cutouts in a thick foam layer to keep them from moving around. The RX 9070 XT Pulse itself comes in a plastic static protective bag as well as has plastic all over the card that you will need to remove.
For documentation the RX 9070 XT Pulse comes with a generic quick installation guide and then an installation guide for the included card support bracket. Then for accessories, as mentioned, you get a nice metal support bracket. This can mount to three PCI slots and runs across with an adjustable rubber-ended section that pushes up on the end of the card for more support. It is black and does have the Sapphire branding to match the RX 9070 XT Pulse itself as well.
Sapphire was careful to put a bright yellow warning on the card about this but this is the first time I have ever seen the card itself being stuffed with foam that you need to remove. They put it in the blow-through section between the heatsink and the backplate to keep the heatsink from moving around. I would rather see that space just filled with more heatsink in most cases, but it is too early to judge on that. This was a big pain to get out though.
Card Layout and Photos
If you have seen one of Sapphire's Pulse cards in the past the Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse isn’t going to be too much of a surprise visually but that isn’t to say that the design isn’t different. Sapphire has taken the simple black with a touch of red styling of past Pulse cards have they have spiced things up slightly with a step-down section on the fan shroud in the center at the top and bottom. It has the same black plastic shroud with red accent lines but the step-down section they have molded in groves to give it a little more styling. I have always been a fan of how simple the Pulse designs have been and this is a departure from that slightly but it isn’t so over the top that I don’t like it. But for the people who maybe thought the old Pulse designs were boring this is for you. As usual though, beyond that change the Pulse still has a focus on keeping things simple with no RGB lighting or anything that would add to the costs without sacrificing performance. In fact, this is the largest Pulse I’ve ever seen. It comes in at 320 mm in length, 120.25 mm in height, and 61.6 mm in thickness. That thickness puts it at just over a 3-slot card but they do list it as a 3-slot (normally we see 10 mm per slot). That size is all focused on cooling with the three fan design including a blow-through section taking up almost half of the card.
The triple fan cooler has two matching 100 mm fans on both ends and a smaller 94 mm fan in the center which is closer to 89 edge to edge on the fan blade itself. All three fans are black to match the shroud and have an axial fan design that blows down into the heatsink. They have 7 blades and all of the blades have a heavy twist to their design which they call the AeroCurve design. On the outside, there is an outer ring that gives the fan more strength and helps focus the airflow down into the cooler. They all have a machined aluminum sticker on the center with a red ring and the Pulse branding on it. The center fan, in addition to being smaller, is also spinning in the opposite direction to help cut down on turbulence near where the fans are next to each other. Looking through the fans we can see the cooler is an aluminum finned heatsink oriented vertically to push the air up and to give the shortest path away.
Up on the top edge of the RX 9070 XT Pulse, there is both Sapphire and Radeon branding. The Sapphire logo is on a raised grey section in the middle of the card and the Radeon logo is down at the end of the card. Both are printed in red and don’t have any backlighting, keeping with Pulse’s simple design that keeps costs down without taking away from features that affect performance. Also up on the top edge, the RX 9070 XT Pulse has its power connections. Like with the other 9070 XT’s it runs two 8-pin PCIe power connections. They have both connections flipped around with the clip side on the PCB side with the PCB notched to fit them. This means the heatsink can be tight up against the power connections. While the RX 9070 XT Pulse is a large card, you will notice that the power connections are dropped down into the card which means all of the space that the power plugs use is also utilized by the heatsink.
Looking around the top and bottom edges as well as the end of the RX 9070 XT Pulse we can get a much better look at Sapphire's cooling design. The top edge of the card does have the front fan shroud wrapped around and the backplate wraps around slightly mostly to give it even more strength. Even with those cutting into the space, there is a large opening across the top for the air to be pushed out. The same goes for the bottom, though I would prefer more air push out of the top than the bottom down against your motherboard where M.2 drives are installed. At the bottom edge, we can see the heatplate that sits on top of the GPU and memory and the heatpipes sitting right on top of that. Sapphire does note that they are using Honeywell PTM7950 for the TIM. The heatpipes drop down over the GPU and rise back up slightly on the PCI bracket end of the card and they loop back around on that end closer to the top. Just past the GPU, those heatpipes jump way up to run through the middle of the right heatsink. There are five heatpipes in total. That is the larger of the two heatsinks and runs to the end of the card, well past the PCB with the blow-through design. I was surprised that the heatsink on that end doesn’t fill the full thickness of the card. The end of the RX 9070 XT Pulse doesn’t have an opening at all. Here both the fan shroud and the backplate both wrap around and with the metal backplate section they have also included three screw holes for use with some support brackets.
For display connections, the RX 9070 XT Pulse has four connections, but like with past Sapphire cards, they don’t go with the traditional layout of 3 DisplayPort and 1 HDMI. They have two DisplayPort and two HDMI, giving more HDMI connectivity for users who have older displays or are using TVs. The rest of the triple slot bracket is filled with ventilation slots cut at 45-degree angles for a simple design. The Sapphire branding is stamped into the bracket at the base and each of the display connections has a label stamped as well.
The back of the RX 9070 XT Pulse has a full-length metal backplate with a black finish with a slight texture to it. They have the Sapphire Pulse branding in white and red along with the AMD Radeon logo in white as well with both being printed upside down to be readable when installed in traditional cases. In addition to that, there is the Pulse EKG-like line in red and if you look closely there are a few black accents printed as well. The backplate is cut out around the back of the GPU bracket and up at the power plugs as well. That large cutout for the power cables shows how deep Sapphire has those connections. There is a vent up at the top and then a large vent for the blow-through design that goes from the end of the PCB almost to the end of the card.
If you were curious how the RX 9070 XT Pulse compares with the Steel Legend that I previously took a look at I do have a few pictures of them next to each other. We can see the Pulse’s extra length sticking out at the end. The extra thickness is noticeable as well, but that is more exaggerated because Sapphire is using a proper larger PCI bracket for its 3-slot size.
Test Rig and Procedures
Test System
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Live Pricing
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero – Live Pricing
Cooling: Enermax LIQMAXFLO 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler - Live Pricing
Noctua NT-H2 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (2x16GB) 6000MT/s CL28-36-36-96 – Live Pricing
Storage: Viper VP4300 Lite 4TB – Live Pricing
Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600W- Live Pricing
Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing
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. The Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse has a stock clock speed but does have a larger cooler than the 9070 XT Steel Legend that I previously tested, so I am curious to see how they compare performance wise. Beyond that, we want to keep an eye on how it compares with Nvidia’s new RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 and AMDs older but still powerful RX 7900 Series cards.
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 RX 9070 XT Pulse scored a 67571 in the base Fire Strike benchmark putting it ahead of the Steel Legend by 1.2%. In Fire Strike Extreme it scored a 34575 once again sitting ahead of the Steel Legend, this time by 2%. Then for Fire Strike Ultra, it scored 17725, beating the Steel Legend by 2.49%. That wasn’t enough for any of them to pass any other cards but did put the Pulse ahead in all three tests.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. The RX 9070 XT Pulse scored a 29716 in the base Time Sy benchmark putting it ahead of the Steel Legend by 1.7% and putting it even closer to the RX 7900 XTX that sits above it. In Time Spy Extreme the RX 9070 XT Pulse scored a 14367. This put it ahead of the Steel Legend by 2% which helped push it up over the RTX 4080 SUPER in this test.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RX 9070 XT Pulse scored a 6267 in the Speed Way benchmark, which was 1.2% ahead of the Steel Legend. That did close the gap between it and the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. In Port Royal, the RX 9070 XT Pulse scored 18240 which was 2.4% ahead of the Steel Legend 9070 XT. That improvement helped it pass the RTX 4080 FE and put it close to the RTX 4080 SUPER FE.
The last test is the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RX 9070 XT Pulse scored a 7025 which was an even larger improvement compared to the previous tests at 2.5% over the Steel Legend. That helped open up the gap between it and the RTX 4080 SUPER but didn’t get it any closer to the next fastest card, the RTX 5080 with a big gap between the two.
I did also run 3Dmark’s FSR 2 comparison. It doesn’t test the latest FSR 4 but it does still give a look at the performance differences you can see between different quality settings. In this case, the RX 9070 XT Pulse ran at just 43 FPS without FSR 2 but with it on in the best case like this you will see between 82 FPS and 180 FPS. The quality, balanced, and performance results show good improvements each but the ultra-performance setting has the largest performance jump.
In-Game Benchmarks
Now we finally get into the in game performance and that is the main reason people pick up a new video card. To test things out I ran through our new benchmark suite that tests 8 games at three different resolutions (1080p, 1440p, and 4k). Most of the games tested have been run at the highest detail setting and a mid-range detail setting to get a look at how turning things up hurts performance and to give an idea of whether turning detail down from max will be beneficial for frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 is also tested with Super Sampling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). In total, each video card is tested 60 times and that makes for a huge mess of results when you put them all together. To help with that I like to start with these overall playability graphs that take all of the results and give an easier-to-read result. I have one for each of the three resolutions and each is broken up into four FPS ranges. Under 30 FPS is considered unplayable, over 30 is playable but not ideal, over 60 is the sweet spot, over 120 FPS is for high refresh rate monitors, and 240 helps show the performance ideal for the latest higher refresh displays.
So how did the RX 9070 XT Pulse do? Well at 1080p all of the tests except for one came in over 120 FPS with 13 of those sitting at over 240 FPS as well. This is the same as what I saw with the Steel Legend. At 1440p there are two results in that 60-119 FPS range and with 10 results in the 120-219 FPS range most results fall in that section but there were still 6 results over 240 FPS. This matched the Steel Legend as well. Then at 4k, we get the first result under 60 FPS. There are 7 results between 60 and 119 FPS and 8 from 120 to 219 with just two over 240 FPS. Here the RX 9070 XT Pulse has one more result up over 240 FPS when compared to the Steel Legend.
To get a better look at some of the cards that are the closest competition to the RX 9070 XT Pulse I have compiled all of the averaged FPS results at all three resolutions tested for a range of cards around the RX 9070 XT Pulse’s performance and price range. This really shows the performance difference between the RX 9070 XT Pulse and the 9070 XT Steel Legend which is surprising given that they both have the same clock speeds. The RX 9070 XT Pulse is ahead of the Steel Legend in all three resolutions with a 2.4 FPS gap at 1440p and a 2.5 FPS gap at 4k. That wasn’t enough to push it up ahead of any of the other cards but we still see it sitting ahead of the 7900 XTX at 1440p but not at 4k and ahead of the RTX 4080 SUPER across the board by a good margin. It does sit behind the RTX 5070 Ti in these averages, helped by the fact that Nvidia has support for DLSS 4 in our Cyberpunk 2077 test where AMD currently doesn’t have their latest FSR on the game.
Of course, I have all of the actual in game results as well for anyone who wants to sort through the wall of graphs below.
Another new addition to my testing was a few additional tests using Cyberpunk 2077. This is one of only a few games that support most of the tech from all three of the GPU companies. So I did tests at medium and ultra detail while having Super Sampling on for all of the cards. Using whatever the latest and greatest is supported. In this case, I tested with FSR 3.1. Just a note here, the AMD cards only allowed FSR when running windowed mode whereas Nvidia only performed well in fullscreen mode. Getting to see the Cyberpunk 2077 performance with and without FSR 3.1 shows just how much of a performance difference that it can make. With the RX 9070 XT Pulse at ultra detail that took the frame rate from 61.07 at 4k up to 207.17 FPS, a 239% increase.
Compute and AI Benchmarks
Now some people don’t need a video card for gaming, they need the processing power for rendering or 2D/3D production, or in some cases, people who game also do work on the side. AI performance importance has increased quickly recently as well. So it is also important to check out the compute and AI performance on all of the video cards that come in. That includes doing a few different tests.
With the 9070 not supporting the Blender benchmark (the actual app does work with it) my only test here was Geekbench AI, a cross-platform AI benchmark that uses real-world machine learning tasks giving three results, a full precision score, half precision score, and quantized score. The RX 9070 XT Pulse came in below the Steel Legend on all three tests by a small amount which when combined together shows a noticeable drop between the two. Not enough to change the order of any of the cards however, it still sits ahead of the RX 7900 XTX.
Cooling and Noise
For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU.
Sadly I wasn’t able to include power numbers, in testing, I damaged our P-Cat and was getting inaccurate results.
My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RX 9070 XT Pulse was impressive in the 50% fan speed test sitting in the bottom ¼ of our chart with a 37.2 decibel result. The Steel Legend is up near the top with its 42.3 dB result. Cranking the fans up to 100% the RX 9070 XT Pulse dropped even farther down in the chart and was the second quietest result. The 54.2 dB result was 4 and a half dB lower than the Steel Legend. This is especially impressive once we see the RPM chart. Normally the max speed noise results are close to the RPM chart but the RX 9070 XT Pulse is up in the top 1/3 for fan speed but extremely quiet. Great job Sapphire!
I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the RX 9070 XT Pulse is the quietest card test at 33.1 dB and by a large margin even with the Steel Legend also doing well here but is still 1.1 dB louder.
To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RX 9070 XT Pulse leveled off at 58c putting it in the bottom ¼ of our chart and 1c below the Steel Legend. The memory temperatures were at 89c, 1c higher than the Steel Legend. The RX 9070 XT Pulse did that however with the fans hardly working, running at just 27%. Cranking the fans up it ran at 41c, 5c less than the Steel Legend, and an impressive 17c delta between the stock fan profile and 100% fan speed results. At full fan speed, the memory temps were much lower at 72c which does make me think that a little more on the stock fan profile might help keep those a little cooler without causing too much noise.
While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. The RX 9070 XT Pulse, as we saw in the temperature testing, was running cool, especially on the fan side. You can see that the blow-through section is cooler at 28c with the hottest spot being to the left of the center fan at 39c. There was more heat up on top where the warmed air is blowing out. The heatsink was registering 58.9c but the exposed areas of the PCB that you can see from that angle were up to 87c and the warm air blowing up onto our power cables had them warm as well. The hottest spot on the back view was the PCB again which was peaking out near the power connection. It was warm with the exposed PCB behind the GPU but the backplate itself which is also acting as a heatsink was cooler at 50c and down at the blowthrough end it was 46.8c.
Overall and Final Verdict
Even before getting into testing, I had high expectations for the Sapphire RX 9070 XT Pulse. The previous 9070 XT Steel Legion that I took a look at was good but Sapphire has always done a great job of being a step ahead and we see that here with the RX 9070 XT Pulse. Like we have seen with past Pulse cards, the RX 9070 XT Pulse keeps things very simple with a focus on performance and no flashy aesthetics like RGB lighting. That said, the basic black cooler design looks good and gets the job done without being too flashy. While having the same stock clock speed, it stood out in a majority of our tests sometimes with more of a lead than we would see with an overclocked card. Sapphire did that with impressive cooling performance with the only exception to that being memory temps a little warmer than I would like to see. But still better than the memory temps on the Steel Legion. Even with the cooling performance, it was also impressive in our noise testing across the board. The RX 9070 XT GPU was once again impressive with its raster performance. AMD has come a long way with AI and Ray Tracing performance as well, but that is the one area where we see Nvidia cards still leading the way.
It's impressive that Sapphire did so well with the RX 9070 XT Pulse even at stock clock speeds and with that this is technically an “MSRP” card with its MSRP being $599. Of course, we all know that video card pricing right now has been crazy across the board, and finding them at MSRP is basically impossible. In the case of the Pulse, they are at Newegg and Micro Center for $849.99. You can at least currently get the Steel Legend and a few other cards closer to the $700 range and that would be the only reason to not be looking at the Pulse when shopping for an RX 9070 XT.
Live Pricing: HERE
