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.
