Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse Review: Quiet a Performance

A $120 price drop makes this card more enticing.

By Jarred Walton
published
Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse photos and unboxing
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

Sapphire RX 7900 XT Test Setup

Our graphics card test system was updated earlier this year to use Intel's fastest Core i9-13900K, with all the bells and whistles. We tested the Sapphire RX 7900 XT card using AMD's most recent 23.5.2 drivers, while the other AMD cards were tested with 23.3.2 through 23.5.1. All the cards in this review have been retested in the past month or two, without Windows 11's Virtualization Based Security enabled.

Test Equipment

TOM'S HARDWARE INTEL 13TH GEN PC

Intel Core i9-13900K
MSI MEG Z790 Ace DDR5
G.Skill Trident Z5 2x16GB DDR5-6600 CL34
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 4TB
be quiet! 1600W Dark Power Pro 13
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

GRAPHICS CARDS
Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse
AMD RX 7900 XTX
AMD RX 7900 XT
AMD RX 6950 XT
AMD RX 6900 XT
AMD RX 6800 XT
AMD RX 6800
Nvidia RTX 4080
Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti
Nvidia RTX 4070
Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti

Our initial review of the RX 7900 XT looked at performance across all resolutions and settings that we normally test (1080p medium, 1080p ultra, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra). It also had professional and AI benchmarks. For third-party cards like this Sapphire Pulse, we'll limit our testing to 1440p and 4K ultra, as that's the primary target for graphics cards that cost $800 or more. Results in other tests should have similar margins to the gaming results.

Our test PC includes an MSI Z790 DDR5 motherboard, G.Skill DDR5 memory, and a Sabrent 4TB SSD — which we promptly filled to about half its total capacity. be quiet! also supplied us with its new 1600W Dark Power Pro 13 80 Plus Titanium rated power supply. That would have been overkill, back before cards like the RTX 4090 were a thing.

We're including a collection of current and previous generation GPUs, with the Nvidia results from the RTX 40-series (but skipping the significantly more expensive RTX 4090). If you want to see how the RX 7900 XT stacks up against other GPUs, check out our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.

We have Nvidia PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware as well, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll have most of the details for power testing in a few pages.

Jarred Walton
Jarred Walton

Jarred Walton is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on everything GPU. He has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.

29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • cknobman
    If they get the 7900XT down to $699 I might consider getting one.
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    I have to agree only the Highend options from both NV and AMD this gen are worth it. Anything below 4080,4090 and 7900XT,7900XTX just looks like trash.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Or you can just recognize that HD texture packs often do very little for image fidelity and stick with settings that won't exceed 12GB (unless a game is poorly coded, which unfortunately seems to be the case with a lot of recent ports).

    With that attitude you don't need to buy a higher end GPU, just buy a console for much less than $600!
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    With that attitude you don't need to buy a higher end GPU, just buy a console for much less than $600!
    This is actually a fair take. We're not talking about pennies here. These cards are mega expensive and saying "just compromise" feels wrong to say.

    I mean, people that buys a Ferrari Enzo won't use it* to haul big cargo or for off-road, but the cards above $300 start nudging the "if you need to compromise, just get a console" lever to me.

    As for the rest of the review, thanks for it. This card is a tad underrated as "cheap non-reference" cards go. The XTX version of this is same price as reference and a tad better (both come with the 3 8pin so you can OC it IIRC), so you can give them a good run for the money if you want. Also, they're better for Water Cooling enthusiasts as they keep the 3 8pin and aren't as expensive as the higher end cooled ones.

    Everything else is: "this is a 7900XT", haha.

    I wish you could give VR games a quick try and comparison, since friends with these are crying when I tell them my 6900XT is performing better at lower power than theirs.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    This is actually a fair take. We're not talking about pennies here. These cards are mega expensive and saying "just compromise" feels wrong to say.

    That's what I was going for. Mainstream and entry level cards have compromises, high end designated cards should only have ray tracing as their compromise (and that's not much of one in many cases).

    I also don't agree with TH's testing methodology here of requiring the use of ray tracing, since that is one area that usually brings a significant performance detriment for very little actual visual gain. In my opinion ray tracing shouldn't even be counted as a detail for the purposes of defining "max details", but a processing enhancement effect. Techpowerup's review did not use ray tracing for their average FPS chart (it's in a separate chart). They used 25 games, and some were not included from TH's choices, but it provides a far better real-world result. I hope TH will adopt a policy that will require all GPU tests to be run without RT, and if RT is to be included it should be placed in a separate chart, at least until such time when RT does not carry any more than a 10% reduction in performance.



    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    That's what I was going for. Mainstream and entry level cards have compromises, high end designated cards should only have ray tracing as their compromise (and that's not much of one in many cases).

    I also don't agree with TH's testing methodology here of requiring the use of ray tracing, since that is one area that usually brings a significant performance detriment for very little actual visual gain. In my opinion ray tracing shouldn't even be counted as a detail for the purposes of defining "max details", but a processing enhancement effect.
    If we're going down that road, we shouldn't even test at ultra settings, we should just run everything at medium or high. And for those games that actually have ultra settings that actually do look better? Those are just "processing enhancement effects." We should also just test at 1080p, because 1440p and 4K are "resolution enhancement effects." Or put more bluntly, discounting a chunk of what modern GPUs can do just because you don't like how it impacts GPU rankings isn't something I condone or intend to do.

    You'll note in the articles where I look at new games, the conclusion is often (though not always) that ultra and high are basically equivalent quality but ultra requires more GPU resources for minimal gains. Ray tracing, at least in some games, actually does way more than the minor differences between high and ultra. Weakly/poorly done RT of course doesn't do much. So games like Far Cry 6, World of Warcraft, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Dirt 5, etc. But when it's actually used more extensively, it can make a bigger difference, like Minecraft, Cyberpunk 2077, and a few other games.

    If you're willing to discount ray tracing hardware entirely, you can discount a lot of other stuff as well and end up with consoles. But if you're willing to compromise on ray tracing just because it's an area where AMD GPUs in particular perform much worse than their Nvidia counterparts, that's just intentionally limiting your view of a graphics card to favor one brand.
    Reply
  • gg83
    Whats better the 6950xt for $600 or the 7900xt on-sale?
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    gg83 said:
    Whats better the 6950xt for $600 or the 7900xt on-sale?
    What is the difference in price?
    Reply
  • atomicWAR
    Makaveli said:
    What is the difference in price?
    Two hundred atm.
    Reply
  • sherhi
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    I also don't agree with TH's testing methodology here of requiring the use of ray tracing, since that is one area that usually brings a significant performance detriment for very little actual visual gain. In my opinion...
    People have different opinions about visuals but these cards are usually within margin of error of reference models, this test shows it as well. Im sure they can make just a rasterization chart for you personally if you are interested in this model but again I bet its within margin of error of reference model and you can always check that here: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
    Its standard these days to separate those measurements. In this article I dont see 1080p and I am okay with that, its high end GPU and if its good at 1440p then I dont really need another page or two (which takes maybe even an hour or two to write) for 1080p because it wont say much.
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    With that attitude you don't need to buy a higher end GPU, just buy a console for much less than $600!
    I agree, is there any online chart comparing same games´performance of all modern GPUs and consoles? I know digital foundry is doing comparisons like PS5 vs Series X vs high end PC but mixing consoles´FPS into these GPU charts would be interesting.
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    If we're going down that road, we shouldn't even test at ultra settings, we should just run everything at medium or high. And for those games that actually have ultra settings that actually do look better? Those are just "processing enhancement effects." We should also just test at 1080p, because 1440p and 4K are "resolution enhancement effects."
    I get your point but its not the best example, resolutions are standardized and its common for GPUs to behave differently, their power curve is often non-linear across resolutions...anyway RT should stay thats for sure.
    Reply