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We have 1440p and 4K ultra benchmarks for this Sapphire RX 7900 XT review. Given the $799 typical price (with sales bringing it down to $779), we'll start with the 1440p ultra performance before moving on to the 4K gaming results.
Here's the overview, first with the 15-game full suite, and with separate rasterization-only and DXR-only (i.e. ray tracing) charts. We'll discuss the individual game results further down the page.
First, overall performance ends up exactly tied (a 0.1 fps difference) with the reference RX 7900 XT. It's interesting, because we've seen other tests of Sapphire's card where it's a couple of percent faster. That's what we'd normally expect, since it has a higher power limit and a minor factory overclock, but there's always a bit of variability between GPUs.
Maybe our sample card was a bit of a dud, or maybe our reference card is a bit better than typical. It's not drivers, either, as we previously tested the card with the same drivers that we used for our most recent reference GPU testing. Regardless, there's really nothing to worry about as no one would notice a less than 10% difference without running benchmarks.
The Sapphire card also lands between the RX 6950 XT and RTX 4070 Ti in performance, but here we need to look at the rasterization and ray tracing charts as well. AMD's GPU ends up slightly ahead of the 4070 Ti in rasterization performance with a 6% lead, but conversely ends up trailing by 19% in the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) test suite.
That's expected in general, and how much you want to weight rasterization versus ray tracing performance is a contentious subject. Some will argue ray tracing is just technical snake oil, others hail it as the next big thing for graphics. There are currently close to 150 games that have some form of ray tracing. That's the "good" news.
Subjectively, however, we'd say probably only fifteen or so rate as reasonably popular games where the RT effects make a noticeable difference. Not coincidentally, six of those games are in our test suite. We'd also say that good upscaling (DLSS, XeSS, or one of the better FSR2 implementations) often ends up being more useful than token ray tracing support.
Across our 15-game test suite, the Sapphire and reference 7900 XT cards are basically equivalent, with a spread of -2.2% to +4.3% for the Sapphire card. Forza Horizon 5 shows the biggest change, and that could be due to drivers or a recent game patch. Everything else is within margin of error.
Switching gears to the Sapphire versus RTX 4070 Ti, we'll split that up into rasterization and ray tracing games. The spread for rasterization ends up ranging from -7.2% (Total War: Warhammer 3) to +25.9% (Borderlands 3) in favor of Sapphire. DXR meanwhile is a clean sweep for Nvidia, with anywhere from a 10.3% (Metro Exodus Enhanced) to a 57.1% (Minecraft) lead for Nvidia. Not surprisingly, but the most demanding DXR games are the ones that favor Nvidia the most. Those are also the games where ray tracing makes the most noticeable visual difference.
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