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With a suggested price that's nearly the same as the RTX 4080, and with street prices currently hovering above the 4080 cards, 4K performance should be a major consideration for anyone looking at the 7900 XTX cards. We'll start there.
With the current seven fastest GPUs available, plus the Sapphire 7900 XTX, Sapphire's card ends up ranking second place overall in our rasterization benchmarks (not counting the manually overclocked cards). At the same time, it's barely any faster than the reference 7900 XTX — and we should note that our reference card sample doesn't seem to be one of those affected by the vapor chamber defect.
There's a bit of variability in our testing, and the Sapphire card was up to 7% faster than the reference model in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Total War: Warhammer 3, but it was also a few percent slower in Forza Horizon 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn. Bottom line was mostly a wash, with a 2.2% advantage across the nine tested games.
Overclocking is a different story. Where the gains from the factory overclock are almost negligible, the manual overclock improved performance by 7% overall. That's still not a massive change, but relative to the overclocked reference XTX card it was also a 4% gain. Those gains do come at the cost of power and efficiency of course, and we'd generally recommend sticking to the default clocks or even toying with underclocking or undervolting as a better option.
Meanwhile, looking at Nvidia, the Sapphire card leads the RTX 4080 by 6% overall, with larger wins in Borderlands 3, Far Cry 6, and Watch Dogs Legion. Nvidia's biggest win is in Total War: Warhammer 3 where it was 6% faster than the Sapphire card.
Ray tracing of course turns the tables, and the best Sapphire and AMD can do is fifth place, not counting the manually overclocked cards. The Sapphire card is also just 0.6% faster overall compared to the reference model, and the individual games show the two cards trading blows. The extra power and clocks ultimately don't show up in our factory stock testing.
Versus Nvidia, the Sapphire card is now 27% slower than the RTX 4080, and also trails the RTX 4070 Ti by 6%. It actually takes a slight lead over the 4070 in half of the games, but the deficits in Minecraft (-29%) and Cyberpunk 2077 (-11%) are quite a bit larger. And that's not accounting for DLSS, which most demanding DXR games support — though some also support FSR2, which at least partially closes the gap.
It's the usual story of AMD being a fine choice for rasterization, while Nvidia generally dominates in ray tracing performance. If you don't care at all about ray tracing, that's fine, and the visual difference in a lot of current games isn't even that big. Still, there are enough games with decent ray tracing support that we wouldn't completely write it off as "unnecessary."
Overclocking shows the same gains as in rasterization, incidentally: 7% faster compared to the default factory clocks, and 4% faster than the overclocked reference XTX card. The overclock is enough to just push past the (stock) Asus RTX 4070 Ti card in overall performance, though Minecraft still heavily favors the Nvidia GPU.
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