AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX has been on the market for three months now. While the XTX has been pretty difficult to find and is out of stock in many places, the XT's sales were fairly slow, mostly because of the $900 price point, which is pretty close to the $1000 asking price of the XTX. AMD has now lowered the pricing to $800, which makes quite a difference for the card's value proposition, especially in the fight against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, which was released in January, starting at $800.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse is the company's most affordable custom-design variant, targeting price points close to MSRP. You get a small factory overclock to 2450 MHz Boost, up from 2400 MHz on the reference design (or +2%). Also included is a triple-slot, triple-fan thermal solution, but no RGB or dual BIOS. While the card isn't compact by any means, it's definitely smaller than some other RX 7900 XT cards.

Averaged over our test suite at 4K resolution, the RX 7900 XT Pulse beats the AMD reference card by a meager 1%, which isn't unexpected—factory overclocks these days achieve minimal performance increases. With those performance numbers the card is 10% faster than RTX 4070 Ti, beating RTX 3090 by 12% and it also ends up 1% ahead of RTX 3090 Ti, NVIDIA's last-generation flagship card. The RTX 4080 is 14% faster, and the RX 7900 XTX has a 17% lead. It's also important to look at 1440p performance, for gamers looking to drive high-refresh-rate monitors with their GPU. Here the RX 7900 XT does much better, closing the gap to the 4080 to 10%, and the 1% lead vs the 3090 Ti expands to 8%. While RX 7900 XT works great on 4K, it works even better on 1440p, because at that resolution the demands on L3 cache are not as high as on 4K, so the smaller size (compared to RX 7900 XTX) doesn't matter as much.

Things change when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XT is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. While we saw a 10% lead for the AMD card vs RTX 4070 Ti without ray tracing, turning on RT switches the numbers around and now the NVIDIA card is 10% faster. I think everyone agrees that ray tracing is the future, and just disagrees on how quickly that future is happening. If you're part of the "I want this now" camp, then you should probably consider GeForce. On the other hand, if you feel like ray tracing is just minor additional eye candy, that comes with a huge performance hit, then you can happily grab the RX 7900 XT.

With GeForce 40, NVIDIA has introduced DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which effectively doubles the framerate by generating "middle" frames based on two frames. As complicated as it sounds in theory, it works really well to boost your framerates, and you'll be unable to spot any issues during normal gameplay. Of course AMD doesn't support DLSS, and their FSR 3 Frame Generation technology is merely announced "it'll come out this year," but exact details are scarce, whereas you can use NVIDIA DLSS 3 today in many games.

Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison test shows that Sapphire's RX 7900 XT Pulse comes with a cooling solution that's only slightly more powerful than the reference design cooler, which makes it weaker than many competing cards from other board partners. Nevertheless, Sapphire found amazing fan settings for their card. With less than 29 dBA, the card is almost whisper-quiet, yet temperatures are still good with 69°C. Other vendors are shooting for even lower temps (why?), and compromise on fan noise in the process. The XFX Merc 310 is very loud, much louder than the Sapphire Pulse, and the ASUS TUF has a huge, expensive cooler that's only marginally quieter than the Pulse. While other vendors are using a dual BIOS feature to offer some choice in terms of settings, Sapphire's card comes with a single BIOS only and that's perfectly fine. The fan settings are as good as they get—no need to mess around, just install the card and enjoy your games. As expected for a modern graphics card in 2023, the fans will stop spinning when not gaming, for the perfect noise-free experience.

Power efficiency of the new Radeons is fantastic, clearly much better than the previous generation of RDNA 2 and NVIDIA Ampere cards. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 cards are a bit better still, by 22% (RTX 4080), 16% (RTX 4090), and 2% (RTX 4070 Ti). For all intents and purposes I'd say that RX 7900 XT and RTX 4070 Ti have the same energy efficiency. This is important, because higher efficiency means lower power draw, which reduces the card's heat output, meaning a weaker heatsink can keep the card cool. I did notice that as the card heats up, the frequencies will drop by a lot. In our thermal load test, the card starts out running at 2621 MHz, and stays in that state for around 20 seconds, good to get a boost on short running benchmarks, but then clocks go down to 2447 MHz and stays there until the card cools down again at the end of your gaming session. This 6% drop is clearly significant and costs AMD against NVIDIA's cards, which don't drop nearly as much. Our benchmarks are designed to be realistic, by simulating a longer gaming session, there's a warm-up period before I start recording FPS numbers..

While power consumption in non-gaming states like multi-monitor and video playback was terrible in the first round of reviews, this has been fixed since and the numbers are halved now, but with 40 W they are still fairly high compared to competing products. RTX 4070 Ti for example makes do with less than half the energy consumed. Generally speaking, PSU requirements are low—just 320 W during gaming, which matches the reference design almost exactly, which means Sapphire didn't sacrifice efficiency on their card to achieve the factory OC.

Overclocking worked well on our card, once you know what to do. Without power limit increase or undervolting you will not see any meaningful gains—check out my step-by-step guide in the OC section and you'll have a good starting point. With 12.7% performance gained after OC, the card almost matches the RX 7900 XTX in performance, beating the RTX 4080, too. Double-digit OC gains are quite rare these days and always nice to see.

As mentioned before, AMD has dropped the MSRP or the Radeon RX 7900 XT from $900 to $800, which makes quite a difference. First of all, this widens the gap to the XTX from $100 to $200, which means people will think twice before opting for the XTX. What's just as important is that the XT now is priced the same as the RTX 4070 Ti, which previously was seen as more affordable, despite the very high asking price of $800-$900. Price/performance of both cards is surprisingly similar, with the RX 7900 XT offering a small benefit without ray tracing, while the NVIDIA card has the upper hand with ray tracing. For the Sapphire Pulse specifically it is VERY important that it comes with amazing noise levels, because that's something where the AMD reference card didn't do so well. Previous-generation graphics cards aren't really attractive, despite the high price of the RX 7900 XT / RTX 4070 Ti. For example, RX 6900 XT would have to be sub-$600 before I'd even consider it an alternative, RTX 3080 maybe at around $550, and that's about it.

Sapphire's Pulse is currently listed online for $860, which is cheaper than the $900 launch-day MSRP, but other custom-designs are still more affordable, like the ASRock Phantom Gaming ($800), the XFX Merc 310 ($810), the MSI Gaming ($840) and the ASRock Taichi ($850). Considering that the Pulse is a near-reference design without many bells and whistles I think it's a little bit overpriced right now and would sell much better if the price was much closer to $800. Still, the amazing noise levels are what redeems the card—if you want a quiet RX 7900 XT that doesn't break the bank then the Sapphire Pulse is ideal.