Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Review: Aesthetics First

The Nitro+ Radeon RX 9070 XT sits at the top of Sapphire’s lineup. AMD’s current Radeon generation focuses solely on the upper mid-range segment with intense price competition. As a result, Sapphire’s flagship isn’t a pricey premium model with a massive cooler like the previous-gen Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX. Instead, the designers focus on attractive aesthetics and distinctive features, such as the hidden 12V-2×6 power connector.

Cyberpunk 2077, native resolution

Ultra, RT Ultra and RT Overdrive settings

The first set of tests compares performance in native resolution using various anti-aliasing techniques. Traditional aliasing falls slightly behind in image quality compared to FSR or DLSS in native resolution, i.e., Native AA or DLAA modes.

The image quality varies between anti-aliasing methods, with DLSS currently offering the highest quality, although it’s exclusive to GeForce cards. GeForce owners have no real reason to choose anything other than DLSS. To compare GeForce cards with Radeons, however, all cards are also tested with FSR.

For weaker cards, we include tests at Ultra settings without ray tracing, and for more powerful cards, we also run RT Ultra and RT Overdrive with path tracing.

Global settings Ultra

The lower, Ultra settings are tested mainly for older cards. On high-end cards, performance is bottlenecked by the CPU, so the performance increase doesn’t reflect raw GPU performance. Ray tracing is not used, and DLSS isn’t necessary either.

1920 × 1080

2560 × 1440

 

3840 × 2160

Global settings RT Ultra

The RT Ultra setting uses hybrid ray tracing—a combination of rasterization and ray-traced effects—and is suitable for comparing the performance of the latest generation cards.

 

1920 × 1080

2560 × 1440

 

3840 × 2160

Global settings RT Overdrive

RT Overdrive employs path tracing, using full ray tracing to render scenes. On GeForce cards, DLAA with transformers is used.

1920 × 1080

2560 × 1440

3840 × 2160


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