Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9070

Yahoo

08-03-2025

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AMD's Radeon RX 9070 falls right in line behind the Radeon RX 9070 XT in its Radeon RX 9000 series of graphics cards. Though a competent card in its own right, the $549 Radeon RX 9070 sits in the shadow of the generally better-value $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT, with the difference in price not big enough to make the Radeon RX 9070 stand out. In testing a Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9070 for this review, we found that you can undoubtedly draw an enjoyable gaming experience from the Radeon RX 9070 at high-detail 1440p and lower-detail 4K resolutions. However, spending an extra $50 for the Radeon RX 9070 XT, an Editors' Choice award winner, is much more worthwhile, so long as that card remains in stock and the price gap doesn't grow.
The RX 9070 uses the RDNA 4 graphics architecture and the Navi 48 GPU die, just like the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, but AMD partially disabled portions of the RX 9070's GPU in the binning process. The RX 9070 hasn't lost much from a part-by-part analysis. The number of stream processors inside the RX 9070 is 3,584, a 14% reduction from the RX 9070 XT's count of 4,096. This reduction comes with a decrease in the number of texture mapping units (TMUs) from 256 on the RX 9070 XT to 224 on the RX 9070, and the number of ray accelerators similarly dropped from 64 to 56.
That's about it in terms of hardware changes. Technically, the number of AI accelerators dropped from 128 to 112, but those don't impact gaming performance under normal conditions. The number of raster operation units (ROPs) was unchanged; same for the memory interface. AMD's 16GB pool of GDDR6 memory operates at 20Gbps on both cards.
Arguably, the most notable differences between the RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070 come from their firmware. The RX 9070 XT is configured to operate with a max boost clock of 2,970MHz and is rated to mostly hover around 2,400MHz while gaming. AMD set the RX 9070's turbo clock 15% lower at 2,520MHz, and the expected gaming clock speed dropped by 14% to 2,070MHz. These reductions in hardware resources and clock speed also pushed the expected peak power draw of the RX 9070 down to 220 watts from the RX 9070 XT's peak of 304W.
These drops in performance create a sufficiently large performance delta between the Radeon RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT to keep each card from directly competing on performance, but pricing is another matter. With the RX 9070 XT priced at $599 and the RX 9070 set at $549, that's a price difference of just 9%. Keep this in mind when I get to the benchmarks: If the RX 9070 XT can outpace the RX 9070 by more than 9%, which these specs suggest it should easily do, then the RX 9070 XT is the better value.
Before moving on to the tests, it's worth mentioning that the Radeon RX 9070 could have ample headroom for overclocking. The RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT both use the Navi 48 graphics chip, but AMD clocked the RX 9070 XT much higher, suggesting that the RX 9070 could also go higher. However, if you are interested in overclocking, I wouldn't bother buying a better-cooled RX 9070 model if it costs any extra. You won't find enough room between the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT in price to support doing that when you could just buy an RX 9070 XT.
Sapphire manufactured the test card that AMD sent us for review with a dual-fan thermal solution. The Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9070 doesn't have any RGB LEDs but makes up for this with an edgy black exterior covered in diagonal slits and red lines. A metal backplate helps give the card additional structural integrity while keeping the components on the back of the card's PCB cooler.
This card requires only two conventional eight-pin PCIe power connectors. Display output options include two HDMI 2.1 ports and two DisplayPort 2.1a jacks.
Our 2025 graphics card testbed features a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard and an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor with a large 360mm water cooler to test the Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 9070. We installed two 16GB sticks of DDR5 on the motherboard and configured them to operate under a 6,000MHz AMD EXPO memory profile. We also added two Crucial 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs to the system, one dedicated to games and the other holding Windows 11 and all other software. To ensure plentiful power delivery headroom, we used a 1,500-watt Corsair power supply.
AMD's main Radeon RX 9070 competition is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which is also priced at $549. Due to similar pricing, the RX 9070 will also have to compete with the RX 9070 XT, the last-gen Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE.
The Radeon RX 9070 started strong in the 3DMark tests we conducted. It essentially tied with the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super while surpassing the RTX 5070 and the RX 7900 GRE in the Port Royal test. The RX 970 also performed this way in the Steel Nomad and Time Spy Extreme benchmarks.
In 3DMark's Solar Bay and Speed Way tests, the RTX 5070 pulled into a close tie with the RX 9070. Unigine Superposition showed both scenarios, with the RTX 5070 tying with the RX 9070 in DirectX but falling behind in OpenGL.
AI performance could be a key measurement for graphics cards someday, but that remains somewhat questionable for the moment as software that can take advantage of this hardware is still in development. In these particular tests, Nvidia unquestionably has the advantage over AMD.
At least the AMD Radeon RX 9070 performed well enough for an AMD card, holding an edge over the RX 7900 GRE.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 also performed reasonably well in content creation tasks. It essentially tied with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 and outpaced the rest of the AMD competition.
The Blender benchmark refused to work with the AMD Radeon RX 9070, but this will likely be a temporary issue that will disappear after the drivers or Blender software are updated.
We limit our DLSS, FSR, and XeSS testing to Black Myth: Wukong due to the complications surrounding testing these technologies against each other. They all result in differing image quality, which makes comparing them solely on performance imprecise.
Black Myth Wukong supports DLSS 3 and FSR 3, which we test on Nvidia and AMD cards, respectively, with the super-resolution sampling set to 100%. We then rerun these tests with frame generation on for all cards to gauge how this alters performance.
This test notably does not show DLSS 4 or FSR 4 multi-frame-generation performance. With DLSS 4, Nvidia adopted a new AI model for DLSS work and AMD also made several changes to its fourth version of FSR technology. Of particular note is that these technologies can create more than one intermediary frame between each conventionally generated frame, though this has some trade-offs. To learn more about DLSS 4, check my article that closely examines DLSS 4 performance on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090.
In this test, the RX 9070 performed about the same as the RTX 5070 with frame generation off but pulled ahead of the RTX 5070 with frame generation on. The RX 9070 was faster than the RX 7900 GRE in both tests, though.
The Radeon RX 9070's performance in modern games that support ray tracing produced ups and downs. In Cyberpunk 2077, the RX 9070 was slightly slower than the GeForce RTX 5070 and lagged behind the RTX 5070 in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Returnal. However, the RTX 5070 never beat the RX 9070 by more than 10% in these titles, with its advantage typically in the single digits.
That contrasts with the RX 9070's wins against the RTX 5070. The RX 9070 may not have beaten the RTX 5070 in every game, but when the RX 9070 was faster, it was typically ahead by double-digit percentages. The RX 9070's advantage varied from as low as 6% in F1 2024 to as high as 27% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. It was also faster in Far Cry 6.
As for competing with other AMD cards, the last-generation Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 GRE were typically behind the RX 9070. And the RX 9070 XT was typically faster than the RX 9070, which makes sense. I didn't calculate the percentage differences between the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT across the board, but the RX 9070 XT was ahead by at least 18% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III at 4K and by 16% in the same game at 1080p.
The RX 9070 XT's lead over the RX 9070 in other games looks roughly around these figures across the board. As those leads are greater than the 9% difference in price between these two GPUs, there's no question: The Radeon RX 9070 XT presents a better value and more frames per dollar than the RX 9070, assuming the pricing holds.
Last generation, AMD's greatest strength was in games that didn't support ray tracing as its ray-tracing hardware was less potent than Nvidia's. Instead, the average AMD GPU seemed to have a bit more muscle when it came to more traditional gaming workloads like those that don't support ray tracing.
This generation's situation appears to have been reversed, with the GeForce RTX 5070 performing better in Total War: Three Kingdoms than the Radeon RX 9070.
The Radeon RX 9070 pulled ahead in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the 4K resolution, which shows that it can still be faster in older games. The RTX 5070 appeared slightly faster in this game at 1440p and 1080p, but the scores were realistically close enough to be a tie at those resolutions.
Using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, we measured the power consumption of our graphics card test bed as a whole while running some key benchmarks on each of the graphics cards shown in the table. The Radeon RX 9070 consumed a bit more power in the Adobe Premiere Pro test than the RTX 5070, but this is made up for by the RX 9070's higher performance in that test.
Gaming power consumption was also notably lower on the RX 9070 than the RTX 5070. Given the RX 9070 typically tied with or performed better than the RTX 5070, this suggests the RX 9070 is the more energy efficient of the two. The RX 9070's power consumption was also considerably better than the RX 9070 XT's, which is likely due in large part to its reduced clock speeds and slightly reduced shader count.
The RX 9070 also stayed much cooler than the RTX 5070 during the testing process; the Sapphire's thermal solution performed better than Nvidia's Founders Edition cooler.
For its $549 asking price, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 gives you lots of performance and realistically little to complain about. Sure, its AI performance lags behind Nvidia, but seriously, is that why you are buying a midrange graphics card? When it comes to gaming, the RX 9070 is usually just as fast as the RTX 5070 or a fair bit faster. It is slightly slower in a few games, but not by a meaningful amount, whereas the RX 9070's performance lead is more meaningful and noticeable when present.
The Radeon RX 9070 goes a long way to replace AMD's aging Radeon RX 7900 GRE and Radeon RX 7900 XT, as it generally outpaces these cards. AMD only has one real issue as far as the RX 9070 goes: You can buy a Radeon RX 9070 XT for just $50 more.
AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT is generally better and well worth the added cost if the two cards remain $50 apart or less. The RX 9070 is a solid buy, but it would be easier to recommend if it were priced a touch lower, like $499. At $549, the Radeon RX 9070 is a fine graphics card that is worth its asking price, but think long and hard and make sure you can't scrape together that extra $50 for the Editors' Choice-award-winning Radeon RX 9070 XT.