Earlier this week we brought you reviews of the AMD reference design RX 7900 XTX and XT, and two custom-design boards from ASUS and XFX. Today we have tested the Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX Nitro+. This is Sapphire's flagship card for this launch, featuring a big factory overclock, a large power limit increase that's supported by three 8-pin power inputs, an amazing RGB light show and a great-looking cooler that can keep things cool, no matter what.

AMD's new RDNA 3 architecture brings with it the world's first GPU based on chiplet technology. Why is that a big deal you ask? Making large chips is expensive, more expensive than making several small chips. AMD realized that years ago and built their Ryzen CPUs using the chiplet approach, which is the foundation for the company's tremendous comeback in the CPU space. Team Red is betting that the same can happen in the GPU world, and today we're testing their first products built using that philosophy. Using chiplets gives another major advantage—you can combine multiple production processes. For the case of the Navi 31 GPU that powers the Radeon RX 7900 Series, the central compute die is fabricated on TSMC's leading 5 nanometer node, because efficiency greatly matters for its design. On the other hand, the memory-cache dies don't put out as much heat, and contain analog technology, which doesn't scale as well with process size. That's why AMD decided to build those with 6 nanometer tech, making them cheaper to produce.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD's flagship for this generation—it comes with the full Navi 31 GPU: 6144 cores, 96 compute units, 24 GB GDDR6 and six MCDs with 96 MB of L3 cache. RDNA 3 also introduces an upgraded display engine, which has support for DisplayPort 2.1, for higher refresh rates on upcoming 4K and 8K displays, and you also get support for hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding—the video format of the future.

For this round of reviews I've switched my testing to a Core i9-13900K, replacing our aging Ryzen 7 5800X that served us well for many years. Originally I wanted to switch over the holidays, but constant feedback on how "outdated, slow, and terrible" the 5800X is (it is not), made me switch early—just last week. So in addition to working on the RDNA 3 reviews, I also had to retest all my cards on the new setup, which is why there's fewer comparison cards in this review than what you're used to. I'll keep retesting, and update this review with data for the remaining GPUs. All the important high-end cards are included right now, so the outcome won't change in any way, it will just give you a broader overview.

Averaged over our whole 25-game test suite at 4K resolution, with RT off, the factory-overclocked Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX Nitro+ has a 3% performance lead over the AMD reference design, which makes it the fastest RTX 7900 XTX card we've tested. These gains increase the performance uplift to RTX 4080 from 3% to 7%—we're getting closer to AMD's projections. While a few percent here and there isn't "much," it's still a welcome improvement. The gap to RTX 4090 shrinks to 19% now. Compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, the Sapphire card is 22% faster and the increase over the RTX 3090 is 39%. Compared to last generation's RX 6900 XT, the Nitro+ is a whopping 52% faster. The differences between individual games are huge, in some titles the XTX is 25% faster than the 4080, in others it's 10% slower. I've added a new chart at the end of the "Relative Performance" page, to break that down for you.

It's also possible that the press driver isn't fully optimized for all our games yet. RDNA 3 introduces new dual-issue compute units, which require special code optimization, so that they can achieve the +100% performance uplift. In briefings AMD has made it clear they have been optimizing the driver for the new units, and I'm sure a lot of work has already been done in the shader compiler, but I'm just as certain that there's some cases where hand-optimization can yield further benefits. During testing I also encountered crashes in AC:Valhalla and Elden Ring, no doubt these will be fixed soon.

With those performance characteristics, RX 7900 XTX is a formidable choice for gaming at 4K, with maximum details and 1440p at high-refresh-rate. You can crank up everything and you'll still run at over 60 FPS. Things are different when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XTX is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. On average (new chart in the RT section), the RTX 4080 is around 13% faster than the Sapphire RX 7900 XTX with ray tracing enabled, which isn't monumental, but definitely more than what I would have expected. I think everyone agrees that ray tracing is the future, and just disagrees on how quickly that future is happening. If you're part in the "I want this now" camp, then you should probably consider the RTX 4080, or RTX 4090. 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 XTX. That's not to say that AMD's new cards are useless with ray tracing, but if you consider the differences in price and RT performance, then the value-proposition of both cards is virtually identical, with NVIDIA RTX 4080 giving you the higher overall performance.

For this series, Sapphire has engineered a completely fresh design. The new Nitro+ looks amazing, thanks to a large matte metal surface on the front, with additional details on the back. Both the cooler and the backplate are made from thick metal and are of excellent build quality. Certainly the highlight are the two ARGB light bars that run along the longest side of the card. I really like that Sapphire has put an RGB element on the "bottom" of the card, which will add a subtle glow around your motherboard's socket area. Very well done, good job, Sapphire!

The Sapphire Nitro+ is a very large card, a quad-slot design no doubt helps with cooling, but it could also block some motherboard slots that you need, or require a larger case. For the vast majority of gamers this will be a non-issue though, multi-GPU is dead, so you'll have plenty of unused slots. As expected, temperatures are excellent, reaching only 63°C. While this is technically 5°C higher than the AMD reference design, I really like the way Sapphire thinks. Instead of wasting all the cooling potential on the lowest temperatures, that really do nothing for you, other than show a lower number in monitoring, Sapphire found a great balance between temperatures and noise levels. With 31.8 dBA, the card is very quiet, considerably quieter than the AMD reference card and the XFX Merc 310 that we tested this week. The ASUS TUF is slightly quieter in its default setting, but much quieter when activating the "quiet" BIOS. Sapphire does have a dual BIOS feature on their card, too, but it seems they weren't sure what to do with it. They call it "secondary," and the only difference is that clock speeds are slightly lower, which reduces temperatures and heat output a little bit, but the fans are basically at the same noise level. If you do dual BIOS, do it right. The goal is to provide a meaningful difference to people, so that they actually have a choice to think about.

In our apples-to-apples heatsink test, which runs all cards at the same noise and power levels for a fair cooler comparison, the Nitro+ heatsink does very well, too. It conclusively beats AMD's reference design cooler, and is roughly 9°C better than the XFX thermal solution. Only the ASUS TUF cooler, which is also quad-slot, ends up marginally cooler, by an insignificant 1°C. If you've studied the temperature results you might be wondering now "but why is the ASUS card quieter and cooler at the same time?". The answer is that Sapphire runs their card at higher clocks and voltage, which drives up the card's power usage, so the cooler has to work harder to achieve the same temps and noise, because it needs to deal with the additional heat.

One of AMD's goal with RDNA 3 has been to improve power consumption, and they achieved that. While their cards are not as energy-efficient as NVIDIA's new Ada series, it's pretty close. As mentioned before, to achieve their performance, frequency and binning goals, Sapphire bumped their card's voltage quite a bit. We measured 1.023 V on average during gaming, the AMD reference XTX ran at only 0.934 V, ASUS TUF at 1.015 V and XFX Merc 310 at 1.017 V. In return for that voltage bump you get the highest factory-overclocked performance on the Sapphire Nitro+, but pushing gaming power consumption from 356 W to 436 W seems quite a bit, especially considering that this 22% increase only turns into 3% real-life performance gain. The good thing is that Sapphire has installed an awesome heatsink on their card, so this power draw increase doesn't compromise on the card's thermals or acoustics.

We measured a shocking power consumption result for multi-monitor and media playback. Here, just the graphics card alone consumes 104 W and 92 W, respectively. This is way too high, RTX 4080 uses only 20-23 W in the same scenario, even the last generation RDNA2 cards were less than half that with 40 W. This can only be some sort of driver bug, because it basically disqualifies the new Radeons for multi-monitor use. Remember, this is idle sitting at the desktop, not gaming. Wasting that much power is simply a big no-no, especially in these times. AMD has had a long history of drawing a lot of power in these power states, so I'm not 100% convinced this really is so easy to fix. I also find it hard to imagine that nobody at AMD tests multi-monitor power draw, so in some meeting somewhere, someone decided "we will release it like that."

Overclocking worked really well on the Sapphire Nitro+, much better than on the AMD reference design. What definitely helps here is the 3x 8-pin power inputs. While the AMD reference card very quickly ran into its power limit, even at the +15% power setting, the Sapphire card has more headroom, which allows higher overclocks. Actually, Sapphire's card has the highest power limit setting of all the cards that I've tested so far. At the +15% setting, with overclocking, I measured 525 W power for the graphics card alone. That's in Furmark, typical gaming hits around 470 W, which is still A LOT of power. That's great news for overclockers though, because Sapphire didn't chicken out and lets you use all the power that the 3x 8-pin + the slot can provide. Overclocking is still complicated, but I have to admit it was fun seeing all the pieces come together to unlock an overclock that's better than what we usually see in our reviews (from both AMD and NVIDIA).

Sapphire hasn't given us any pricing yet, throughout this review I've assumed a price point of $1100 and will update this review when final pricing is out. No doubt, the Nitro+ is an impressive piece of engineering, and it comes with a thermal solution that's so much better than the AMD reference card. There's also the awesome RGB lighting and noise levels are much improved—this combo could definitely tempt me to spend the extra $100. On the other hand, at $1100, there's "only" another +$100 to the RTX 4080 MSRP, which offers lower raster performance but higher ray tracing FPS, with better energy efficiency overall. What's definitely great is manual overclocking on the Sapphire Nitro+, if you love playing with OC and are willing to try and learn, then there's some fun to be had here.