Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse is the company's value custom design offering based on the swanky new performance segment GPU by AMD. Sapphire is one of the oldest AMD board partners, and its Pulse line of graphics cards has had a long legacy of giving gamers a solid board design at MSRP or close to it, covering all bases such as low cooler noise and decent overclocking potential. There's none of the glamour from Sapphire's premium NITRO series, but the Pulse has enough design heft to not look cheap when installed in your rig. The cooling solutions of Pulse series graphics cards tend to be highly capable, with a focus on low noise. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is this generation's flagship GPU from AMD, and given that the company has withdrawn from the enthusiast segment, it could focus its efforts on making its performance segment offering best in segment, at an attractive starting price of $600.



The Radeon RX 9070 XT is mainly designed to max out games at 1440p with ray tracing and 4K Ultra HD gameplay at fairly high settings, with ray tracing enabled. With the new RDNA 4 graphics architecture powering the Radeon RX 9070 series, AMD made a concerted effort at vastly improving the ray tracing performance, reducing its performance cost, given that ray tracing is no longer a novelty, but something almost every AAA game is expected to implement it. AMD also worked to significantly improve and specialize the AI acceleration capabilities of its GPUs, and is introducing the new FSR 4 performance enhancement suite. The new FSR 4 technology implements an AI ML-based upscaling algorithm that's more accurate and greatly improves image quality at every performance setting. For now, AMD has made FSR 4 exclusive to the Radeon RX 9000 series.

The RDNA 4 graphics architecture is designed to maximize performance per die-area, so AMD could design a lean and potent silicon purpose-built for the segment. To do this, the company claims to have achieved a significant gain in performance per CU (compute unit) over the previous RDNA 3 architecture. It also claims to have nearly doubled the ray tracing performance of its new RT accelerators over the previous generation, with the introduction of additional ray intersection hardware, and many other updates to the RT pipeline.

The Radeon RX 9070 series is based on the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon. Unlike the Navi 31 and Navi 32 chips powering the RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 series, the Navi 48 is a traditional monolithic silicon built entirely on the TSMC N4P node. In comparison, its predecessors were chiplet-based GPUs in which the GCDs were built on the 5 nm TSMC N5 node, while the memory controllers and Infinity Cache were spun off to MCDs built on the 6 nm TSMC N6 node. The Navi 48 features 64 compute units, all of which are enabled on the RX 9070 XT. These work out to 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, and 256 TMUs. AMD has given the Navi 48 a healthy 128 ROPs.

The memory size given to both RX 9070 series SKUs is 16 GB, across a 256-bit wide memory bus, however these use slower 20 Gbps GDDR6, while NVIDIA has moved on to faster GDDR7. This move is probably driven by cost, and to maximize AMD's ability to wage price-wars against NVIDIA in the segment. The company claims to have made strides with its new out-of-order memory management and texture compression, which should help it overcome the lack of generational growth in memory bandwidth.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT comes with a fairly hefty triple-slot cooling solution (considering its MSRP positioning). The cooler uses a trio of the company's latest AeroCurve axial airflow fans. It also features two aluminium fin-stacks that are skewered by five 6 mm-thick heat pipes that pull heat from the GPU over a copper baseplate. The cooler features a structural reinforcement that counteracts bending of the graphics card over time. The cooler shroud is designed to make it easy to remove the fans for cleaning, or for replacement. Complementing the cooler shroud is a solid metal backplate. The card comes with 2400 MHz Game Clock, and hence sticks to the AMD reference specs. Sapphire is pricing the RX 9070 XT Pulse at AMD MSRP of $600, but it's currently sold out everywhere, and scalped to around $900.

AMD RDNA 4 Architecture

The new Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are powered by the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon. Unlike the Navi 31 and Navi 32 before it, this is a traditional monolithic die built entirely on the TSMC N4P (4 nm EUV) process node. It has an area of 356.5 mm², but with an impressive transistor count of 53.9 billion. To put this number into context, the previous "big Navi" GPU, the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 XTX, has 57.8 billion transistors (just 8% more), despite having 96 CU, a larger Infinity Cache, and a wider 384-bit memory bus. Navi 31 has a die area of 529 mm² (304 mm² for the 5 nm GCD, with the rest being 6 nm MCDs), so you can see the kind of strides AMD made with die-area. At the top-level, the Navi 48 features a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory bus. With 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips, the RX 9070 XT gets 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is made up for with a faster 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a critical improvement AMD made to its memory management system, called Out-of-Order Memory Queuing.

The Navi 48 silicon physically has 64 CU spread across 4 shader engines. With each CU containing 64 stream processors, the chip has a total of 4,096 stream processors. All 64 CU are enabled on the RX 9070 XT, while the RX 9070 has 56 out of 64 of them enabled. The maxed-out Navi 48 contains 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The chip also features 64 MB of 3rd Gen Infinity Cache, and a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, driving 16 GB of 20 Gbps memory on both the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. With 56 CU enabled on the RX 9070, it has 3,584 stream processors, 112 AI accelerators, 56 RT accelerators, 224 TMUs, and an untouched ROP count of 128, besides the exact same memory configuration as the RX 9070 XT.


At the heart of the RDNA 4 graphics architecture is the new dual compute unit, with a vastly improved memory sub-system, improvements made to the scalar units, a new technology called dynamic register allocation, and improvements to CU efficiency and engine clocks. Each CU has two scheduler blocks, driving a 192 KB general purpose register (GPR), an 8 KB scalar GPR, 32 FMA ALUs, and 32 FMA+INT ALUs. There are also 8 transcendental logic units. RDNA 4 introduces the concept of dual SIMD32 vector units, for even more parallelism. The Scalar Unit comes with support for newer Float32 ops. Schedulers are updated with accelerated spill/fill operations. Instruction prefetching is improved. The new generation AI Accelerator comes with two 16-bit and four 8-bit/4-bit dense matrix compute rates, support for 4:2 structured sparsity for doubling throughput, and matrix loads with transpose. AMD has incorporated many technologies from its CDNA 3 Instinct AI ML accelerators on the AI Accelerators of RDNA 4, including enhanced and power-optimized WMMA, improvements to the ops per CU, support for FP8, E4M3 and E5M2 formats, and 4:2 structured sparsity.


The new generation AI Accelerator comes with two 16-bit and four 8-bit/4-bit dense matrix compute rates, support for 4:2 structured sparsity for doubling throughput, and matrix loads with transpose. AMD has incorporated many technologies from its CDNA 3 Radeon Instinct AI ML accelerators on the AI Accelerators of RDNA 4, including enhanced and power-optimized WMMA, improvements to the ops per CU, support for FP8, E4M3 and E5M2 formats, and 4:2 structured sparsity.


The new generation Ray Accelerator comes with double the box and triangle intersection resources as RDNA 3 RT accelerator, support for hardware instance transforms, improvements to the RT stack management, BVH8 node compression, and a revolutionary feature called oriented bounding boxes. To contain the number of rays really needed to be tested against an object, modern ray tracing technologies use something called a bounding box, which defines a region in which a geometry has to be tested against rays. Most of the time, the geometry is of a vastly different shape and smaller than the shape of a bounding box, which introduces false intersections, and wastes ray testing resources. AMD innovated a way to turn this bounding box into a 3D shape by giving it a Z-axis component, so the bounding box is oriented closer to the shape of the object to be tested, reducing the number of rays needed to be tested against it.


This graph highlights the contribution of various components toward the 100% generational ray traversal performance gain, allowing AMD to make do with a CU count of 64, with RDNA 3 being the baseline.


Both ray tracing and ML acceleration are memory sensitive applications, so AMD innovated a revolutionary change to its memory management system with the introduction of new out-of-order memory. All math is executed in waves on an RDNA GPU, and mutual dependencies between waves can cause memory request stream misses, as one wave's memory request queue waits for the other wave to complete its task. This is solved with a new out-of-order (relaxed ordering) memory management. This graph highlights the contribution of various components toward the 100% generational ray traversal performance gain, allowing AMD to make do with a CU count of 64, with RDNA 3 being the baseline.


On AMD, a fairly big chunk of the ray tracing stack continues to be executed on shaders, but the company has made advances to ensure the cost of ray tracing on the shader resources of the GPU is minimal, with the introduction of Dynamic Registers to improve parallelism.


The new Radiance 2 Display Engine comes with major hardware updates that reduce GPU idle power draw in multi-monitor setups. The engine also comes with hardware flip-metering support (something NVIDIA also introduced with Blackwell, and which enables Multi-Frame Gen on the RTX 50-series). Flip-metering improves video frame pacing to the GPU and reduces CPU overhead for video playback. There is also a display engine level hardware image sharpening component that drives Radeon Image Sharpening. As for I/O, you get contemporary DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b, the maximum bitrate is UHBR 13.5.


Navi 48 comes with a dual media engine, each of the two can perform concurrent encoding and decoding, and so the implementation resembles an NVIDIA GPU having two each of NVENC and NVDEC units. The new generation media engine offers a 25% increase in H.264 low-latency encode quality, and an 11% improvement in HEVC encode quality. AV1 encode and decode get B-frames support, vastly improving bitrates. The media engine posts a 50% generational performance uplift (measured in encoder/decoder frame rates), with reductions in memory overhead.

AMD FSR 4 and New AMD Software Features

With the Radeon RX 9000 series, AMD is debuting FSR 4, the latest version of its performance enhancement suite. FSR 4 introduces the biggest tech update since FSR 2, which also makes it exclusive to the RX 9000 series. With the RDNA 4 generation of GPUs offering significantly higher ML compute throughput, AMD designed a new ML-based upscaler to reconstruct details of the upscaled frame. In that sense, FSR 4 is technologically close to DLSS. RDNA 4 GPUs also leverage AI DNNs to de-noise ray tracing and path tracing, unburdening the shaders.

An AI ML based upscaler requires ground truth data, and just as NVIDIA goes through the painstaking task of training game-specific ML models that can later be shipped to end-users through game developers and as driver updates; AMD has set up a large FSR 4 data-center of its own, powered by Radeon Instinct MI300-series AI GPUs for the task. On the client side, the ML-based upscaler needs the dedicated AI acceleration hardware from the RDNA 4 family. The frame generation technology appears to be carried over from FSR 3 Frame Generation, and is essentially a smart frame interpolation technology.


AMD in its presentation provided examples of image quality for FSR 4, claiming that in some cases, FSR 4 presents geometry more accurately than even native resolution. While AMD didn't detail it, FSR 4 comes with preparation for neural rendering. Given that Microsoft has now standardized neural shaders, and the ability for applications to directly address AI acceleration hardware on the GPU via the DirectX API, AMD could in the near future implement neural rendering, however, the company hasn't detailed a timeline. FSR 4 is ready for neural rendered objects.


Fluid Motion Frames gets an update with FMF 2.1, with improved image quality, reduced ghosting, and improved temporal tracking. The company also updated its API-agnostic image sharpening tool, with the introduction of Radeon Image Sharpening 2 (RIS 2).


AMD provides a slick driver frontend application called simply "AMD Software." AMD improved the way in which users can report bugs, artifacts, or corruption in games, through a voluntary (opt-in) feature called AMD Image Inspector.


As you submit a screenshot or video sequence to AMD, the company uses an AI model to identify rendering bugs, or corruption in the display. The entire driver-level game optimization, testing, and bug fixing process has been revamped with AI doing the heavy lifting.


The company also introduced AMD Chat, which is an AI chatbot that runs locally, and is accelerated by the GPU. You can make plain language queries on configuring AMD Software features and settings; and also chat with it on AMD technologies. This is essentially AMD's answer to NVIDIA's ChatRTX, but we don't know if the utility can be trained with custom datasets.


For streamers, AMD Software simplifies connecting their gameplay with their social media and streaming accounts. You can then take advantage of the new dual media engine of RDNA 4 that improves H.264 and HEVC image quality, and use other utilities such as AMD Noise Suppression, which is a 2-way AI-based audio filter.

AMD AI Apps Manager consolidates all your AI applications into a simple launcher-like interface resembling a game launcher.

Packaging

The Card

The RX 9070 XT Pulse follows the color theme of earlier Pulse GPUs—black and red are the primary colors. You now get a metal "Sapphire" logo near the top edge and some additional detail has been added in that area, too. The metal backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1213 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 60 mm.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1a and two HDMI 2.1b ports.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest change at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


There is no lighting on the RX 9070 XT Pulse.


The card uses two 8-pin power connectors, which allow a maximum of 300 W power draw, plus 75 W from the slot.

Teardown

Sapphire's card lets you remove and replace the fan assembly without touching the thermal paste. This makes it easy to fix the fans after a few years if their bearings are worn out.


The Sapphire cooling solution uses five heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.


High-resolution versions are also available (front, back).