Sapphire Pulse's AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT Review

it's launching it's finally here it's no secret because AMD announced it and basically spilled all the beans a couple of weeks ago but you can basically buy these now like this is a thing actually going to be in Micro Center and the first one that I've got to take a look at is the sapphire pulse 16 GB of gddr6 128bit memory bus that's about 475 GB per second of memory bandwidth it has Hardware av1 en code and it's just about $300 well 330 maybe a little bit more for the aib partner versions this is the overclock version you're going to pay a little bit of a premium for that the 7600 XT is required by AMD to feature 40 gbit display port 2.1 interfaces as well our Sapphire pulse has two and two display port HDMI 2.1a on the 7600 you weren't required to have display port 2.1 you had to have 1.4 sappi recommends a 600 wat power supply and the total board power is starting at 190 watts and that's pretty reasonable it does take two 8 Pin power connectors if you take take a look at the card the fit and finish works pretty well uh this is a fabulous upgrade I think for any older gpus that you might be rocking older in this case might even be a 30 60 that's not that old indeed not we'll get to [Music] that we've taken a look at the 7600 noxt and the past the 7600 XT What's the upgrade well it's a 16 gigs of vram I mean that's what that's what everybody is going to latch on to it's not really okay the clocks are a little different but not dramatically so the XT uses a little bit more power and yeah the clocks I don't know it's a bit of a wash in my testing sometimes it's better sometimes not so much but 16 gigs of vram do you even really need that I mean the current AAA titles no but more than 8 gigs would be nice I mean 10 to 12 gigs would be kind of The Sweet Spot in modern AAA so for the future would 16 gigs be better uh probably but also what about 16 gigs for off label uses he talking about AI yeah maybe some AI going on in here physically with the unboxing and the fit and finish Sapphire has done a great job with the engineering and the cooling was uh basically inaudible in the machine the fractal defined Micro ATX at a distance of a 6 feet the machine across the room basically two quiet cooling fans built in Sapphire knows what they're doing not really any hot spots as reported by Hardware info 64 there's a lot to love just what we've come to expect from Sapphire and this also be really popular with system Builders because it's get built-in mounting grommets on the end so you can secure it for shipping it is however a 2.1 slot card you might look at it and say I can you know deal with this it's a two slot card that's 2.1 slot you could probably wedge in a Nick or something else but if you're planning on a really dense system configuration know that it's 2.1 or if you're going to rock 2 7600 for like a Linux vfio build then it's going to be problematic if you need it to fit into slots now AMD has also made a lot of progress in their drivers since the launch of the 7,000 series gpus we're coming in this is gpus launching late in the 7,000 series GPU cycle and they've moved mountains and they should not let up now they should keep going the GPU landscape as it exists currently has never been better for consumers in terms of features Innovation and competition AMD Nvidia and heck even Intel have Legions of programmers pouring over every inch of what is mostly a device for entertainment and the software differentiation is mostly the things that consumers have to look at a market worth billions of dollars to be sure but AMD has consistently positioned itself as a company of fair business practices and open Innovation he's talking about GPU open isn't he yep GPU open for the 7600 XT AMD has positioned it as the direct competitor to nvidia's RTX 460 and in a lot of games the performance can be similar but with upscaling and frame generation AMD offers a higher frame rate and dare I say a better game play experience than the 4060 it's weird though it's a little weird we need to talk about that before you you know before you say well what about RTX and Ray tracing and that sort of stuff I I mean can you really talk about R tracing with a straight face on the 4060 I can't 4070 maybe but 4060 come on okay let's take a look and dive into the benchmarks as always we start with shadow of the Tomb Raider this is an ancient title from 1276 ad that was commissioned to celebrate the leap here okay we're just using this to make sure we've got our heads screwed on straight 143 FPS not bad this title does not stretch our vram and so the performance is very similar to that of a 7600 non XT all other things being equal we can also see that stepping up dramatically in cost to the 4070 also performs quite a bit better that's kind of going to be the theme of this review spend more get more but if you were rocking a 3060 this might be a compelling upgrade given what you you could probably sell your 3060 for On the Open Market at least before people realize this is what's going on with the 7600 XT next up is Assassin's Creed mirage at 1080p we can easily maintain 91 FPS with our 1% lows dipping to just 58 FPS in the worst case scenario even though I like to Target above 60 FPS for enabling frame generation which would necessitate the use of upscaling it is possible to achieve over 120 FPS with frame generation here and AMD frame gen you can get 150 FPS pretty consistently compared to dlss quality this is about a 30% improvement over with dlss that's an important key thing I think the Improvement holds up at 1440p actually 1440p Assassin's Creed Mirage surprisingly fast on the ultra preset at 70 FPS with with FSR quality and frame gen you can expect buttery smooth 120 FPS it's strange this is another one of those situations where 1440p is not really that much slower than 1080P and in a lot of titles with this card 1440p is an entirely reasonable experience it's pretty awesome let's talk about how this Frame Generation stuff can change the way we think about benchmarking and benchmarking stuff it's a little bit of a brain worm and so I'm not saying frame gen is good or bad I'm saying that if you look at it with and without frame generation you get two different stories and maybe something to keep in mind so frame generation as an upscaling technology is going to change how I need to explain how a card works I think and how you get actual gaming value I mean okay well let's let's talk about that fine we'll segue I think it will always be important to look at the raw performance of the card and use that as one of the pillars of supporting your own evaluation as to whether this product will make you happy I mean just the raw performance give me the raw performance numbers but Modern Warfare 3 is kind of a microcosm of all the things that if your head is not in the right space you'll probably not have the right takeaways from the reviews looking at the numbers it's a great example of a game that when an a in FSR 3 with frame generation uh it's it's a fabulous experience but it's also a great example of a game part if you just run uncapped FPS it will absolutely make 300 FPS feel like it's sub 60 and that's weird but like if you want to look at the number really high I I think it has to do with frame pacing had a much better experience with vsync on 120 HZ and FSR 3 with frame generation than uncapped FSR 3 on this one specific title it's Modern Warfare 3 uh perhaps that's an outlier but the frame pacing really was not fabulous with FSR 3 frame generation AMD recommends the game already runs at 60 FPS before you enable frame generation so frame generation technology is really designed for high refresh rate displays we've done reviews where you can get you know 144 HZ display for just just over $100 these days and so it it is pretty interesting for a lot of games and for the purposes of testing rather than playing the game it can actually make sense to turn vsync off with variable refresh rate you'll see screen tearing but this is useful for measuring the raw performance the raw performance doesn't always necessarily translate into the best gameplay experience this is probably not how you should actually play the game either which is why I've used all this to sort of point that out like you'll have a better experience with variable refresh rate and just letting it run at whatever your monitor is capable of 120 HZ 160 HZ 144 HZ whatever that looks like you're you're going to be better off look this is this is kind of the Wild West Intel bursting onto the scene here with XE CSS xxs which is actually a legitimately interesting and awesome technology like Yay programmers there's also Technologies like Ray tracing and you know how we approach whole the graphics rendering pipeline when you have things like frame generation and upscaling and Ray reconstruction and Ray tracing AMD has made tremendous strides with FSR 3 since they launched it in September setember now I encountered game bugs while preparing this review and that was from both Nvidia and AMD if I go full hamfist I can come up with quite a bit where dlss still just does not work properly and has basic jankiness like the menus here in fores spoken which by the way that b-roll that was on an Nvidia card that I was comparing for testing and doing the review uh to be sure the AMD card also does it but fores spoken you can also make the foliage glitch and do other weird stuff uh the other standout for frame generation and upscaling was cyberpunk 2077 I know that game had a rocky launch and you know it really is was it Gabe that said is like you can be late for a little while or you can suck forever but I was able to go from a janky 50 fps to over 100 FPS at 1440p with frame gen and that also works on the 4060 but not as well a 1080p it never dipped below 120 FPS and mostly was higher than that was some really good gameplay unexpectedly good and I hadn't really messed around with it that much a little bit so the you know cyber Punk is its own special brand of Jank and I've experienced Jank with cyberpunk across Intel and Nvidia especially Intel and Nvidia and AMD and you know a lot of that is down to the game I mean the single biggest Improvement I've seen from amd's software stack is hyper RX AMD builds this as a feature that simplifies enabling performance features like rad on super resolution and fluid motion frames anti-ag boost and whatever combination makes sense for a particular game you should check it out it was good with Call of Duty but for cyberpunk and balers gate it was also basically just point and click I just turned it on we got any Skyrim streaming granny's in the audience because hyper RX would be a great feature for them like just hit that for whatever game you want to play play the native resolution of your monitor probably going to have a good time okay maybe a bigger Improvement than that but still kind of software stacking adjacent the integration and fixes for streaming and encoding especially with OBS I mean it feels like a lifetime ago that OBS and AMD just didn't get along but a lot of what AMD is doing is open GPU open as I mentioned before while AMD does what it can do to make sure that it hangs on to the competitive advantages that it has with its gpus and its GPU compute landscape it also goes far above the Call of Duty that pun intended to open up their Technologies and sort of respect the ecosystem and make everything usable for developers take a look at GPU reshaper GPU or GPU reshape GPU reshape is this really amazing piece of technology uh it's going to be a GameChanger a the puns for developers working on games these are tools to reduce human suffering for game development and reducing unnecessary human suffering is always a benchmark that I look for this will provide Shader Diagnostics and help developers track down issues uh without having to be John karmac levels of smart both Gamers and Gam developers will benefit from a simplified software ecosystem really solid tools for development will Speed game development and it'll take out some of the Jank like we see in the menus with for spoken until people report it you know they don't know cuz how do you do unit testing and in toin testing on things like this is from a software development standpoint this kind of thing is really hard and from an ecosystem standpoint we've seen Nvidia snub older generations of cards see also RTX voice which is entirely unnecessary probably a decision made for support reasons or at least support was probably the excuse amds at a disadvantage here they've got their desktop cards sure but they've also got rdna in Mobile they' got rdna in uh desktop CPUs and pretty soon they're going to have apus at least those were announced at CES and so AMD is sort of reworking their software Foundation here to be more coherent or they have been over the last what 6 Months 8 months uh sort of kind of like at least I don't know that's through the grap Vine and it makes sense that they're rearching their foundational stuff because well you can't make a delicious cake without breaking a few eggs and AMD must not slow down at the egg cracking rate now Nvidia is distracted by Ai and now is the time for devs to embrace all the GPU open Technologies so a lot of words to just say that I had a lot of fun testing for this oh and I did try Ray tracing with the ultra preset in cyberpunk 2077 it ain't pry 24 FPS uh upscaling or frame generation Tech just is not a good idea at 24 FPS this is not a fair fight because the 4070 is in a different price class and it still only has 12 GB of vram the 4060 for R tracing Ultra it's only around 28 FPS for me the same rate tracing preset that's pretty close to Performance parody for R tracing so yeah benchmarking games is weird with all this extra Tech that's bolted on frame generation and upscaling Tech is a bit of a balancing act between line go up and image Fidelity I'm genuinely impressed with FSR 3 where it is today in 2024 the scrappy Underdog might be pulling ahead if they keep focused to stay on course and hire more devs to do yet more game testing and some of that is also getting the game developers on board because AMD can't always just do the Fancy Pants runtime binary patching thing you get into trouble with that especially you know the things that we've seen where Nvidia and AMD got in trouble with competitive Esports titles for trying to reduce latency and then that turned into a kafuffle and I don't know speaking of software development and fun off Lael uses for these graphics cards what about AI what about non-gaming uses been working on AI options and you know like an options Trader bot kind of thing so what what about what about that well it turns out 16 gigs of vram can be used with AI and AI type tasks you're best off with pytorch on Linux natively of course be sure to check out our other video level one Linux but you can use shark to download the 13 billion parameter large language model and run it on this GPU some of these support uh a direct Vulcan back end and Microsoft is pushing something that they call Direct ML and I was delighted that all that works with the large vram of the 7600 XT at this point in 2024 out of the box it's basically the same speed is rx 7600 non XT though 8 gigs of vram but with double the vram it's possible to run much larger language models performance of the language model was basically the same at about 45 tokens per second for this particular language model it's just that you can't run the 13 billion parameter model on the 7600 only the 7 billion parameter model 13 billion parameter model of course runs fine with 16 gigs of vram on the 7600 XT nice forage generation the stackyard AI can download models from hugging face and run them with the Vulcan back end just fine on AMD gpus the performance is reasonable for this card love generating d v know stuff creative workloads as well the performance of the 7600 and 7600 XT are really close using Puget bench the extended vram is nice of course for larger projects so if you're doing 4K video exports more vram more better it's probably going to speed things up and finally what's my opinion especially around pricing well the 7600 no XT can be regularly bought for around 280 sometimes a little less 8 gigs more vram for an extra 50 bucks that seems like a pretty good deal that seems reasonable but the 7800 XT is a much much better card and it's come down to between $500 and $550 that's $200 more it's almost twice as much well not quite but that card is more than twice the card this is this card also makes things a bit awkward for the 12 gig 7700 XT like okay H 16 gig 7700 XT on the horizon maybe there's no denying the software features though av1 and good OBS support and that'll benefit all AMD users no matter which card you pick I don't think that this card exists to upsell you on the 7800 XT and yet it probably should oh this card also has good day one Linux support check out my other video for more information about that that's been a quick look at the uh 7600 XT from Sapphire the OC version with a a mild OC it's pretty awesome the 7800 also really good this is the reference version I don't have the I don't have the Sapphire version all right out you can find me in the level one [Music] forms [Music] for

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Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024