I am both disappointed and happy about the Sapphire Nitro 9070 XT. The RE2 remake looks great in 21:9 5K at a nearly constant 120 fps with settings almost maxed but ray tracing off (although I don't actually have the desire to play it again). A test in the game Control went from upscaled 3440x1440 at around 80 fps on the old Sapphire Pulse 6800 to 120 fps after putting in the new card.
But one big reason I wanted a new graphics card is because I needed a second HDMI output, one for the TV and one for the monitor. When I try to use both HDMI outputs at 4K and 5K 120 Hz, the second channel detected is limited to 75 Hz or below with compressed colors, YCbCr 4:2:0. I uninstalled the video driver with DDU in Safe Mode, but the issue persists. Either HDMI can deliver the speed advertised, but not both at once. Which makes me think that the bandwidth is shared between HDMI outputs. Sapphire must have expected my scenario, considering how long monitor makers took to include DisplayPort 2.0 and the fact that TVs only have HDMI, but wanted to save a few pennies. I wonder if Asus does the same thing with their cards that have dual HDMI outputs.
No one tests this in reviews. It's all benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks.
I gave up and connected the monitor with DisplayPort 1.4. The AMD control panel now shows 10-bit full RGB 4:4:4 for both displays, but the monitor is achieving that with Display Stream Compression (DSC). Instead of "VRR," the AMD control panel now gives me the option for an alternative called "Adaptive Sync." The colors still look great. I doubt I could tell the difference between DSC and HDMI 2.1. I can't tell yet if some games are taking longer to Alt+Tab or take out of fullscreen, a common complaint with DSC. One movie might have taken a little longer to bring into fullscreen, but I'm not sure.
Inserting the card was so hard. I finally wedged it against the hard drive cage. Next time I will pull out the hard drive rack from the back and bring the card in like a car backing up for parallel parking.
If
