Sapphire’s Crimson Desert-Themed Custom Nitro+ Radeon RX 9070 XT Is A Must See
Let's start with the card itself, because that's the hook. Visually, it's a Nitro+ through and through, but with custom Crimson Desert artwork on the backplate instead of the usual industrial minimalism. Sapphire has also kept the Nitro+'s hidden power connector design; the connector is recessed and covered by the backplate so cables don't jut out of the top edge like cyberpunk plumbing. It's clean, it's sensible, and once you've used a card like this, going back feels barbaric.
The genuinely unusual bit is which connector it's hiding. The Nitro+ Radeon RX 9070 XT uses the 12V-2×6 power connector, which is the same dense connector NVIDIA has standardized on for its GeForce RTX 40- and 50-series cards. This is not the first Radeon to use it, but it's still atypical. Most RX 9070 XT cards stick to traditional dual or triple 8-pin PCIe power. While it's a standard feature of the base model, Sapphire opting into 12V-2×6 here feels especially appropriate, preserving the clean look of the card.
Now, about Crimson Desert. It's a single-player, offline, open-world action RPG from Pearl Abyss, the studio best known for action-MMORPG Black Desert Online. The new title is not an MMO, not a live-service experiment, and not a surprise Unreal Engine 5 project either. Pearl Abyss is using its own proprietary engine tech, which is increasingly notable at a time when UE5 has developed a certain reputation among PC players for shader stutter, traversal hitches, and general unpredictability.
Structurally, Crimson Desert sounds very familiar: a fixed protagonist, a large handcrafted fantasy world, real-time combat, and a narrative-driven campaign you can play start to finish without an internet connection. The obvious comparison is The Witcher III, although this is hardly a road less traveled in game design.
Where AMD comes in is the tech stack. Crimson Desert is being positioned as a showcase title for AMD's "FSR Redstone" features. You can check out our previous coverage for the fulld etails, but FSR Redstone is essentially the next evolutionary step of FidelityFX Super Resolution. It uses machine-learning-assisted upscaling, frame generation, and ML-based ray-tracing cleanup, including ray reconstruction and neural radiance caching. The idea is that AMD is leaning hard into ML-accelerated rendering, primarily on RDNA 4 hardware like the RX 9070 XT.
That puts Crimson Desert in the small but growing category of games designed with AMD's upscaling and reconstruction as first-class citizens, not bolt-ons added six months later. For Radeon owners, this is meant to be a "this is what your card is for" moment. Importantly, though, this does not lock the game to AMD hardware. The usual NVIDIA technologies you know and love are still supported, like DLSS.
Sapphire hasn't announced pricing for the new card, but says it will be available later this month. You don't have to buy this exact card to get the game for free from AMD, though. In fact, you don't even have to buy a graphics card. AMD's Crimson Desert bundle promo starts today and runs through April 25th; if you buy a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 7 9850X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D, or Ryzen 9 9950X3D, you're eligible for a free copy. Likewise for any Radeon RX 9070 or Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card, as well as certain OEM laptops, a list of which you can find here. Oh, and if you just bought a Ryzen 7 9850X3D, you're in too. Hit up the AMD terms & conditions to learn more.
