I think they just learned that capitulating to the bully only brings more bullying, not to mention pissing off your customers in the process.

Nitro+ is Sapphire’s flagship model but they chose to use that connector which is unfortunate in my opinion. They do have other models of 9070XT with the old 8 pin connectors.

It is not the end of the world if you have to use a card with 12V-2x6, they are on all current gen nVidia cards and they don’t all melt. I’m just saying for AMD cards you can choose to avoid it for the peace of mind as the old 8 pin connector is much less likely to melt (though not completely unheard of).

For 9070XT, just don’t get the version with the 12V-2x6 / 12VHPWR connector, save some worrying over whether it will burn some day.

Refresh should be handled by the hardware and should not need OS support once the video mode is set. This sounds like they added support for decoding higher refresh rates reported by monitors in their EDID so that those video modes can show up and be selected by users.