SAPPHIRE’s flagship Radeon RX 6800 XT is where we are
Today’s GPU evaluation laboratory, SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT has a wobbly appearance and some excellent custom Big Navi performance. let's see.
AMD launched the RDNA 2 architecture with 3 graphics cards last year: Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6900 XT-today, we have
Equipped with three fans, three-slot radiator and factory overclocking.
If you want to upgrade and find SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT at the time of purchase, you will get some excellent performance-it will beat NVIDIA's previous flagship product, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and can even keep up with the new GeForce RTX 3080.
SAPPHIRE provides a clock of up to 2360MHz for the Boost GPU on the NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT, which is 110MHz higher than the 2250MHz clock of the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. You will be able to use some manual OC margin, I will do some operations in the comments later.
As for the price, it’s hard to even mention, because the card’s price should be
Around ($120 higher than the launch price of RX 6800 XT), but its current listing price on Amazon is
At the time of writing.
AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture has more changes than any previous generation GPU architecture I remember from AMD (and even ATi) over the past 10 years.
There is a lot to do here, but we are working on an enhanced computing unit, a new visualization pipeline with Ray Accelerators, and a brand new (and very exciting) Infinity Cache (which I will introduce on the next page). At the same power per CU, we are looking for features that can increase performance per watt by 1.54 times and frequency by 1.3 times-something impressive, AMD.
One of the biggest new features in the new RDNA 2 architecture is the high-performance ray tracing acceleration architecture, namely Ray Accelerator. AMD does not have NVIDIA's excellent ray tracing performance, but it exists in RDNA 2.
Each Ray Accelerator can calculate up to 4 ray/box intersections and 1 ray/triangle intersection per clock. This means that the ray accelerator based on RDNA 2 can effectively calculate the intersection of the ray and the scene geometry represented in the "boundary volume level", sort it, and then return the information to the shader for further scene traversal or result coloring .
This is another big problem-HDMI 2.1 connection.
HDMI 2.1 brings the world of 4K 120Hz and 8K 60Hz to a brand-new TV or game monitor through an HDMI 2.1 cable. I personally own a new CX series LG OLED TV with HDMI 2.1 that can drive its 4K 120Hz, so if I want 4K 120Hz, there is only one way to plug a gaming PC into the TV.
The introduction of HDMI 2.1 on graphics cards began with NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 30 series, and was followed by AMD's new Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. All 3 new Radeon RX 6000 series cards-Radeon RX 6900 XT (coming soon), Radeon RX 6800 XT (
) And Radeon RX 6800 (this review) both have HDMI 2.1 output.
Now this is where things get very interesting-
, Even with a smaller 256-bit memory bus and slower GDDR6 memory, it can provide a certain amount of memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA may have a better 320-bit memory bus, faster GDDR6X-but it has less VRAM (10GB vs. 16GB), and the Radeon RX 6800 XT will still conflict with the GeForce RTX 3080 in all resolutions and situations. But under the right circumstances (such as when paired with Zen 3 processor, such as my preliminary test on Ryzen 9 5900X), if you add SAM (Smart Access Memory) to the processor, you can increase performance by more than 10% . equation.
The SAM results are as good as you can see in these charts, and in some cases better-this is an impressive thing, and I really can’t wait to see more from the Smart Access Memory technology .
You can
.
SAPPHIRE keeps the retail packaging of NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT clean, with some beautiful illustrations printed on the front and usual positions: 4K games, 16GB GDDR6 memory and PCIe 4.0 connections are listed on the left, and AMD is highlighted on the right RDNA 2 architecture.
I like the design of the card. The three-fan cooler looks good and cool. It can keep the NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT beautiful and cool through games or benchmark tests.
I am a big fan of the backplane design that comes with SAPPHIRE, and I think it looks great-it works better when it has RGB lighting (RAM, chassis fan, etc.) reflected from the system.
SAPPHIRE uses the three-slot design of NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT.
A 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connector is required on the card.
SAPPHIRE provides dual BIOS through NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT.
Display I/O includes the usual 3 x DP 1.4 and 1 x HDMI 2.1 interfaces.
:
Sabrent sent their huge Rocket Q 8TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD, which will be my newly installed Games SSD in the main test bed.
Before changing to the next-generation test bed, I have performed a new upgrade in the GPU test bed, where I will prepare for NVIDIA's next-generation Ampere graphics card and AMD's next-generation RDNA 2 graphics card.
Sabrent provided some new storage for my GPU test bench and sent a lot of crazy Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSDs. I have installed it on my GPU test bed as a new game storage drive because the game is so big now. Thanks to Sabrent, I now have 2TB of super high-speed M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD storage.
I have recently upgraded my GPU test platform-at least for now, until the release of AMD's new Ryzen 9 5950X processor before the final update for 2020, and we will be very satisfied with both RDNA 2 and future Ampere GPUs. You can read my article here:
3DMark has been the main benchmark for many years, dating back to the release of The Matrix and Futuremark benchmarks inspired by the bullet age. 3DMark is the perfect tool to see if your system (most importantly, CPU and GPU) is working properly. You can search the results of the GPU to see if it is consistent with other systems based on similar hardware.
Heaven is an intensive GPU benchmark test that can really push your chip to the limit. This is another favorite of ours because it has excellent scalability for multi-GPU testing and is very useful for increasing GPU power and noise testing to 100%.
Assassin's Creed: Valhalla (Assassin's Creed: Valhalla) is the latest game to be inserted into our benchmark suite, and Ubisoft Montreal uses its AnvilNext engine to power the game. It scales well on all graphics cards and has the amazing performance advantages brought by AMD's new Big Navi GPU.
You can
Middle-earth: "Shadow of War" is a sequel to the popular "Shadow" powered by a Lithtech engine. When increased to the maximum detail, it will pierce your GPU and its VRAM like nothing.
"Metro Exodus" is one of the hardest tests that our graphics cards have to go through, and 4A Games' latest work is one of the most beautiful games on the market. This is a severe test, pushing the GPU to its limit and using RTX technologies such as DLSS.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the newest games to join our graphics card benchmark lineup. The game uses the Foundation engine as a foundation, the same engine as in Tomb Raider. Eidos Montreal's R&D department made many changes to the engine during the development of "Tomb Raider", making it one of the most beautiful games currently.
SAPPHIRE immediately took the shot and dominated Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s benchmark chart with NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT, with a resolution of 1080p. The overclocked NITRO + RX 6800 XT defeated the faster flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT. Graphics card.
The same is true for "Shadow of War", but NITRO + RX 6800 XT was defeated in Metro Exodus at 1080p (96FPS and 100FPS on RTX 3090). The shadow of "Tomb Raider" is definitely an average of 278FPS, surpassing all other content in the benchmark chart.
Starting from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the reign of SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT only lasts at 1440p, and it will wipe out the benchmark chart after overclocking. Even in terms of inventory, it beats the RTX 3090.
The shadow of war allowed SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT to win again when overclocking, defeating Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards. In terms of inventory, it can easily resist the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3080.
GeForce RTX 3090 is the only graphics card in the chart that can overturn SAPPHIRE NITRO + RX 6800 XT when overclocking, and in the shadow of "Tomb Raider", it is sensational with an average of 203FPS at 1440p, which is a huge achievement.
SAPPHIRE and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla shine in 4K games together, the customized NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT launched a huge average of 72FPS-beating the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT’s 64FPS and Radeon RX 6800’s 59FPS average Value XT and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards.
Shadow of War brought GeForce RTX 3090 to the top again-just-but the overclocked SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT took its place in Shadow of War with 4K. In Metro Exodus between SAPPHIRE NITRO + RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3090, the situation is still very close-both are about 60FPS.
When using NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT, the average 4K is 117FPS.
Out of the box, my SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT sample runs at 2360MHz, while the GPU temperature is 72°C and the fan is 37% (around 1300RPM).
I can see from the maximum power squeezed out of the card that it peaks at 2520MHz-other than that, the card is not stable. When the fan speeds up to 100%, the GPU temperature I see is 58C.
The out-of-the-box SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT runs at a temperature of approximately 72°C under baseline load and gaming load, while the operating temperature of the fan is only 58C when fully overclocked, and the fan speed is up to 100%.
In terms of power consumption, SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT is consistent with other custom Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards, and the whole system power consumption is about 440W (Ryzen 7 3800X test platform), and it can reach up to 480W when overclocking.
It is difficult to hit these cards to this level, so I choose here.
I think I’ll mention the fact again that you can’t buy these cards anywhere in the world (depending on when you saw it, this sentence may be wrong, but at the time of writing, it’s almost impossible).
SAPPHIRE's flagship NITRO + graphics card is impressive, and SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT has played a role in all appropriate places.
Our performance is comparable to NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and the performance can exceed the previous generation GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. The card is kept cool by the NITRO cooler, which consists of three fans, a three-slot cooler and a beautifully shaped back plate.
If you have a game monitor with a native resolution of 1440p and you want to play games at a high refresh rate (120, 144, 165FPS), then SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT will be the perfect choice. However, if you want to drop to 60FPS and enjoy the 4K advantage of higher resolution, then NITRO + RX 6800 XT can provide 4K 60FPS games.
Once SAPPHIRE NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT is on the market, or if you find luck somewhere, pull the trigger immediately-or the joystick, and feel NITRO, baby.
90%
SAPPHIRE's custom NITRO + Radeon RX 6800 XT ticked all appropriate boxes to provide custom Big Navi performance for 1440p and 4K gamers.
Anthony (Anthony) is a long-term PC enthusiast, full of hatred for games developed around consoles. From the FPS game before the earthquake (you will be insulted if you use the mouse to aim), he has been obsessed with games and hardware since then. Having worked in the IT retail field for 10 years, he has extensive experience in customizing PCs. His obsession with GPU technology is unwavering.
